Avoiding the more prosaic title, Wagner’s Dream, Jonathan Harvey and his librettist Jean-Claude Carrière identify their true theme: a 21st-century composer practised in the latest technologies imagines a possible connection between the day of Wagner’s death in 1883 and his projected Buddhist opera Die Sieger (‘The Victors’). Wagner Dream is a work of bold contrasts: events on that last day in Venice are narrated in speech accompanied by music, and this documentary material interacts with an operatic realisation of the plot outline of The Victors which shuns naive varieties of musical exoticism and overt imitations of Wagner. Subtle allusions can nevertheless be detected: a solo section for Prakriti called ‘Ballad’ has similarities – especially rhythmic – with Senta’s Ballad from The Flying Dutchman.

Following its world premiere in Luxembourg in April 2007, six performances of Wagner Dream were given in Amsterdam during June. This technically impeccable recording stems from those later stagings and the seasoned confidence of the artists involved – with principal singers Claire Booth, Gordon Gietz and Dale Duesing and conductor Martyn Brabbins – makes for a vivid and moving experience. The huge range of sound sources – speech, solo and choral singing, electronic and acoustic instrumental music – might initially disconcert listeners without a clear sense of what is happening on stage: this is very much a ‘total’ work of art, a late-modernist ‘dream’ of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. But Harvey avoids excessive complexity. His musical materials often repeat or vary simple motivic elements placed in a richly coloured harmonic spectrum that is only harshly dissonant when the dramatic context requires it.

Wagner’s prose sketch for Die Sieger outlined the kind of tensions between sacred and secular realms of experience that found fulfilment in his last music drama, Parsifal. Composing Wagner Dream in his mid-to-late sixties – the age at which Wagner completed Parsifal – Harvey dramatises a very different kind of conflict between the agony of physical collapse and the desire for spiritual peace. His music is of our time in its forceful, often angular energy. But it also has the warmth and intensity to do its challenging subject justice. In the end, the melodrama of Wagner’s last moments on earth and the high-flown vision of how The Victors can be given a living musical presence come into precarious but persuasive balance. Wagner Dream is a remarkable achievement.