The World Ash-Tree is a useful talisman for the many attempts to bring Wagner’s epic musical visions alive in performance. Not just The Ring, but his other mature operas: Die fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. The constant problem, as Patrick Carnegy observes in his magisterial study of the theatre of Wagner’s time and beyond, is the discrepancy between the composer’s creations and their manifold dramatic depictions. Stage directors and designers all too often find themselves with challenges unrealised – the same plight as Hunding’s kinsmen, described in Act I of Die Walküre: many attempt to pull Wotan’s sword from the tree into which he plunged it, but only Siegmund succeeds.

Carnegy does not attempt to catalogue the failures, which would take several volumes; instead, he charts the course of Wagner in performance from the theatre of Wagner’s time to our time, via several landmarks that, he says, ‘define a coherent line of development that begins with Wagner himself’.

Thus the three sections of the book. The first: the composer and how he bent theatrical convention to suit his will, especially at Bayreuth. The second: what happened in the years after Wagner’s death, when his widow, Cosima, preserved the master’s productions in a sort of jellied formaldehyde, and other attempts to change the style – most notably by Gustav Mahler and designer Alfred Roller, in Vienna, the Swiss designer Adolf Appia, and Otto Klemperer’s brief but effective tenure at the Kroll Opera, in Berlin. The third: the postwar symbolism of Bayreuth under Wagner’s genius grandson, Wieland, and, in 1976, the astonishingly provocative centennial Ring from the French creative team of director Patrice Chéreau, designer Richard Peduzzi and conductor Pierre (‘All opera houses should be blown up’) Boulez; the overtly political productions from the East German director Joachim Herz and the extreme interpretations from the Marxist director Ruth Berghaus, with a sidetrip to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s astonishingly symbolic film of Parsifal (1982), set on, around and in a giant death mask of the composer.

It is a long, fulfilling journey and, rather like The Ring, one that cannot be made all at once, and which takes time to yield its secrets and wonderment. It is as much a technological voyage as a musical and dramatic one. The prelude, as it were, is an essential chapter on European theatre from 1730 to 1830, when the young Wagner was beginning his theatrical apprenticeship and starting to compose his first completed opera, Die Feen (The Fairies). Opera of the time tended to be more musical spectaculars, with regular battles, floods, tempests and floods – the more cataclysmic, the better. For Wagner, this was at once inspiration and distraction; by the time of the première of Der fliegende Holländer (1843), with the not-so-satisfactory premiere of Rienzi (1841) as guidance, he became more determined to stage things his way. His famous essay ‘Remarks on Performing the Opera Der fliegende Holländer’ (1852) is an almost bar-by-bar instruction manual for the singers and technical staff, stressing ‘exact observance’.

Wagner, who would increasingly use nature in his operas, was in essence the trunk of his own World Ash-Tree. To encourage the growth of the branches, limbs and leaves, he steadily gained more control of staging his works to achieve his aim: ‘Everything on stage must breathe and move with no other purpose than the most effective communication with the visual and aural perception of the spectators … [who] must live and breathe only in the work of art.’ But, for Wagner, being true to nature and wanting this to reflect his music did not reflect the clunky, literate stagings of the period; nor were traditional theatres to his taste. Or some audiences – he withdrew the score of his Paris version of Tannhäuser (1861) after just two performances, not because of the production, which he supervised, but because of audience antipathy.

The Ring would change all that. Wagner, with a little bit of help from his friends, including King Ludwig, commissioned and built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus – the ‘theatre of total illusion’ – where the first complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen was given in 1876. Yet, even with the concealed orchestra pit, the dark auditorium and the wretchedly uncomfortable amphitheatre seating, Wagner faced the dilemma of music-drama versus scenic realism. His vision of Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing art work) was, as Carnegy proves, hampered by the very elements Wagner strove so hard to depict:

In giving nature and landscape such an active role in the drama, Wagner created huge problems both for himself and for all subsequent producers of the Ring. It is not only the states of mind and actions of the characters which are mirrored in the music and in the intended settings. Air, earth, fire and water are no less vital players, both in their own right and as symbolic correlatives of the characters.

It is a wonder the place didn’t immolate, along with Brünnhilde. The special effects of that first Ring were assisted by plentiful bursts of steam, piped through from a little boiler house fifty metres from the stage, and the main lighting was supplied by gas from 3066 fixed burners, with just some electric lighting. The dragon (created by one Richard Keene, of South London, who also supplied ‘a car with a yoke of rams for Fricka … a bear, a magpie and an ousel for Siegfried’) was a laughing stock. ‘Into the deepest junk room with the wretched thing! Get rid of it!’ advised the choreographer, Richard Fricke. Other devices, such as the Rhinemaidens’ swimming machines, were better received.

The surprising thing, as Carnegy reminds us, is that there were only two festivals at Bayreuth under Wagner’s control: three cycles of the Ring in 1876 and sixteen performances of Parsifal in 1882, the year before his death. His widow, Cosima, although derided for her reverential Wagner-in-aspic production style, nevertheless made the festival virtually an annual event: fifteen festivals from 1883 to 1906, adding new productions of Tristan und Isolde, Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Tannhäuser, Der fliegende Holländer and Lohengrin to the repertoire. ‘Duty and obedience’ might have been Cosima’s credo, but she put Bayreuth on a firmer cultural-and-cash footing, as well as providing ample artistic inheritance for her son, Siegfried Wagner.

The non-Wagner inheritors included Mahler and Klemperer, those two extraordinary geniuses in music and theatre who, in Vienna at the short-lived Kroll Opera in Berlin, took the operas from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in ways that set production standards that are observed to this day. The designers Alfred Roller and Adolf Appia furthered the cause with stage pictures that were equally revolutionary – literally in Roller’s case; he used a double-revolve on the Vienna stage. It was Appia, however, who was the real agent of change, and who identified the ‘profound contradiction’ within Wagner’s work whereby ‘he did not conceive of a staging technique different from that of his contemporaries’. Thus Appia took ‘the living actor as the point of departure, placing him not before, but in the midst of planes and lines which are rightly intended for him, and which harmonise with the spaces and the time-units dictated by the music of his role’.

On through the century, with a diverting chapter on Wagner performances in Russia, and Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering production of Die Walküre for the Bolshoi, with an enormous, enveloping World Ash-Tree, complete with mime group. The real awakening, the proving of the validity of that ‘profound contradiction’, came to the hall of the Holy Grail itself in 1951, with the first postwar festival, directed by Wieland Wagner, whose productions brought the very visual, dramatic and musical integration that so eluded his grandfather. ‘Apostasy had arrived overnight on the Green Hill,’ Carnegy writes. ‘Over the next 15 years Wieland’s, work was never to lose its capacity to shock and surprise.’

It has been said that Wieland’s spare yet evocative style stemmed more from economic than artistic imperatives, and certainly money was tight at the time. It was also political, with Wieland taking the festival away from the war years and, indeed, the powerful influence of his mother, Winifred, and her notorious friendship with ‘Uncle Wolf’ Hitler. Most of Wieland’s productions, timeless and with almost mythological settings, were determinedly not of any time.

It took the French invasion of 1976, ten years after Wieland’s death, to bring politics back to the Festspielhaus. Patrice Chéreau’s controversial centennial Ring, which put Siegfried in a dinner suit, the Rhinemaidens into the dresses of Victorian doxies and a hydroelectric dam across the Rhine, outraged the audience. Five years later, it was called a classic. Here, at least, you can see for yourself. Apart from the Syberberg film of Parsifal, the Chéreau– Boulez Ring is the only production in the book to be filmed and available on DVD. The more complex political stagings of the Ring by Ruth Berghaus, for Frankfurt in the 1980s, and of Joachim Herz’s Leipzig cycles of the decade before, were, alas, not filmed for posterity.

So where next for Wagner on the world stage? His operas have always been problematic, not just in their staging. They take time, and this in a society that increasingly values brevity: the Ring is an epistle, not an e-mail. If a publisher can bring out a shorter War and Peace, complete with happy end, how long before condensed-Wagner, with a Ring in one evening or an upbeat Tristan und Isolde, where both of them live happily ever after at Kareol?

Patrick Carnegy’s long and exhaustive (though never exhausting) survey of Wagner on stage is an important addition to any musical library. It complements myriad books on Wagner’s music by adding the drama – how it got there, how it was changed, how it affected audiences – and completing the picture.