Desperately seeking Wagner

To do battle with Wagner, you must have a taste for the epic. This, after all, is a composer who spent more than a quarter of a century composing the Ring, a mighty four-nighter that deals with no less a subject than the very creation of humankind. But music and theatre critic Patrick Carnegy has managed to out-Wagner Wagner - spending 40 years writing a book about a century of Wagnerian productions, and not just the Ring, but the rest of the oeuvre, too.

Last night, Carnegy was rewarded when his book, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, won the Royal Philharmonic Society prize for "creative communication" (an award sponsored by the Guardian). (It's not a phrase he likes; best classical music book of the year will do.) "I'm just amazed and relieved to have brought it to fruition," he says. "When Wagner went to meet the Kaiser at Bayreuth railway station for the premiere of the Ring in 1876, all the Kaiser could think of to say was, 'So, you've actually managed to get it done.' I'm pleased to have got it done."

Carnegy, 66, is worryingly sane for a Wagnerian: no obvious tics except for the occasional deep sigh; not unduly besotted with the great man (he recognises the flaws as well as the genius); lives a life of sunny domestic bliss with his partner, the soprano Jill Gomez, in a thatched cottage in Cambridgeshire. He has had a varied career (assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s, music books editor at Faber in the 1980s and dramaturg at the Royal Opera House from 1988 to 1992), but above all, he has survived 40 years' immersion in the dangerous waters of Wagnerism. Shame the same can't be said for all the crazies who flock to productions of the Ring. Why are Wagnerians so obsessive?

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