In this sense, he was radically ahead of his time.
His "music-poetry", despite appearances, has much in common with a mid-20th-century avant-gardist like John Cage, as well as with the traditions he worked out of. Wagner had a vision of opera that extended to theatre, to the visual, and he melded the poetry to the sound in a very distinct and specific way. Along the lines of Wagner's "music of the future", I have attempted to create a "poetry of the future" but, as with Wagner, one firmly imbued with notions (and rejections) of tradition. To remain narratively and artistically true to the original, but to create a new poem, a fresh way of seeing, out of the original. To adapt a libretto as immense as Wagner's Götterdämmerung into an Australian setting, with a contemporary, multicultural audience in mind, was always going to be a challenge. I was commissioned to adapt Wagner's Götterdämmerung by the Perth international arts festival, and felt this might be an opportunity to let such an interplay of the senses become a focused articulation. I've never been able to separate poetry from music or art, and this sensory overload is probably why. Sometimes the static, the cascade of sound and colour, overwhelms at others it translates into language and becomes poetry. It's like Coleridge's synaesthesia, I guess. Slight noises might annoy me, but they also enrich the visual plane. The same is true in reverse: a painting will evoke an array of sounds determined viewing of a particular aspect of landscape, even an object, will activate all senses.
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