Orchestration has remained remarkably underrepresented in the field of Wagner scholarship, despite the fact that Wagner’s treatment of the orchestra was recognised as exceptional within his lifetime and has been consistently praised since. David Trippett, for example, has cited orchestration in the years around Lohengrin as “perhaps Wagner’s only compositional parameter to escape ridicule during a decade shot through with partisan criticism”, while Richard Strauss claimed in 1904 that Wagner’s operas “mark the only noteworthy progress in the art of instrumentation since Berlioz”. The aim of the dissertation is to achieve a better understanding of both the importance of orchestration in Wagner’s output and the significance of Wagner within the development of orchestration.

The singular ontological position of orchestration between the practical and the aesthetic justifies a methodology that combines positivistic and interpretative strategies. A synthetic approach is needed to bridge several disparate perspectives on Wagner’s orchestration, whether the systematic, data-driven angles of Eugen Thomas and Egon Voss, the broader theorisation of scholars such as Theodor Adorno and Tobias Janz, or the performance-based practical experience of commentators such as Richard Strauss and Pierre Boulez. In addition, the dissertation embraces thought in other musicological spheres, such as the role of instruments and the orchestral medium as “agents”, traditions of associating woodwind voices with genders, and Wagner’s interaction with scientific debates of his day.

The first chapter examines Wagner’s relationship with the orchestra and with the emerging concept of “orchestration”. The second and third chapters explore two principal dimensions to Wagner’s treatment of the orchestra: texture and sonority. Ultimately, the aims of the dissertation are to provide new historical, theoretical and analytical approaches to Wagner’s treatment of the orchestra, and, for the first time, to treat the composer’s orchestration as on a par with other musical parameters.