Drawing inspiration from the final moments of Richard Wagner’s life and from his aborted opera project Die Sieger, itself inspired by the Buddhist legend of Prakriti and Ananda, Wagner Dream, Jonathan Harvey’s opera, seems to multiply and illuminate the veils of illusion. It was with the librettist Jean-Claude Carrière, who shares his attraction to Buddhism, that Harvey built this revelation given to Wagner “in the space of a blink of an eye.” The drama, made up of nine scenes set sometimes in Venice, at the bedside of the dying Wagner, sometimes in India (the place where the opera unfolds in his mind), is supported by a perfectly synchronized real-time electronic device which, on the border between the explicit and the implicit, creates a link between reality and dream. Going against the grain of the expressive violence of Wagnerian music, the English composer most often conveys the humanity of the characters through a delicate writing that speaks more to the soul than to the senses, and thereby renews the operatic genre by offering a thoroughly Buddhist vision of the representation of feelings and passions on stage. Harvey’s originality thus serves a deepened spirituality and, above all, a universal thought reconciling Wagner, Buddhism, technology, the operatic tradition, and the musical explorations of the first half of the 20th century.