Epic opera is a very rare breed in a large kennel, and its successes are even rarer in number. “Grand Opera,” that nineteenth-century invention that updated (without even knowing it) the spectacle opera of the seventeenth century, is not epic opera, because for all its vocal and scenic extravagance it is still confined to the operatic stage. Epic opera, however, seeks to travel beyond, and it is not surprising that most operas of this limited genre are based on epic literary works. Even the overreaching failures, like August Bungert’s operatic trilogy on the Homeric poems, are connected to literature, as are the most celebrated epics of Berlioz (Virgil) and Wagner.

There is a good case to be made that the gap-toothed, antic fable created by Emanuel Schikaneder for Mozart’s genius—Die Zauberflöte—is some sort of epic, and certainly its journey of discovery from youth to maturity, from naïveté ...

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