It is difficult to know how to take this book. The title suggests it will be about Wagner’s theatre and the author’s name instantly catches one’s attention, as 18 years ago Yale University Press published his Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, the most comprehensive history of Wagnerian stage production in English. The only flaw of that otherwise excellent volume was its total silence on stage[...]
Over the last several decades, interpretations of the Ring have become so various that it is difficult to find any scholarly analysis or staged production that has not been touched […]
This is a remarkable book. Alex Ross has written what is arguably the most wide-ranging, intellectually comprehensive, entertaining, and thoroughly useful volumes ever produced on Wagner. Let us dispense at […]