Wagner and the Romantic Hero. By Simon Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 193. $75 cloth.

Extract

Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.