The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen
The Companion is an essential, truly interdisciplinary, tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner’s Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, as well as giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent chapters, written by leading Wagner experts, focus on musical topics such as “leitmotif” and structure, and provide a comprehensive set of character portraits, including leading players such as Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried. Further chapters look to the mythological background of the work and the idea of the Bayreuth Festival, as well as critical reception of the Ring, its relationship to Nazism, and its impact on literature and popular culture, in turn offering new approaches to interpretation including gender, race, and environmentalism. The volume ends with a history of notable stage productions from the world premiere in 1876 to the most recent stagings in Bayreuth and elsewhere.
Mark Berry is Reader in Music History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s “Ring” (2006), After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from “Parsifal” to Nono (2014), and Arnold Schoenberg (2019). He is a recipient of the Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal for his work on Wagner.
Nicholas Vazsonyi is Dean of the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, and Professor of German at Clemson University in South Carolina. He is the author of Lukács Reads Goethe (1997) and Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge University Press, 2010) as well as editor of Wagner’s Meistersinger (2003) and The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013).
