A one-volume reference work on Richard Wagner that does justice to such a complex and controversial subject would seem at first glance a highly improbable undertaking. Yet, the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (henceforth CWE) comes very close to accomplishing this goal, offering readers with varying levels of background a comprehensive and sophisticated resource. As befits the nature of Wagner’s work and his appeal to different constituencies, editor Nicholas Vazsonyi has assembled a formidable team of about 80 Anglo-American and German contributors comprising both long-established and newer Wagnerian scholars and critics from a variety of humanistic disciplines. Their collective efforts result in an impressive amount of up-to-date information and a representative cross-section of opinions and approaches to Wagner two centuries after his birth.

In its nearly 900 pages, the CWE includes approximately 550 entries of varying length on aspects of Wagner’s life, works and writings, and on the people, places, terms and institutions important for his career and the afterlife of his oeuvre; these are supplemented by 12 appendices, a select bibliography and an excellent index. In the following I shall discuss what I consider to be the volume’s major areas of emphasis, moving from its treatment of Wagner as man, thinker and creative artist to its coverage of such topics as the performance of his works, the institutionalization of Wagner, reception history, the question of Wagner’s anti-Semitism and its relationship to twentieth-century developments, and Wagner scholarship.

Wagner as man. As one would expect, the CWE provides a wealth of information about Wagner’s colourful life and controversial personality. In addition to Derek Watson’s excellent biographical overview, ‘Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard’, at 18 pages the longest essay in the volume, and the chronology in Appendix 2, one can consult entries on the composer’s personal habits (‘Diet/eating habits/food’, ‘Health’, ‘Hiking and Walking’, ‘Reading’), financial matters (‘Money’, ‘Publishers’), personal relationships and domestic life (‘Friendship’, ‘Servants/domestic staff’, ‘Singers, Wagner’s relationship with/to’, ‘Pets’) and character (‘Morality’). The geography of Wagner’s peripatetic life receives attention in entries devoted to places where he lived or that he visited, as well as a listing of his known addresses in Appendix 3. Of primarily biographical interest are the items devoted to individuals important for Wagner’s life: family members, friends, lovers, professional contacts and patrons. Although the encyclopedia does not shy away from difficult aspects of Wagner’s personality, the contributors generally refrain from passing harsh moral judgements on certain of Wagner’s questionable behaviours, such as his freedoms with money that he did not have and with the wives of other men, tracing such foibles to Wagner’s ambition, optimism and ill-timed altruism towards others (see Watson’s essay on ‘Money’) or to his principled, proto-socialist rejection of property and the related phenomenon (in Wagner’s mind) of marriage (see Mark Berry’s entry on ‘Morality’). ‘Friendship’ by Chris Walton likewise seeks to provide nuance to a view of Wagner as someone who dropped friendships when people were no longer useful to him.

The Mind of Wagner. The reader interested in delving into Wagner’s wide-ranging thought on aesthetic, political and social issues has ample opportunity to do so with synoptic essays on selected topics, entries devoted to specific writings, and items on Wagner’s opinions about philosophical, literary and musical predecessors and contemporaries. Insisting on the importance of writing within Wagner’s life’s work and on the centrality of metaphysics and dialectical method to his thought, the overview essay ‘Wagner as Essayist’ by Barry Emslie argues that Wagner was a master of style insofar as he tailored his prose to his intended purpose or audience, affecting a tortured, ‘academic’ syntax in writings that he considered to be significant aesthetic-philosophical pronouncements, but writing much more directly in autobiographical and journalistic writings. For more detailed information one can consult entries on selected writings by Wagner; of these the student or fan coming to Wagner’s writings for the first time should find the ones written by Sanna Pederson and Thomas S. Grey to be particularly valuable for the concise summaries and commentaries that they offer.

A number of entries deal with prominent topics or themes in Wagner’s thought, often presenting provocative interpretations. Roger Allen’s contribution ‘Aesthetics’ challenges common notions of inconsistencies and reversals in Wagner’s ideas, stressing instead his life-long concern with the fusion of music and poetry. Julian Young’s essay on ‘Philosophy’ sees Wagner as an original thinker only prior to his conversion to Schopenhauer; thus he emphasizes the revolutionary socio-political agenda of the later 1840s and early 1850s, covering similar ground as Mark Berry’s entry ‘Politics’. For Wagner’s later thought one must consult Young’s piece on Schopenhauer, which provides a lucid introduction to the philosopher and his impact on Wagner; however, Young ultimately views Wagner’s conversion to Schopenhauer as a retreat from the ethical questions that engaged him earlier in his career and thus sees in Wagner’s post-Schopenhauer, music-orientated aesthetics a less satisfactory basis for serious drama. Very informative is Ulrike Kienzle’s substantial essay on ‘Religion’, which traces the evolution of Wagner’s religious thought and its reflection in his dramas from the Romanticized Christianity of his youth, through the ambivalence about Christianity in Tannhäuser and the Feuerbachian atheism of the Zurich writings and the Ring, to the Schopenhauer-inspired mixture of Buddhism and Christianity in Parsifal and the late writings. Eva Rieger’s contributions ‘Gender’ and ‘Women’ offer a feminist perspective on Wagner’s ambiguous but largely patriarchal treatment of women and male–female relationships in life, in his writings and in the female characters in his operas.

Items devoted to Wagner’s artistic predecessors, both literary (the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Heine) and musical (J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Marschner, Meyerbeer), generally report on Wagner’s pronouncements as to their significance and point to their possible influences on Wagner’s artworks. It is interesting to read, for instance, in Dieter Borchmeyer’s entry on Schiller about the multiple resonances between Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Wagner’s work. The entries on Wagner’s musical contemporaries (Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Verdi, Brahms) include relevant biographical information but are not uniform as to whether to emphasize Wagner’s opinions about them or their opinions about him. Of these, David Trippett’s extensive article on Franz Liszt is one of the highlights of the volume, explaining very clearly the asymmetrical nature of this unique friendship of artistic giants.

Wagner’s thought did not arise in a vacuum, and the CWE includes entries that help the reader understand the historical contexts behind Wagner’s ideas. Adrian Daub’s ‘Romanticism (literary)’ illuminates the literary background to Wagner’s early operas and various debts that Wagner owed the Romantics throughout his work, but notes that from early on Wagner’s aesthetics were also shaped by the more politicized interests of Young Germany. A number of articles elaborate the complex phenomenon of nineteenth-century German nationalism that underlay Wagner’s cultural chauvinism and much of his political thinking, including Celia Applegate’s ‘Nationalism’ and ‘German unification’, Barbara Eichner’s ‘Germanness/German identity’ and Mark Berry’s ‘German history’. Corinna Treitel’s entry ‘Vegetarianism’ puts the late Wagner’s idealization of a meat-free diet into a broader German context where the movement was associated with republicanism, utopian socialism and naturopathy.

The artist and his works. Of course, were it not for his artistic creations, Wagner’s thought would probably attract relatively little attention today, and the CWE devotes substantial space to his creative work, with entries on individual works and on various aspects of his poetic and compositional approach. Each of Wagner’s operas as well as the Ring as a whole receives an essay, although the coverage is decidedly weighted toward the 10 operas beginning with Der fliegende Holländer. The essays on Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot are quite short, and the somewhat longer entry on Rienzi nevertheless is still too compressed to provide an adequate plot summary. For the canonical operas the essays typically supply information about genesis, literary sources, plot, musical features, and aspects of performance history and critical reception, although the format is not entirely standardized; for instance, instead of a traditional synopsis, the essay on Parsifal provides an analysis of the plot structure that presupposes one’s familiarity with the basic story. In addition, major characters from the canonical operas are treated to separate entries that identify celebrated interpreters of the roles in addition to offering dramaturgical analysis.

Each of the entries on the canonical operas has its own emphases, reflecting the perspectives of the various authors as well as the fact that each of the operas creates its own world. Thomas S. Grey’s essay on Der fliegende Holländer stresses the motivic links across various musical themes in the opera that originate in Senta’s ballad. The same scholar’s entry on Tannhäuser highlights its dualities and dichotomies of genre (Grand opéra v. Romantic opera), style (the diatonic world of the Wartburg v. Venus’s chromatic realm) and idea (Young German protest v. Romantic sensibility). Barbara Eichner’s piece on Lohengrin emphasizes its equilibrium of traditional and progressive features. The entries on the Ring and its component operas, jointly written by the Germanist Adrian Daub and the music theorist Patrick McCreless, devote considerable attention to the psychological functions of the Leitmotive (illustrated by a limited sampling of musical examples presented in Appendix 4) and explain large formal and tonal features that underlie individual operas and the cycle as a whole. A recurring theme in William Kinderman’s entries on Parsifal is the motivic-symbolic network that runs backwards from Kundry’s failed seduction of the title character in Act 2 to the Communion motive in Act 1 with its ‘chromatic contamination’ suggestive of her successful seduction of Amfortas prior to the start of the opera, a contaminant that is eventually purged in Act 3 after Parsifal’s years of self-denying wandering.

The entries on Tristan und Isolde by John Deathridge offer some of the most striking commentary in the CWE. Rather than emphasize Wagner’s relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck as a prime motivation for the opera, Deathridge looks instead to psychological pressures that bubbled up with the start of work on Siegfried in 1856. He sees Wagner’s Isolde as a quasi-Shakespearean, conflict-ridden creation that conflates aspects of three Isoldes in the medieval sources (Isolde the Fair, Isolde of the White Hands, and Isolde the Fair’s mother). Deathridge suggests that Wagner relates the naive trick whereby Tristan had passed himself off as ‘Tantris’ to disguise his identity – a device taken from Gottfried von Strassburg – to the anything-but-trivial ‘Todgeweihtes Haupt’ motive through the juxtaposition of A-flat major and A major in both cases. Ryan Minor’s contributions on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg take a somewhat iconoclastic tack, noting that its music contains ‘moments of sheer tedium as well as those of utter sublimity’ (p. 291), drawing attention to the elements that made the opera easily susceptible to appropriation by virulent German nationalists and highlighting unsavoury character traits in Hans Sachs, such as his cruelty toward Beckmesser or his potential for demagoguery.

A number of entries deal with aspects of Wagner’s artistry. His development as a dramatist is summarized by Yvonne Nilges in ‘Wagner as librettist’, an essay that gives a better sense of the rationale and functions of Stabreim than does the dedicated article on that term. Keeping a non-specialist audience in mind, the CWE generally avoids detailed discussions of Wagner’s compositional technique. Nevertheless, Kinderman’s ‘Wagner as composer’ presents a good overview of Wagner’s innovations, focusing largely on Wagner’s development of chromatic harmony for expressive purposes. ‘Orchestration’, by Matt BaileyShea, includes an extended discussion of the final scene of Die Walküre to exemplify the coordination of evolving orchestral sonority with the unfolding struggle between Wotan and Brünnhilde. Grey’s ‘Poetic-musical period’ and Arnold Whittall’s ‘Leitmotiv’ treat with sophistication, respectively, an authentic but problematic Wagnerian formal concept and a non-Wagnerian term of admittedly great utility; for the non-specialist reader it would have been useful for the entry on Leitmotiv also to explain the device’s relationship to and difference from the earlier practice of reminiscence melodies or motives – a practice on which Wagner himself relied in the pre-Ring operas – especially as the CWE contains no separate entry on this device.

Apart from the operas, coverage of the rest of Wagner’s artistic oeuvre is restricted to synoptic entries like Deathridge’s ‘Works, lesser musical’ and Jeremy Coleman’s ‘Projects’, ‘Stage works, incomplete’, and ‘Works, lost’, as well as a handful of essays devoted to individual works such as the Symphony in C, Siegfried Idyll, Wesendonck Lieder, Huldigungsmarsch and Kaisermarsch. Appendix 6 provides a complete list of Wagner’s musical works.

Wagner in performance. As noted above, entries on the operas and the principal characters include information about production history and celebrated performers. Indeed, one of the features of the CWE that marks it as a product of our time is its extensive coverage of various aspects of realizing the works. Although many entries give snapshots of the careers of Wagnerian singers, conductors, directors and designers from Wagner’s time to the present, real insight into the history and challenges of Wagner performance is reserved for the overview articles. The musical side of the equation is represented in such entries as Chris Walton’s ‘Wagner as conductor’, Roger Allen’s ‘Performance, conductors’, and David Breckbill’s ‘Performance, singers’ and ‘Performance, recordings’; from these one gets a sense of the competing and changing ideals of Wagnerian vocal production and rhythm from the start of the twentieth century to the present. One can of course do this thanks to the development of sound recording, the impact of which on the aesthetics of performance, especially since the advent of studio recordings after World War II, is well argued by Breckbill. But a recurring subtext to these discussions is the impossibility of getting back to Wagner’s own ideals of vocal production, orchestral sound, tempo and rubato, either directly or by tracing a non-existent apostolic lineage of conducting and singing. The entry on ‘Performance practice’ by Erling E. Guldbrandsen would suggest, however, that our inability to reproduce Wagner’s interpretations of his own music would not have been a concern for Wagner himself, who presumably encouraged constant reinterpretation of his work with his remark to Liszt ‘Kinder! Macht Neues! Neues! und abermals Neues!’ (p. 421) – an exhortation that, if correctly interpreted here, seems a bit odd in view of Wagner’s own efforts to fix in the score so many details of performance.

The tension between Werktreue and the freedom to fashion new interpretations is felt even more urgently in the area of staging, where Wagner’s very explicit stage instructions and the extensive evidence for the look of Wagner’s operas in the nineteenth century stand in sharp contrast to the experimental stagings that are now the norm. How we got from Wagner to the present is discussed in Simon Williams’s ‘Wagner as stage director’ and ‘Stage design’ and in Evan Baker’s ‘Production history’. Certain points recur leitmotivically through these contributions: the Romantic realism of Wagner’s own productions; the role of Angelo Neumann in demonstrating the feasibility of the Ring with his composer-sanctioned touring company; Cosima Wagner’s efforts to preserve her late husband’s presumed intentions with naturalistic stagings at Bayreuth; Adolph Appia’s revolutionary anti-naturalistic theories of staging; Alfred Roller’s ground-breaking 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde in Vienna; the controversial production of Der fliegende Holländer at the Kroll Oper in Berlin in 1929; the new Bayreuth style under Wieland Wagner after 1951; and the ascendancy of Regietheater (a term that perhaps would have merited an entry of its own in the CWE) since the 1970s with widely varying conceptions. Appendices 8 and 10, respectively, point the reader to select commercially released video recordings and significant productions of the operas from their premieres to the present.

The institutionalization of Wagner. An interesting subset of entries in the CWE comprises those devoted to what might be called the institutionalization of Wagner, an area reflective of editor Nicholas Vazsonyi’s interest in the development of the Wagner brand, about which he has published a monograph. Wagner’s own efforts to publicize his work and control his public image through various writings and concerts are the subject of Vazsonyi’s ‘Publicity and self-promotion’. The realization and perpetuation of Wagner’s dream of a theatre for his own works is traced in a number of articles concerning Bayreuth, with Vazsonyi’s major entry, ‘Bayreuth Festival, history of’ supplemented by articles on the pre-history of Bayreuth (‘Festival, idea of’, ‘Festival theater, Munich’), the theatre itself (‘Festival theater, Bayreuth’), Wagner’s fund-raising and publicity efforts (‘Patron certificates’, ‘Patrons’ association’, ‘Bayreuth Festival, announcements for’), various organizations founded to support the festival (‘Wagner Societies’, ‘Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth’), and individuals associated with the realization of the theatre and the first festival. The subsequent history of the Festival is covered not only in the essays on production history and stage design mentioned above, but also in entries on various members of the Wagner family, whose frequent rifts for personal and political reasons and periodic infighting for control of the festival and Wagner’s legacy, seemingly resolved by assumption of governmental oversight in 1973 (see ‘Richard Wagner Foundation’), are recurring topics.

Wagner reception. The critical reception of Wagner’s thought and works and their impact on Western culture, both high and popular, constitute another point of focus in the CWE. The overview essay on Wagner reception and influence from his day to the present (‘Reception’ by Anthony J. Steinhoff) and the essay on the German discourse on Wagner during the composer’s lifetime (Helmut Kirchmeyer’s ‘Reception, in the German-language press’) offer serviceable introductions to an enormous field in which there is still much work to be done. As Pederson points out in ‘Music critics and criticism’, interest in Wagner contributed greatly to the explosion of music criticism in the second half of the nineteenth century, and entries by Pederson and James Deaville on writers like Theodor Uhlig, Eduard Hanslick and Franz Brendel, on the pro-Wagner Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and on the New German School highlight some of the figures and issues central to the German discourse. A particularly interesting contribution is Julian Young’s entry on Friedrich Nietzsche, which beyond providing a biographical accounting of the friendship and subsequent rupture between the writer and the dramatist also sketches an intriguing analysis of the later Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, according to which the philosopher never ceased to be a Wagnerian but instead turned away from the composer because he regarded the older man himself to have abandoned his earlier (i.e. Greek-inspired, life-affirming, community-renewing) agenda when he turned to Schopenhauer.

Wagner reception outside of the German-speaking world also receives considerable attention in CWE (see the entries ‘France’, ‘Italy, Wagner’s views on and reception of’, ‘London’, ‘Russia’, ‘United States of America’), although here the emphasis is less on journalistic criticism than it is on the multifaceted phenomenon of Wagnerism (the subject of an overview essay by Lydia Mayne). The impact on writers and artists across different disciplines of Wagner’s works and their themes, his ideas (in particular the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk), and his image as a radical opponent of bourgeois status quo is treated in such entries as Yvonne Nilges’s ‘Wagner in Literature’ (a nation-by-nation survey), Emma Sutton’s ‘Wagner in the Visual Arts’, Matthew Wilson Smith’s ‘Modernism’, and Stephen C. Downes’s ‘Decadence’ as well as entries on select individuals like Charles Baudelaire, Henri Fantin-Latour, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, Virginia Woolf, Sergei Eisenstein and Isadora Duncan. Wagner’s profound impact on musical composition is also not neglected, as the interested reader may consult Whittall’s essay ‘Modern music’ and separate entries on post-Wagnerian composers like Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Arnold Schoenberg and Claude Debussy.

The overview entry ‘Wagner and popular culture’ by Sebastian Stauss anchors a number of items that deal with the impact of Wagner across wider segments of society than just elite artists, writers and composers. ‘Piano arrangements and reductions’ (David Huckvale), ‘Piano transcriptions’ (David Trippett), ‘Orchestral concerts’ (William Weber) and ‘Leitmotiv guides’ (Christian Thorau) treat various ways in which knowledge of Wagner and his works was transmitted outside of the opera house to an interested public. Ulrich Drüner’s piece on ‘Memorabilia’ discusses how the nineteenth-century fad for commodification of genius blended in the case of Wagner with his image as a symbol of German identity. In ‘Parodies, satire, caricatures’ Evan Baker focuses mostly on literary and dramatic parodies that easily poked fun at Wagner’s works and writings. Wagner’s presence in popular culture of the twentieth century and beyond is the subject of Huckvale’s ‘Film music’, which points to the debts of film composers to Wagnerian techniques, and Hilan Warshaw’s ‘Films about Wagner’, which provides an overview of documentaries and narrative films in which the composer figures. Whether Wagner may be considered as the forerunner to the new multi-media art forms of the digital age, however, is treated with circumspection by Lutz Koepnick in ‘Wagner and new media’.

The dark side of Wagner. As Anthony J. Steinhoff notes in the entry ‘Reception’, Hitler’s appropriation of Wagner and his works as a symbol of German identity has ‘made it almost impossible to separate Wagner from discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust’ (p. 463). The CWE does not shy away from this dark side of Wagner, giving readers many opportunities to inform themselves about difficult questions. Hans Vaget’s overview entry ‘Anti-Semitism’ presents the undeniable facts of Wagner’s anti-Jewish opinions and takes a middle-of-the road position on the oft-debated question as to whether there is anti-Semitic content in Wagner’s operas, noting that while it ‘strains credulity that Wagner should have been able to keep his most accomplished creations entirely free of so obsessive a concern as his hostility towards Jews’, it is ‘far too simplistic to diagnose complex characters, such as Alberich or Beckmesser, as mere Jewish caricatures’ (pp. 19–20). Wagner’s notorious essay, ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’, is treated both in Vaget’s piece and in a dedicated entry by Pamela M. Potter, who presents an analysis of the essay and discusses its status among Nazi ideologues as a precursor to their own concerns about race. ‘Jews’ by Sander Gilman illustrates Wagner’s complex relationships with individual Jews through consideration of his connections with Fromental Halévy, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Hermann Levi, putting these within the context of the problematic of who was considered Jewish in an age of emancipation and assimilation. The aforementioned articles on the Ring operas, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and characters like Mime and Sixtus Beckmesser further draw attention to the troubling features that certainly lend themselves to interpretation as anti-Semitic symbols.

Leaving unresolved the level of blame that Wagner bears for the horrors of the twentieth century – whether, in Ryan Minor’s formulation, one should speak of Wagner’s ‘annexation by’ or ‘anticipation of’ the Nazis (p. 291) – the CWE provides ample information about the paths by which Wagner’s work came to be associated with ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic ideologies of the early twentieth century. A number of articles are devoted to the so-called Bayreuth Circle, writers close to Cosima Wagner like Hans von Wolzogen, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Henry Thode, who promulgated a view of Wagner’s works and writings as nationalist, conservative, anti-Semitic and völkisch and thus glossed over the cosmopolitan and revolutionary aspects of his career and output. Such interpretations readily fed into Nazi readings of Wagner as a forerunner to their own racist ideology, as shown in David B. Dennis’s ‘National Socialism, Wagner propaganda during’. Hitler’s personal enthusiasm for Wagner’s work, his close ties to the Wagner family, and his support for the Bayreuth Festival before and during World War II are amply documented in a number of entries in the CWE. Yet, both Dennis and Potter, in her entry on Hitler, note that it remains difficult to draw a direct connection between Wagner’s ideas and Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideology because the latter made no public pronouncements on Wagner’s anti-Semitic statements or on the meaning of Wagner for his movement.

Wagner scholarship. Lastly, the CWE offers fans and students of Wagner glimpses into various aspects of Wagner research. The encyclopedia introduces the reader to important primary sources through dedicated items on Wagner’s autograph manuscripts, his diary of 1865–82, the so-called Das Braune Buch, and Cosima Wagner’s diaries. Articles on the complete editions of Wagner’s correspondence and Wagner’s works explain the history and current state of those important projects; John Deathridge’s essay on the various editions of Wagner’s prose works highlights the lack of a truly critical edition of Wagner’s writings. The principal approaches to understanding the thematic, harmonic and formal dimensions of Wagner’s music are discussed in Matthew Bribitzer-Stull’s piece ‘Music theory’, and Emma Sutton’s ‘Iconography’ provides an excellent overview and an extensive bibliography for a vast field of research. Several influential Wagner scholars and critics receive entries, including those who remain generally admired such as Ernest Newman, Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as others, like Carl Friedrich Glasenapp and Alfred Lorenz, whose work can be challenged on various grounds. Contributions by Stephen McClatchie and Michael Saffle cover a number of periodicals devoted to Wagner from the composer’s later years to the present. Those eager to learn more will also find many suggestions for further reading in the select bibliography at the end of the volume and in the reference lists that accompany most of the entries. And for the reader motivated to consult original sources, Appendix 12 provides contact information for important Wagner archives and museums in Bayreuth, Eisenach, Graupa, Lucerne and Venice.

For a book of its size involving so many authors the CWE has remarkably few typographical errors and inconsistencies of format. A few factual errors and internal contradictions did manage to escape detection. The young Engelbert Humperdinck was not already a Bayreuth assistant when he first visited Wagner at Villa d’Angi near Naples in 1880 as claimed on p. 218; the entry on Humperdinck explains that it was only afterwards that Wagner invited him to Bayreuth to help with the preparations for Parsifal (see p. 200). Contradictory statements about Thomas Mann appear on p. 311, where he is said to have been a frequent visitor to Bayreuth (along with Virginia Woolf), and p. 281, where we read that he visited Bayreuth only once, in 1909. Ortrud’s F-sharp minor is not the parallel minor to Lohengrin’s A major (p. 377), but rather its relative minor. Although it is true that Wagner generally did not assign verbal signifiers to his Leitmotive, the statement on p. 250 that there is no evidence in his compositional sketches that Wagner ever named his musical ideas overlooks the sketches for Der junge Siegfried, where the words ‘Fafner’, ‘Waldvogel’ and ‘Schmieden’ are clearly associated with musical motives that ultimately made their way into the Ring as we know it.Footnote ¹ And as is to be expected, a book of this nature entails various choices necessitated by considerations of cost. Surely this explains the lack of reproductions, which would have been particularly helpful to illustrate some of the productions that are discussed in the entries on performance history (there are references, however, to web sites where such images can be found).

Such few blemishes aside, the CWE represents a remarkable achievement. Thanks to its broad range of subjects and the extraordinary collective expertise of its contributors, readers now have a substantial reference work that should serve them well for years to come, answering their basic questions and promoting deeper and more nuanced understanding of the paradoxes and greatness of Richard Wagner.