A Personal Voyage Through the Wagnerian Cosmos: Michael Fuller argues that an often engaging reflection on Wagner’s stage works would have benefited from a more critical approach

David Vernon’s Disturbing the Universe is a reflection on Wagner’s ten ‘canonical’ works, with the aim of sharing its author’s view of them as ‘restless, disconcerted, frantic; exciting, protesting, campaigning’. As flagged by the subtitle, they are referred to throughout as ‘Musikdramas’, the refusal to anglicise this term presumably being an attempt to stress their radical difference from other stage works.