All the World’s a Stage: Patrick Carnegy welcomes a film that explores the composer’s present-day global reach

This 2021 DVD documentary may come to be remembered for its witness to Wagner under the curse of Covid. It is not every day that you find singers in masks, whether at the Bethany Baptist Church in New Jersey or in a one-hour children’s version of Parsifal staged in Tokyo’s largest bank. The DVD lives up to its title in offering us glimpses of how far-flung parts of the world are responding to the Wagnerian spell.