‘Durch Mitleid wissend’? Contexts and Contextualisers: Peter Franklin enjoys a weighty and wide-ranging addition to the Wagnerian library

In Parsifal we learn how Time becomes Space. Wagner certainly needed plenty of both and no essay collection devoted to him can avoid topping 400 pages – 459 in this bullet-stopping addition to the Cambridge University Press ‘In Context’ series. It is absorbing, for all that object and subject prove as interchangeable as time and space in Monsalvat: Wagner as subject readily flips back into context for so much that followed in European culture.