Look East: Rosamund Bartlett considers a timely study of Wagner in the Slavic lands

Review of Stephen Muir and Anastasia Belina-Johnson, eds, Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary and Cultural Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013).

March 2016, Volume 10, Number 1, 89–92.

The production of the Ring given its premiere in St Petersburg in 2003 was remarkable for many reasons. To begin with, it was the first time the tetralogy had ever been interpreted through the prism of Caucasian, in particular, Ossetian mythology. As the Kazakhstan-born designer George Tsypin commented: ‘I had this image of an amazing Ring which looks towards Asia, towards the Russian steppes. I had a sense of this ancient Russia – an almost archaic barbaric perception of that culture, and I was very inspired. This is a very different Ring, not a standard modern interpretation.’