Looking for Trouble: Barry Millington is perplexed by a new study of Wagner

Review of Michael P. Steinberg, The Trouble with Wagner (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

July 2019, Volume 13, Number 2, 86–91.

The cultural historian Michael P. Steinberg (not to be confused with the music writer and critic Michael Steinberg, who died in 2009) is better known in his native America than in Great Britain. He did, however, serve as president of the American Academy in Berlin from 2016 to 2018, and before that as a dramaturg for the production of the Ring by Guy Cassiers shared between the Berlin Staatsoper and La Scala, Milan. German–Jewish intellectual history has always been at the centre of his preoccupations and the present book brings together his insights into the Wagner phenomenon from the perspective of a cultural historian – with many from the disciplines of philosophy and psychology on the way – as well as addressing interpretative issues of the Ring from the point of view of one who has grappled with the practicalities of presenting the work to the public.

That at least was the theory.