Roger Hollinrake, Review of Mark Berry, ‘Treacherous Bonds’

The story of the forging of the Ring has been frequently recounted. In re-researching this complicated evolutionary process – almost as enthralling as the plot of the cycle itself – Mark Berry’s Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ has been well served by the world’s scholarly publishing houses, including Cambridge University Press, which in recent years have assembled an arsenal of post-Hegelian revolutionary literature of the 1800s in English translations. This corpus of material has been amplified by the author’s own reading. The thoroughness of this investigation is impressive. Not only is it new to Wagner studies; it is doubtful whether any standard work on the Vormärz goes further in its range of erudition or uses its sources to better effect.