Under the Spell: Mike Ashman appraises a provocative study of Wagner

Review of Barry Millington, Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth (Thames & Hudson, 2012).

November 2012, Volume 6, Number 3, 101–4.

Barry Millington’s Wagner (Master Musicians, Dent, London, 1984) and The Wagner Compendium (Thames & Hudson, London, 1992) have maintained their places on the Anglophone Wagnerite’s essential reference shelf. Subsequently Millington has pursued individual strands of Wagner study – the composer’s anti-Semitism, the history of the Holländer sketches in France, the approach to the Ring in Dresden and Zurich, to name but a few – in more detail in further books (or updated editions), articles and lecture papers. Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth builds on this previous output. There are even elements here of the large-scale life-and-works opus that Millington has so far abstained from writing.