Victors or Victims? Barbara Eichner welcomes a further contribution to the debate on Wagner’s heroines

Vocal Victories, by the Danish musicologist and singer Nila Parly, sets out to rectify the traditional victimising of Wagner’s female characters, advocating instead that the heroines are in fact in command of the musical and dramatic development of the works in question and thus help to rectify or to redeem their (fictional) worlds. This book is not, as the blurb claims, ‘the first musicological comparison of all of Richard Wagner’s female characters’, since Eva Rieger’s Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod offered that in 2009 (now translated as Richard Wagner’s Women).