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Drama and the World of Richard Wagner.

Article Excerpt
Drama and the World of Richard Wagner. By Dieter Borchmeyer. Trans. by Daphne Ellis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. [x, 391 p. ISBN 0-691-11497-8. $39.50.] Index.

Dieter Borchmeyer is one of the most active German scholars working in the sprawling area of Wagner studies. As the span of Wagnerian centenary observations unfolded towards 1983, Borchmeyer emerged as author of the substantial monograph Das Theater Richard Wagners: Idee-Dichtung-Wirkung (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1982), as editor of a collection of Wagner's writings, Dichtungen und Schriften: Jubilaumsausgabe in zehn Banden, as well as co-editor of Wagner-Parodien (both Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1983). Amidst five subsequently edited Wagner-related volumes, the 1982 book appeared in English, translated by Stewart Spencer, as Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). For this much-modified version, Borchmeyer largely rewrote one of the original four sections--that concentrating on the stage works themselves--"for an English audience" (p. xv). This new material turned out to be less a matter of addressing a different audience than a valuable rethinking, as it has resurfaced, reworked, in Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2002). It has now appeared in English, translated by Daphne Ellis, as Drama and the World of Richard Wagner.

Borchmeyer openly admits that many chapters in this recent book derive from earlier publications, but a newcomer to his writings in either language will not likely be aware of the extent to which this is the case. Yet the book is no mere pastiche. The rethinkings involved in the first translation project triggered a chain of evolutions and expansions of topics that yielded much original material that helps to make Drama...