Graham Bradshaw writes about the interpretation of Wagner

• The Bayreuth Ring
  BBC2, October 1982
• Parsifal by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
  Edinburgh Film Festival, September 1982, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• Parsifal by Lucy Beckett
  Cambridge, 163 pp, £9.95, August 1981, ISBN 0 521 22825 5
• Wagner and Literature by Raymond Furness
  Manchester, 159 pp, £14.50, February 1982, ISBN 0 07 900844 5
• Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’: A Study of the Relationship of Wagner to English Literature by Stoddart Martin
  Macmillan, 277 pp, £20.00, June 1982, ISBN 0 333 28998 6
• Wagner and Aeschylus: ‘The Ring’ and ‘The Oresteia’ by Michael Ewans
  Faber, 271 pp, £12.50, July 1982, ISBN 0 571 11808 9

On balance, we should be grateful to the BBC for finding room on its snooker station, over ten successive Sundays, for what the editor of Opera described as France’s long-delayed revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth’. Musically, the Boulez Ring cannot compare with Furtwängler’s La Scala performance or Knappertsbusch’s 1957 cycle, both available on record. Moreover, if the New Bayreuth approach to Wagner no longer seems new or radical enough, and if overtly socio-political interpretations have now displaced Wieland’s revolutionary emphasis on ‘psychodrama’, then the Ring productions of Götz Friedrich and Joachim Herz might be thought more substantially challenging than Chéreau’s.