Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round
by M. Owen Lee

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round
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Book Summary Information

Author: M. Owen Lee
Brand: Limelight Editions
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994
ISBN: 0879101865
Number of pages: 122
Publisher: Limelight Editions
Product features:
  • Published by Limelight Editions 126 Pages
  • by M. Owen Lee
  • Author: M. Owen Lee

Book Reviews of Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round

Book Review: The world projected in myth and music
Summary: 5 Stars

Father M. Owen Lee, who is known for his erudite commentaries on Metropolitan Opera broadcasts has recently published another book about the Wagner's Ring Cycle, called "Athena Sings. Wagner and the Greeks." Father Lee is a Classics scholar, so it should be no surprise that the Greeks also inhabit "Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Around." This book is only 120 pages long, but like Wagner's Ring it seems to inhabit the whole human experience from the birth of consciousness to the death of god.

If ever a book should published in an audio version, it is this one. 'Turning the Sky Around' stemmed from a series of talks that the author gave during Met broadcast intermissions, and while an 'Index of Musical Themes' might be okay for those who have a piano handy, how wonderful it would be if the book could simply 'play' them for the rest of us. I wonder if the original talks were taped and are lying about in a Met Opera warehouse somewhere---probably just wishful thinking on my part.

Even opera lovers who have every reason to dislike Wagner the man (especially the blatant anti-Semitism of Mime's character and death) will gain insight into the astonishing scope of the Ring from this slender book. As Father Lee puts it: "The subject of Wagner's Ring is not much less than the world itself, the world projected in myth and music."

This book's title is taken from an epiphany experienced by the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who wrote about the first time he saw Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Wagner's Ring: "The sky had turned round...Pure 'Northernness' engulfed me; a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight..." Father Lee chides those directors who attempt to remove the Ring from nature and make it into a Marxist ideologue, or clutter it up with Chicago gangsters and machine guns (a Covent Garden production). But he also argues that the Ring is outside time and nature, and certainly has less to do with the twelfth-century "Nibelungenlied" than it has to do with our own inner lives---with "...man's inner struggle with his own destructive impulses...of the emergence in him of new ideas, and the dying in him of transforming deaths."

Please read this book, even if you think you don't like opera. It is intuitive and passionate commentary on one of Western Civilization's greatest works of art.

Summary of Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round

Commentary on and a concise, lucid interpretation of the opera world's most complex masterwork, expanded from the author's popular intermission talks during Met Opera broadcasts.

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