Thomas Grey is a preeminent scholar of the music of Wagner and nineteenth century music and culture. He is the author of Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (1995) and the editor and coauthor of Richard Wagner: The Flying Dutchman (2000), among other works.
The lecture interrogates the conceptual foundations of this reading of the Ring cycle in the work’s text and music, and in the reception history especially since George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898).