Dieter Borchmeyer, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, trans. Daphne Ellis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). x+391 pp. James Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). xix+304 pp

[...]Die Hochzeits erotic tale of forbidden love serves as a pre-echo of Tristan und Isolde; Die Feen shares many of the later works sympathy with death; and Das Liebesverbot anticipates the conict between power and love that will generate the Ring cycle. Borchmeyers attempt to counter the charges of anti-Semitism extends beyond these debates over particular characters, but his entire discussion of the problem is marred by the failure to consider perspectives that would complicate his claims. [...]in his effort to show that only a handful of contemporaries sensed elements of anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger, Borchmeyer points out that Eduard Hanslick never levels the charge against Wagner in his review of the opera even though he had been the butt of Wagners now-legendary declamation of the works libretto in 1862, when Beckmesser was called Hanslich. [...]in Tristan, despite all Wagners theorizing, [music] offers glimpses of a true Nirvana: not a state of apparent resignation which . . . merely cloaks the will and its desires, but a resonant emptiness which cant be pressed into the service of the will. [...]Proust calls love le mal sacr: it is a disease, but a sacred one.2) The suffering of love, writes Scruton, is also a vindication: a sign that the lovers have risen above the natural order and possessed themselves of the individuality and the freedom which justify the trouble of existence, and of which bereavement is the price (144).