Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round

Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to Wagner's magnificent "Ring"!
Review: A must-read for Wagner lovers, and those who want yet another
book on "The Ring" cycle. It is brief yet insightful. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to Wagner's magnificent "Ring"!
Review: A must-read for Wagner lovers, and those who want yet another
book on "The Ring" cycle. It is brief yet insightful. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to Wagner's magnificent "Ring"!
Review: A must-read for Wagner lovers, and those who want yet another
book on "The Ring" cycle. It is brief yet insightful. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Wagner's Ring
Review: Enthralling! An analysis that makes the music all that more meaningful in terms of ideas and emotions in addition to its already intrinsic beauty.

Rating:
Summary: Wagner's Ring
Review: Enthralling! An analysis that makes the music all that more meaningful in terms of ideas and emotions in addition to its already intrinsic beauty.

Rating:
Summary: The world projected in myth and music
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The world projected in myth and music
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Very Helpful Introduction to the Ring
Review: I bought a copy of this book from the Metropolitan Opera Shop just before seeing the Met Ring last Spring. Although this was not my first Ring production and I was already quite familiar with the Ring and other commentaries on this tetralogy, Owen Lee's book provided me with new insights that I had not thought of before. His manner is forthright and clear and his topic well-researched. It is a valuable resource to both newbies to the subject and experienced Ring afficionadoes.

Rating:
Summary: Very Helpful Introduction to the Ring
Review: I bought a copy of this book from the Metropolitan Opera Shop just before seeing the Met Ring last Spring. Although this was not my first Ring production and I was already quite familiar with the Ring and other commentaries on this tetralogy, Owen Lee's book provided me with new insights that I had not thought of before. His manner is forthright and clear and his topic well-researched. It is a valuable resource to both newbies to the subject and experienced Ring afficionadoes.

Rating:
Summary: Too superficial for my tastes
Review: I've heard comments about Lee--praise for his academic expertise and resentment for his referring to Wagner as "that terrible man" in another book. So I picked this up while watching the 2001 Seattle "Ring."

I don't consider myself a "Ring" expert by any stretch of the imagination. I consider myself a Wagnerian, find Wagner's music emotionally evocative, mentally stimulating, etc. I don't consider Wagner a "terrible man," however, nor do I consider him a superman, despite his musical talent, even genius. Sorry, but he, like all of us, was all-too human.

There are some points of the book that I appreciate. It is, as Lee points out, Wagner's musical talent that needs to be acknowledged. It is that, more than anything else, text or characters, for example, that stimulates me in "The Ring" or any other of Herr Wagner's operas.

And the summaries of each opera were helpful before I saw each one. I've seen tapes of them all before, but one can forget the stories, and a review like those Lee provided before each commentary was helpful.

Then there are the major leitmotifs of the opera, to which Lee frequently refers. But, unless you are very good at "hearing" the music you are reading, you may want to have a keyboard by you, or something by which you can listen to those themes. That will help you understand the operas and the concept of leitmotifs better.

However, one must keep in perspective what was going on in Germanic Europe in the Wagner era. Jung, Freud, Mesmer, and other gurus and similar fantasy builders were part of what was happening there. In fact, I see that as similar to some of the Eastern gurus who got footholds in the West during the 1960s. I fear that Lee doesn't keep that in perspective enough. He rambles on interminably on the "depth" of the "myths," ala Jung. And with that psychobabble I beg to differ. Myths are first and foremost stories. And stories are told to make a point. Lee refers at times to the Brothers Grimm with whom most of us are familiar. However, he refers to their stories as if there is almost an inherent message to be understood by the children hearing them. But any story is open to interpretation. Perhaps the stories most diversely interpreted are what is known as "scripture." Gerry Falwell and I interpret those documents very differently. So are ANY stories interpreted, including, if not especially, the Ring. Lee was so mesmerized by the "depth" of the "myth" that I think he may have left out other influences on Wagner. For instance, I believe Wagner had some commercial drive. I say that not in a critical sense, it's just reality. There was, for instance, appropriate to the time, a desire among German nationalists for a "national opera." Indeed, it may be from this book that I learned that fact. The Ring fulfilled that to a degree, though its sources are more Nordic and Icelandic than German. The times made the story more appropriate--saleable--than it may have been in another era. Wagner's genius at synthesis, taking bits and pieces from many sources and putting them into a plausible series of stories supported by superior--and evocative--musical background made it particularly "commercial."

As to the "mythic" structure of the Ring, I suspect that this was a result of Herr Wagner's rather extensive ego--bigger than reality--coupled with the dramatic effect of such myth. Guys going to work at the university or the factory and coming home to their wives and kids don't have quite the effect that greedy dwarves, ignorant and amorous giants, gods and their incestuous offspring have. The Grimms and Aesop also knew that well.

For those Wagnerian die-hards, no, I'm NOT criticizing Wagner for that. I just returned from a fabulous production of the Ring, to reinforce my video and audio recordings of the art, and the books and other media I have that examine it. I just fear that Lee--and some other authors--make Wagner more of a legend than he perhaps intended. (Note that I give the book 3 stars, not fewer!)

Overall, it's not a bad book, but, if you're familiar with the Ring, and don't get into popular psychological rap, I would recommend other books, including Ernest Newman's "The Wagner Operas" and others whom Lee uses as resources. And I'm reading another Lee book which I prefer. I think that'll get more stars.