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Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.
Simon Williams's excellent book concentrates on the changing role of the heroic figures around which Wagner's Musikdramas are centered. Thus, Wagner is shown moving from the various forms of Romantic hero--Rousseau's natural man, the artist heroes of German Romanticism, and the torn Byronic heroes-- to what he calls the "epic" hero drawn from the composer's reading of German medieval romances, and, in the final stage of his career, to the "messianic" hero suggested by his reading of Thomas Carlyle's book on heroes and hero worship.
Before studying the ten music-dramas that make up the Wagner canon, Williams provides a valuable chapter on the three rarely performed early operas--Die Feen , Das Liebesverbot , and Rienzi --showing how they are rooted in the conventions of early nineteenth-century theatre and opera. The three succeeding operas--Der fliegende Holländer , Tannhäuser...