Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre

In contrast to most books on Richard Wagner, this biography focuses primarily on Wagner as an important figure in the development of the theatre. While his contribution to music history has been exhaustively documented and analyzed, his theatrical ventures, in particular the founding of the Bayreuth Festival, have not been the object of much research by English-speaking theatre historians. Nevertheless, the Festival was a crucial event in the development of the European theatre: while Bayreuth established the paradigm for all modern theatre and music festivals, the Festival Theatre itself has provided the most widely imitated architectural configuration in twentieth-century theatre building.

?Williams's well-crafted study provides even the Wagnerian a useful summary and brief overview, with succinct but perceptive analyses of Wagner's stage work, a clear narrative of his life, a chapter on his theatrical legacy, a comparative chronology, a bibliography with sources in German and English, and well-chosen illustrations.?-Choice, "Williams's well-crafted study provides even the Wagnerian a useful summary and brief overview, with succinct but perceptive analyses of Wagner's stage work, a clear narrative of his life, a chapter on his theatrical legacy, a comparative chronology, a bibliography with sources in German and English, and well-chosen illustrations."-Choice

SIMON WILLIAMS is Professor of Dramatic Art and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Greenwood, 1985) and Shakespeare on the German Stage.