By Andrew Moravcsik [Opera Quarterly, Winter 2010]

By the standards of contemporary German opera, the recent Stuttgart production of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen has generated a great deal of hype. Critics hail it as an epochal “milestone in the history of Wagner production, akin to the Patrice Chéreau Bayreuth centenary Ring of 1976,” and praise it for singlehandedly disproving “widespread claims that opera is dead.”