Mark Berry, Professor of Music and Intellectual History, was an invited guest on BBC Radio 4’s arts magazine Front Row to discuss the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival, founded by Richard Wagner in the 1870s to perform his series of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelung.

Mark’s research has long focused on Wagner in particular and opera and its staging more generally. His books include Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’; After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono; and, as co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ . Here he discussed Bayreuth’s past and present, including this summer’s notorious ‘AI’ Ring. 

Catch up

To listen to this episode of BBC Radio 4's Front Row, please visit this website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0032sb9