M. Owen Lee (1930–2019)

Exceptionally fun and menacing. The late Father M. Owen Lee was a unique personage in the world of opera, and provided delight for decades to buffs around the world. This book collects most of his quizzes from the academic journal Opera Quarterly. They're often brutally hard but at the same time not willfully obscure, as is the case with some other opera quiz books I've collected. More enjoyably, there's a variety of formats here. It's not just multiple-choice quizzes, but crosswords and other teasers. A blessing of a book.… (more)

As a high school student I liked browsing antiquarian bookshops and often came across 4-volume sets of collected plays by Richard Wagner as there were similar sets of collected works of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, but somehow, because Wagner was never praised as a writer, I would not buy them. I knew he was a great composer, and I knew these plays were the librettos of his operas, but for some reason as such I would disregard them as great literature.

One of the main points of M. Owen Lee's lectures is that this is a common misconception. Wagner's opera's deserve as much to be read as listened to. Wagner was serious about everything: the music, the text of his operas and the stage performance, as well known, and pointed out once more much of our concert hall experience is owed to the practice first insisted on by Wagner.

Apparently, Brian Magee's Aspects of Wagner (OUP), a very slim biography is indispensible reading when it comes to Wagner. (I read that slim volume in 2019). By contrast, Wagner. The terrible man and his truthful art, also a slim volume, of just three lectures, is a mere epiphany, a light afterthought. It is more about what other people thought of Wagner (yes, including the Nazis) and how he influenced others, including many writers, than about the music. It ponders more on the smaller operas, like Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and Tannhauser than on the Ring.… (more)