Buried treasure

The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’

Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the works of Wagner: among these the Ring offers the widest scope for traduction.