Wagner in Russia (8/9)

Wagner in the Soviet Union. Part 4 : Stalin's Walküre

Sergei Eisenstein in 1925

With Stalin’s arrival in 1928, the Wagnerian oeuvre as a whole presented so many ideological problems that its performance became narrowed to those few works that could be presented within the constraints of what was politically permissible. The 50^th anniversary of Wagner’s death was marked in 1933 by the former Mariinsky Theatr…