Mike Svoboda, an American who has spent half his life in Germany, knows how Wagner is seen abroad just as well as the passions that he sometimes ignites here at home. Unaffected by servile declarations of respect he approaches this monument impishly: slyly and without false respect. He presents his engagement with the self-styled composer god as a historical-satirical revue, as a roller coaster ride through the heights and depths of Wagner’s reception over the past hundred and fifty years, though a trace of Svoboda’s respect for the work is nonetheless always found beneath the surface.
