Charles Osborne, born in Brisbane in 1927, is journalist and writer whose main works have dealt with classical music, especially opera. He was Assistant Editor of The London Magazine, 1958–66, Literature Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971–86, and chief theatre critic of the London Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1991.

Shows and discusses previous productions of each of Wagner's operas around the world and identifies singers and the roles they played.

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This book "reveals, in a wealth of carefully selected photographs, the extraordinary range of stylistic interpretations that Wagner's works have inspired...from the 1830s to the 1983 centenary of the composer's death, and it is apparent that the problems of staging Wagner, which Sir Colin Davis discusses in his preface to the book, are the same today as they were in the early years: length, scale, musical resources, finding a valid ideological approach, and, not least, devising viable alternatives to Wagner's own stage directions, which were often highly impractical."--From the dw.