"This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five plays ranging from his early work through the time of his prolific maturity in the 1920s to his last period as an exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1945. David and Goliath is set in Denmark and deals with the power of money over men. The President, set in France, is ironical in tone and revolves around a lottery and, once again, the power of money. The Flight to Venice was written at the height of the Expressionist movement in 1922, and is one of the principal plays of the period. One Day in October is highly complex, using nineteenth-century French literary personalities to make points about literary creation and the relationship between art and life. The final play, The Raft of the Medusa, takes its title from Gericault's painting, and concerns the regeneration of man overlaid with the pessimism of the European struggle."

Richard Wagner has fascinated every generation of opera-lovers for over a century, and a mass of literature has interpreted and reinterpreted not only his character, but also the components of the great music dramas that are still some of the most captivating and complex operas in the international repertory today. In this excellent study, Garten examines the cultural and historical sources of these operas: the myths and legends that Wagner employed, in which much of his works' interest, other than the purely musical, can be found. Garten's study also shows how legends of the old Nordic gods, the troubadours and Minnesingers, the quest for the grail, as well as stories taken from folklore and history, were transformed into the theatrical mythology of Wagner's music dramas.