Eva Resnikova

Last night was Wagner night at the New York Philharmonic. Did they do Act I of Die Walküre? No, there were no singers. They played Lorin Maazel’s Ring synthesis—his “Ring without Words.” This is a masterly concoction, by a masterly musician, Maazel. He conducted the Philharmonic in his synthesis when he was the orchestra’s music director (2002–09). He also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in it at Carnegie Hall, in 2012. On that occasion, there was a Mozart symphony first (No. 40).

Recent stories of note: “Facing multiple threats, Peruvian archaeologists remain determined to research the Americas’ oldest known civilization” Maria Luisa del Río, The Art Newspaper For most of us, bands of violent robbers in the desert are thankfully the stuff of old Westerns. But they are an occupational hazard for Ruth Shady, an archaeologist who in 1994 discovered a five-thousand-year-old civilization on the coast of Peru, far preceding the Incas.

Fiction: Lawrence Venuti and Michael Wood on Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois, at McNally Jackson Books at the Seaport (January 16): In the fall of 2023, our fiction critic, Andrew Stuttaford, commended to readers a new translation of Dino Buzatti’s Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), now issued as The Stronghold—a shadowy, suggestive novel about life in a frontier garrison that may have been “[a]n oblique response to Kafka’s The Castle.” That volume’s translator, Lawrence Venuti, and...