Course Description

Instructor: Judith Costello

Richard Wagner was, and remains, one of the most controversial composers in history — both reviled and revered. This is particularly true of his massive four-opera masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen, some 150 years after its first performance as a cycle.

Bio: Judith Costello teaches courses on music about non-musical subjects -- the weather, works of literature, landscapes, animals, human enterprises -- and has been an OLLI@Emory instructor for the past two years. She is a native of Oak Park, Illinois, and has lived in New York, Florida, and Michigan. She was producer and on-air host of classical music programs for NPR stations WUSF (Tampa, Florida) and WFBE (Flint, Michigan), and later worked for 25 years as Political and Academic Officer at the Canadian Consulate General in Atlanta before retiring in 2013.