Meissen’s Porcelain Mecca

My week of Wagner’s Ring cycle has come and gone. In Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the final opera, Valhalla and the old gods are incinerated in the mother of all pyres, which is my idiosyncratic segue to today’s topic: Meissen porcelain. The demise of the gods signals the dawn of Earth, humanity, and creative beauty. Plus, when it comes to the best porcelain, furnaces figure.

I’m not obsessed with porcelain, but I think it’s lovely, and the zenith of porcelain as art has been made in Meissen, a town near Dresden, where Wagner once lived and where we experienced his four Ring operas. Porcelain spends plenty of time in a furnace but, unlike Brünnhilde, Wotan, Fricka, Erda, and the Valkyries, it emerges lush or dainty, depending on the design, but always luminescent. Meissen porcelain is among the earthly delights.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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My week of Wagner’s Ring cycle has come and gone. In Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the final opera, Valhalla and the old gods are incinerated in the mother of all pyres, which is my idiosyncratic segue to today’s topic: Meissen porcelain. The demise of the gods signals the dawn of Earth, humanity, and creative beauty. Plus, when it comes to the best porcelain, furnaces figure.

I’m not obsessed with porcelain, but I think it’s lovely, and the zenith of porcelain as art has been made in Meissen, a town near Dresden, where Wagner once lived and where we experienced his four Ring operas. Porcelain spends plenty of time in a furnace but, unlike Brünnhilde, Wotan, Fricka, Erda, and the Valkyries, it emerges lush or dainty, depending on the design, but always luminescent. Meissen porcelain is among the earthly delights.