Wagner without the music: Mark Twain might have approved. But it’s actually a brilliant idea, as evidenced in the massive photo essay by Nancy Ellison commemorating the Metropolitan Opera’s recently retired Ring cycle. In Wagner’s Eternal Ring: The Complete Production at the Metropolitan Opera, we get a visual sense of the sweep of Wagner’s great epic. For many of us New Yorkers, this James Levine/Otto Schenk production has become as familiar as daybreak, but it looks beautifully new in this volume; paging through it, one secretly hears the familiar notes while appreciating in compressed form one of the great narratives of the Western tradition.