It’s starting to turn into the season to be jolly (or whatever variant you can manage) with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra doing Messiah – a work which is more solemn and sublime than jolly but you can hardly complain when it is so resounding and grand. Then there’s the Brandenburg Orchestra with its Noël Noël Christmas show at Sydney’s Recital Hall from 9 to 14 December which includes Tommie Andersson’s arrangement of Silent Night (originally Gruber’s Stille Nacht) together with The Little Drummer Boy and – surprise, surprise – the Hallelujah from Handel’s Messiah. It’s one of those fascinating rituals that echoes down the centuries that because the King stood up for it now everyone does.

You may prefer your resounding music more on the pagan and mythopoeic side in which case (well, in any case) you may well be heading off to Brisbane for the production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in which Opera Australia are joining forces with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Opera Queensland. The production is by the American/Chinese director Chen Shi Zeng and it sounds as if he has the quality of using state of the art animatronic wizardry so that we’ll actually see Brünnhilde and her fellow valkyries flying through the air in the way the music so powerfully suggests. We’ve recently seen a highly praised concert production of Das Rheingold from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Simone Young and that too can have its advantages because it leaves the imagination totally free to conjure up whatever picture it likes but it would be very refreshing to see a version of the most dynamised of all works of musico-dramatic art allowing for the use Coppola made of the Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now.

Wagner’s is a music of tumult and fury and tragedy and it’s not for nothing that T.S. Eliot in that wildest and most transfiguringly mad of great modernist poems The Waste Land should have quoted not only Rheingold but The Flying Dutchman. Everyone knows what Woody Allen meant when he said that Wagner’s music made him want to conquer Poland but the ultimate logic of the Ring Cycle is tragic and entropic.

The best introduction to the Ring Cycle remains Solti’s Decca set produced by that genius of stereo high jinks John Culshaw who actually blended the voices of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (as Gunther) and Wolfgang Windgassen (as Siegfried) in a way no opera house could ever rival. Solti’s version captures the intense theatrical and Shakespearean sparkle of the Ring even though there are old hands who will tell you that Furtwängler’s version with the great Kirsten Flagstad or perhaps the great 1956 Bayreuth Ring of Hans Knappertsbusch is supreme. But in fact the Ring is extraordinary in any version.

The version by the lean and vibrant Pierre Boulez directed by Patrice Chéreau which the BBC filmed in the 1980s has the great New Zealand bass Sir Donald McIntyre as Wotan and he was the first Anglo-Saxon to sing at Bayreuth. He also played Hans Sachs in Opera Australia’s 1988 production of that very human and rich Wagner opera The Mastersingers conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras though you can make even higher claims for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the version by Eugen Jochum with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Sachs and Placido Domingo as the vocal contestant Walter.

Wagner was obsessed by the idea of the work of art which could encompass the world. Wagner himself would have been very sympathetic to spectacular computer-generated effects like the ones which are to be used in the Brisbane Ring – he would have had jet planes on stage given half a chance! Sometimes we get dramatic or musical or poetic figures who want every kind of spectacular effect which is on offer. Shakespeare was like this and so was Wagner. They both believed in realism despite every other possibility that could be put into their music or drama.

It’s interesting to see that Bell Shakespeare – which recently had that magnificent actress Jane Montgomery Griffiths as Malvolia in Twelfth Night – is doing a comprehensive tour of much of the country (WA, Canberra, Victoria) with performances in places like Wagga Wagga and Shepparton of that lovely play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If memory serves well David Malouf has an especial fascination with The Dream because it seems to be the only plot Shakespeare made up himself.

It’s a very beautiful one of course. Some of us saw the staggering white gymnasium Dream of the great Peter Brook in the Seventies originally with Alan Howard as Oberon but there was a touring RSC production 20-odd years ago with Alex Jennings as Oberon and Lindsay Duncan as Titania which while more traditional was ravishing enough. And there was a production by Peter Evans, the current head of Bell Shakespeare, with Richard Piper as Bottom, Julie Forsyth as an aged creepy voiced Puck and a young man called Ray Chong Nee as Oberon who walked onstage and demonstrated when he said ‘Ill met by moonlight proud Titania’ complete command of the verse.

In the forthcoming tour Ahunim Abebe will be Hermia to Laurence Young’s Lysander and Isabel Burton will be Helena to Mike Howlett’s Demetrius. Ella Prince is Puck.

The Dream is of course an idiot comedy wherever it goes. Is it a C.S. Lewis story that when a bishop attended a girl’s school production of the play he said, ‘I’ve never seen such a beautiful female bottom’?

It’s gratifying to see that the award named after my dear friend the very distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley (who first became famous with her life of Christina Stead) should have borne fruit again with Matthew Lamb’s biography of Frank Moorhouse Strange Paths.

There is a range of opinions about Frank Moorhouse’s work and you can argue that the shorter fiction like Forty-Seventeen is superior to the long elaborate League of Nations novels though it’s not hard to find expert judges of fiction who adore them. What’s not in doubt is the very considerable grace and kindness Frank showed as a person. He also showed all manner of Australian writers what was possible in terms of thematic taboos – as in The Everlasting Secret Family – and in the way he could create a discontinuous narrative by making stories associate with each other.