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Author: Martin Geck Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226924629 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 463
Book Description
“[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner’s compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. A landmark study of one of music’s most important figures “People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years . . . will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.” —Tablet “Geck describes a Wagner who is grounded, focused and even cautious, a savvy realist and ironist rather than a flamboyant, flailing ideologue . . . Suffused with his readings of contemporary productions of the operas, Geck’s musical analyses are succinct and superb” —New York Times “As an editor of Wagner’s Complete Works, Geck brings a deep familiarity with the composer to his task.” —Weekly Standard “A thoroughly approachable yet consistently provocative study.” —Thomas S. Grey, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner
Author: Martin Geck Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226924629 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 463
Book Description
“[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner’s compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. A landmark study of one of music’s most important figures “People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years . . . will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.” —Tablet “Geck describes a Wagner who is grounded, focused and even cautious, a savvy realist and ironist rather than a flamboyant, flailing ideologue . . . Suffused with his readings of contemporary productions of the operas, Geck’s musical analyses are succinct and superb” —New York Times “As an editor of Wagner’s Complete Works, Geck brings a deep familiarity with the composer to his task.” —Weekly Standard “A thoroughly approachable yet consistently provocative study.” —Thomas S. Grey, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner
Author: Jacob Katz Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism considered in the context of his time, place, and aspirations rather than in relation to his later appropriation by the Nazis.
Author: Alex Ross Publisher: HarperCollins UK ISBN: 000751851X Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 784
Book Description
’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
Author: Michael Saffle Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135839522 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
Richard Wagner: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer.
Author: David J. Levin Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400866693 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
This highly original book draws on narrative and film theory, psychoanalysis, and musicology to explore the relationship between aesthetics and anti-Semitism in two controversial landmarks in German culture. David Levin argues that Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Fritz Lang's 1920s film Die Nibelungen creatively exploit contrasts between good and bad aesthetics to address the question of what is German and what is not. He shows that each work associates a villainous character, portrayed as non-Germanic and Jewish, with the sometimes dramatically awkward act of narration. For both Wagner and Lang, narration--or, in cinematic terms, visual presentation--possesses a typically Jewish potential for manipulation and control. Consistent with this view, Levin shows, the Germanic hero Siegfried is killed in each work by virtue of his unwitting adoption of a narrative role. Levin begins with an explanation of the book's theoretical foundations and then applies these theories to close readings of, in turn, Wagner's cycle and Lang's film. He concludes by tracing how Germans have dealt with the Nibelungen myths in the wake of the Second World War, paying special attention to Michael Verhoeven's 1989 film The Nasty Girl. His fresh and interdisciplinary approach sheds new light not only on Wagner's Ring and Lang's Die Nibelungen, but also on the ways in which aesthetics can be put to the service of aggression and hatred. The book is an important contribution to scholarship in film and music and also to the broader study of German culture and national identity.
Author: Dieter Borchmeyer Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691114972 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
Richard Wagner continues to be the most controversial artist in history, a perpetually troubling figure in our cultural consciousness. The unceasing debate over his works and their impact--for and against--is one reason why there has been no genuinely comprehensive modern account of his musical dramas until now. Dieter Borchmeyer's book is the first to present an overall picture of these musical dramas from the standpoint of literary and theatrical history. It extends from the composer's early works--still largely ignored--to the Ring Cycle and Parsifal, and includes Wagner's unfinished works and operas he never set to music. Through lively prose, we come to see Wagner as a librettist--and as a man of letters--rather than primarily as musical composer. Borchmeyer uncovers a vast field of cultural and historical cross-references in Wagner's works. In the first part of the book, he sets out in search of the various archetypal scenes, opening up the composer's dramatic workshop to the reader. He covers all of Wagner's operas, from early juvenilia to the canonical later works. The second part examines Wagner in relation to political figures including King Ludwig II and Bismarck, and, importantly, in light of critical reactions by literary giants--Thomas Mann, whom Borchmeyer calls "a guiding light in this exploration of the fields that Wagner tilled," and Nietzsche, whose appeal to "philology" is a key source of inspiration in attempts to grapple with Wagner's works. For more than twenty years, Borchmeyer has placed his scholarship at the service of the famed Bayreuth Festival. With this volume, he gives us a summation of decades of engagement with the phenomenon of Wagner and, at the same time, the result of an abiding critical passion for his works.
Author: Urs App Publisher: UniversityMedia ISBN: 3906000001 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 104
Book Description
It is little known that Richard Wagner was among the very first Westerners to appreciate Buddhism and that he was the first major European artist to be inspired by this religion. In 1856, in the prime of his creativity, the 33-year-old artist read his first book about Buddhism. Madly in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, a beautiful but happily married woman, he conceived two deeply connected opera projects: Tristan und Isolde which he went on to compose and stage, and Die Sieger (The Victors), an opera scenario based on an Indian Buddha legend translated from Sanskrit. These two projects mirrored Wagner's burning desire for the consummation of his love and the necessity of renunciation. This Buddhist opera project occupied Wagner's mind for decades until his death in 1883. Indeed, the composer's last words were about the Buddha figure of his scenario and his relationship with women. Urs App, the author of The Birth of Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press) and the world's foremost authority on the early Western reception of Buddhism, tells the story of Richard Wagner's creative encounter with Buddhism and explains the composer's last words.
Author: Marc A. Weiner Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803297920 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
This book addresses one of the most hotly contested debates in contemporary cultural life: the question of how anti-Semitism figures in the operas of Richard Wagner. Until now, scholars have generally acknowledged Wagner's anti-Semitism but have argued that it is irrelevant to the operas themselves. Marc A. Weiner challenges that traditional view by asserting that anti-Semitism is a crucial, pervasive feature in Wagner's operas. Weiner argues that the operas exemplify and contribute to a vast collection of images that are patently anti-Semitic - and that were readily recognized as such by nineteenth-century German audiences. These images were associated particularly with the body. Through a careful examination of Wagner's music, libretti, and stage directions, Weiner reconstructs iconographies of corporeal images - iconographies of the eye, voice, smell, gait, and sexuality - that were essential to the operas and were "associated with anti-Semitism and the longing for an imagined German community".
Author: Laurence Dreyfus Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674018818 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.
Author: Martin Geck
Author: Martin Geck
Author: Jacob Katz
Author: Alex Ross
Author: Michael Saffle
Author: David J. Levin
Author: Martin Gregor-Dellin
Author: Dieter Borchmeyer
Author: Urs App
Author: Marc A. Weiner
Author: Laurence Dreyfus