Author: Klaus DögePublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 236
Book Description
"Schlagen Sie die Kraft der Reflexion nicht zu gering an"
Author: Klaus DögeRichard Wagner's Zurich
Author: Chris WaltonPublisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133311
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
An investigation of the considerable influence of Wagner's stay in Zurich from 1849 to 1858 -- a period often discounted by scholars -- on his career. When the people of Dresden rose up against their king in May 1849, Richard Wagner went from Royal Kapellmeister to republican revolutionary overnight. He gambled everything, but the rebellion failed, and he lost all. Now a wantedman in Germany, he fled to Zurich. Years later, he wrote that the city was "devoid of any public art form" and full of "simple people who knew nothing of my work as an artist." But he lied: Zurich boasted arguably the world's greatest concentration of radical intellectuals and a vibrant music scene. Wagner was accepted with open arms. This book investigates Wagner's affect on the musical life of the city and the city's impact on him. Mathilde Wesendonck emerges not as Wagner's passive muse but as a self-assured woman who exploited gender expectations to her own benefit. In 1858, Wagner had to flee Zurich after again gambling everything -- this time on Mathilde -- and again losing.But it was in Zurich that Wagner wrote his major theoretical works; composed Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and parts of Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde; first planned Parsifal; held the first festival of his music; and conceived of a theater to stage his own works. If Wagner had been free in 1849 to choose a city in which to seek heightened intellectual stimulation among the like-minded and the similarly gifted, he could have come to nomore perfect place. Chris Walton teaches music history at the Musikhochschule Basel in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the English-speaking world.
Wagner's Melodies
Author: David TrippettPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014301
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 463
Book Description
Wagner's Melodies places the composer's ideas about melody in the context of the scientific discourse of his age.
Richard Wagner
Author: Martin GeckPublisher: 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
Wagner Beyond Good and Evil
Author: John DeathridgePublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093461X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music. Deathridge writes authoritatively on what Wagner did, said, and wrote, drawing from abundant material already well known but also from less familiar sources, including hitherto seldom discussed letters and diaries and previously unpublished musical sketches. At the same time, Deathridge suggests that a true estimation of Wagner does not lie in an all too easy condemnation of his many provocative actions and ideas. Rather, it is to be found in the questions about the modern world and our place in it posed by the best of his stage works, among them Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Controversy about Wagner is unlikely to go away, but rather than taking the line of least resistance by regarding him blandly as a "classic" in the Western art tradition, Deathridge suggests that we need to confront the debates that have raged about him and reach beyond them, toward a fresh and engaging assessment of what he ultimately achieved.
Beyond Reason
Author: Karol BergerPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520409256
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 548
Book Description
Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.
Richard Wagner's Women
Author: Eva RiegerPublisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843836858
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
A well-researched and exhaustive analysis of the role of women in Wagner's operas.
Wagner's Visions
Author: Katherine Rae SyerPublisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
Examines the impact of contemporary ideas about the psyche and neglected yet crucial artistic influences on the psychological dimension of Wagner's operas, especially Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the Ring. Wagner's Visions studies crucial influences on Wagner's dramatic style during the years before and just after the failed Dresden revolutionary uprising of 1849. Offering a detailed examination of Die Feen, Wagner's least-known complete opera, together with analysis of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the four Ring dramas, Katherine Syer explores the inner experiences of Wagner's protagonists. Sources ofparticular political significance include the fables of the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, the Iphigenia operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck, and the legacy of the martyr Theodor Körner, whose poetry became the lingua franca of the revolutionary movement to liberate and unify Germany. Syer's book offers fresh insights into the historical context that gave rise to Wagner's dramatic art, revealing how his distinct and powerful imagery is intimately bound up with the crises and instabilities of his era. Katherine R. Syer is associate professor of theatre and musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Differentiation of Modernism
Author: Larson PowellPublisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571135723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The Differentiation of Modernism analyzes the phenomenon of intermediality in German radio plays, film music, and electronic music of the late modernist period (1945-1980). After 1945, the purist "medium specificity" of high modernism increasingly yielded to the mixed forms of intermediality. Theodor Adorno dubbed this development a "Verfransung," or "fraying of boundaries," between the arts. TheDifferentiation of Modernism analyzes this phenomenon in German electronic media arts of the late modernist period (1945-80): in radio plays, film music, and electronic music. The first part of the book begins with a chapter on Adorno's theory of radio as an instrument of democratization, going on to analyze the relationship of the Hörspiel or radio play to electronic music. In the second part, on film music, a chapter on Adorno and Eisler's Composing for the Film sets the parameters for chapters on the film Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1957) and on the music films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The third part examines the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and its relationship to radio, abstract painting, recording technology, and theatrical happenings. The book's central notion of the "differentiation of culture" suggests that late modernism, unlike high modernism, accepted the contingency of modern mass-media driven society and sought to find new forms for it. Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature (Camden House, 2008).
Richard Wagner
Author: Nicholas VazsonyiPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139486462
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
All modern artists have had to market themselves in some way. Richard Wagner may just have done it better than anyone else. In a self-promotional effort that began around 1840 in Paris, and lasted for the remainder of his career, Wagner claimed convincingly that he was the most German composer ever and the true successor of Beethoven. More significantly, he was an opera composer who declared that he was not composing operas. Instead, during the 1850s, he mapped out a new direction, conceiving of works that would break with tradition and be literally 'brand new'. This is the first study to examine the innovative ways in which Wagner made himself a celebrity, promoting himself using every means available: autobiography, journal articles, short stories, newspaper announcements, letters, even his operas themselves. Vazsonyi reveals how Wagner created a niche for his works in the crowded opera market that continues to be unique.