Richard Wagner
Download Richard Wagner full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online free Richard Wagner ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
| Author | : Martin Geck |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 463 |
| Release | : 2013-09-18 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 0226924629 |
“[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 | : Thomas S. Grey |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 560 |
| Release | : 2009-07-27 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 1400831784 |
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) aimed to be more than just a composer. He set out to redefine opera as a "total work of art" combining the highest aspirations of drama, poetry, the symphony, the visual arts, even religion and philosophy. Equally celebrated and vilified in his own time, Wagner continues to provoke debate today regarding his political legacy as well as his music and aesthetic theories. Wagner and His World examines his works in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Seven original essays investigate such topics as music drama in light of rituals of naming in the composer's works and the politics of genre; the role of leitmotif in Wagner's reception; the urge for extinction in Tristan und Isolde as psychology and symbol; Wagner as his own stage director; his conflicted relationship with pianist-composer Franz Liszt; the anti-French satire Eine Kapitulation in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; and responses of Jewish writers and musicians to Wagner's anti-Semitism. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Karol Berger, Leon Botstein, Lydia Goehr, Kenneth Hamilton, Katherine Syer, and Christian Thorau. This book also includes translations of essays, reviews, and memoirs by champions and detractors of Wagner; glimpses into his domestic sphere in Tribschen and Bayreuth; and all of Wagner's program notes to his own works. Introductions and annotations are provided by the editor and David Breckbill, Mary A. Cicora, James Deaville, Annegret Fauser, Steven Huebner, David Trippett, and Nicholas Vazsonyi.
| Author | : Alex Ross |
| Publisher | : Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Total Pages | : 784 |
| Release | : 2020-09-15 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 1429944544 |
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist 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. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
| Author | : Jacob Katz |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 184 |
| Release | : 1986 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : |
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 | : Dieter Borchmeyer |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 430 |
| Release | : 2003-11-30 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 9780691114972 |
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 | : Martin Gregor-Dellin |
| Publisher | : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P |
| Total Pages | : 606 |
| Release | : 1983 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : |
| Author | : David J. Levin |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 220 |
| Release | : 2014-12-25 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 1400866693 |
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 | : Joachim Köhler |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 726 |
| Release | : 2004-01-01 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 9780300104226 |
This major new biography of Richard Wagner is iconoclastic, astringent and bold. It explores the philosophical roots of Wagner's work, which the composer himself deliberately obfuscated. It re-evaluates Wagner's relationships with his mother, step-father and - most revealingly - his wife, Cosima, standing received opinion on its head. And he meets head on, and confirms, the controversy over Wagner's anti-semitism. At the same time, and notwithstanding, Kohler profoundly acknowledges Wagner's genius.
| Author | : Richard Wagner |
| Publisher | : U of Nebraska Press |
| Total Pages | : 416 |
| Release | : 1994-01-01 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 9780803297647 |
"One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion." With these words Richard Wagner began "Religion and Art" (1880), one of his most passionate essays. That passion made Wagner himself a central icon in the growing cult of art. Wagner felt that he lived in an age of spiritual crisis. "It can but rouse our apprehension, to see the progress of the art-of-war departing from the springs of moral force, and turning more and more to the mechanical," he wrote. In response to the frightening progress of dynamite and steel, Wagner adopted the role of the Tone Poet Seer, who reveals the inexpressible in concert halls and cleanses souls in waves of symhonic revelation. "Religion and Art" is the pivot of the works collected here. Also included are his defining essays "Public and Popularity" and "The Public in Time and Space"; his papers relating to the creation of the Bayreuth School; his complaint against publishers, "On Poetry and Composition" (1879); his article on the first production of Parsifal (1882); and other works that speak his mind about strengthening the spirit through music. These works participated in the duel between Wagner and Nietzsche that ensued after the breakup of their friendship in 1878. Nietzsche publicly called Wagner an incurable romantic, emphasizing how sick he thought both Wagner and his art were. Here Wagner counterattacks with arch innuendo and sarcasm. This edition includes the complete volume 6 of the 1897 translation of Wagner's works commissioned by the London Wagner Society. William Ashton Ellis is one of the most important translators of nineteenth-century musicology. In addition to his monumental translation of Wagner's prose works, he translated Wagner's correspondence with Franz Lizst, Mathilde Wesendonck, and Wagner's own family. Ellis died in 1919.
| Author | : Ronald Taylor |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 312 |
| Release | : 1979 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : |
"Ronald Taylor has set out to provide in a single volume a substantial all-round life-and-work to place alongside the many specialist and partial studies of Wagner. He essays to cover all main aspects of Wagner within a coherent biographical framework, basing his account on primary sources such as Wagner's autobiographical writings and letters, the reminiscences of Liszt, Nietzsche and other friends and associates, and the complete diary of Cosima, first published in 1977. The restless existence that Wagner led from his schooldays to the end of his life, his revolutionary activity, his love affairs, his pursuit of luxury and his perpetual debts, his extraordinary self-centredness and manipulation of others, the famous men and women around him, the heaven-sent patronage of the lonely and eccentric arch-romantic King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the building of his personal temple, the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth--this is the stuff of absorbing biography. And there can be scarcely any other composer whose life was so bound up with the events of his time, and so compellingly illustrative of them, as Wagner's. The 1830 Revolution in France and the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, the heady radical and hedonistic notions of the Young German movement, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the urge towards German political unification--these played crucial parts in moulding his mind. Ronald Taylor not only discusses Wagner's compositions as works of art, but shows how each of them, from Die Feen to Parsifal, is grounded in its creator's intellectual and spiritual development. He considers, for example, the allegorical significance of The Ring in terms of Wagner's views on society and human relationships, the indelible mark left by the experience of being spurned by the bourgeois taste of 1830s Paris, and demonstrates how a work which contains such nationalistic elements can at the same time be one of the overwhelming achievements in European culture. The elaborate structure of ideas and theories that surrounds Wagner's music is further revealed by succinct accounts of his political, social, and musical thinking at all periods of his career as expressed in his key writings on culture and society, the role of the artist in the community, the musical scene in nineteenth-century Europe, and many other subjects. In a postscript the main lines of the controversies--musical, philosophical and psychological--that have raged over Wagner from his lifetime onwards are shown in a balanced selection of statements by prominent, and diverse, figures such as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Debussy, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, Bruno Walter, Adorno and Boulez." --Jacket.
