The Trouble with Wagner

The Trouble with Wagner
Author: Michael P. Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022659419X

In this unique and hybrid book, cultural and music historian Michael P. Steinberg combines a close analysis of Wagnerian music drama with a personal account of his work as a dramaturg on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung for the Teatro alla Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera. Steinberg shows how Wagner uses the power of a modern mythology to heighten music’s claims to knowledge, thereby fusing not only art and politics, but truth and lies as well. Rather than attempting to separate value and violence, or “the good from the bad,” as much Wagner scholarship as well as popular writing have tended to do, Steinberg proposes that we confront this paradox and look to the capacity of the stage to explore its depths and implications. Drawing on decades of engagement with Wagner and of experience teaching opera across disciplines, The Trouble with Wagner is packed with novel insights for experts and interested readers alike.

The Trouble with Wagner

The Trouble with Wagner
Author: Michael P. Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 022659422X

In this unique and hybrid book, cultural and music historian Michael P. Steinberg combines a close analysis of Wagnerian music drama with a personal account of his work as a dramaturg on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung for the Teatro alla Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera. Steinberg shows how Wagner uses the power of a modern mythology to heighten music’s claims to knowledge, thereby fusing not only art and politics, but truth and lies as well. Rather than attempting to separate value and violence, or “the good from the bad,” as much Wagner scholarship as well as popular writing have tended to do, Steinberg proposes that we confront this paradox and look to the capacity of the stage to explore its depths and implications. Drawing on decades of engagement with Wagner and of experience teaching opera across disciplines, The Trouble with Wagner is packed with novel insights for experts and interested readers alike.

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 784
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 000751851X

’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.

The Wagner Clan

The Wagner Clan
Author: Jonathan Carr
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2009-01-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0802143997

Examines the legacy of the German composer Richard Wagner and his descendants in terms of the rise, fall, and resurrection of Germany in modern Europe.

The Darker Side of Genius

The Darker Side of Genius
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.

Inside the Ring

Inside the Ring
Author: John Louis DiGaetani
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2006-03-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0786423307

Once tainted by association with Hitler and Nazism, Richard Wagner's work has experienced an international cultural renaissance in the last 25 years. His magnum opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which took him over 20 years to finish, is a complex tale with themes of greed, corruption and loss, spun out in more than 16 hours of powerfully moving opera. This book, with provocative essays for both the uninitiated and the seasoned fan, examines Wagner's Ring cycle from a wide array of modern perspectives. Divided into six parts, this anthology first offers a foundation for the Ring, with a chronology and an introduction, along with a look at Wagner as an enterprising marketer. Part Two explores different interpretations of the Ring, with reference to politics, romanticism and international inspirations. Part Three studies the complex relationship between Wagner's Ring and Germany, with a summary of the opera's influence on German culture and a discussion of its Munich premiere. Part Four offers a production history, including studies of the Ring's effects in America and its influence on world literature. Part Five provides a technical examination of language in the Ring, as well as an interview with the famous Wagnerian soprano Jane Eaglen. The book concludes with an essay on the trouble with Wagnerian opera and an overview of the recorded Ring on disc, video and print.

Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination

Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
Author: Marc A. Weiner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803297920

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".

Wagner and the Art of the Theatre

Wagner and the Art of the Theatre
Author: Patrick Carnegy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300106954

Chapitre 6, p. 175-207, consacré à Adolphe Appia.

The Life of Richard Wagner

The Life of Richard Wagner
Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 623
Release: 2014-03-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108007716

Newman's Life of Wagner, published between 1933 and 1947, the culmination of forty years' research, is a classic biography.

Wagner

Wagner
Author: Paul Lawrence Rose
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1992-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300067453

It has long been acknowledged that Richard Wagner was a virulent antisemite, yet the composer has also been characterized as an idealistic revolutionary, and historians have puzzled over the paradox of these conflicting elements in his character. In this fascinating book, Paul Lawrence Rose argues that Wagner did not suddenly change from a progressive revolutionary into a reactionary racist; for him, as for many other Germans, the idea of revolution always contained a racial and antisemtic core. Rose approaches Wagner on varying levels so as to see him as he really was: he places Wagner within the context of mid-nineteenth-century German revolutionary culture; he studies the composer's whole range of theoretical and artistic works, tracing his career and the evolution of his thought; and he considers Wagner's personality and his personal relationships (especially with those Jews who considered themselves his friends). Rose demonstrates that Wagner's conversion to antisemitism dates not from 1850--the year in which his infamous essay Judaism in Music was published--but from his conflict with the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer three years earlier over the Berlin production of Rienze. This affects our understanding of the genesis of the Ring operas. In addition, Rose offers fresh and stimulating interpretations of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal, based on an analysis of their revolutionary and antisemitic elements.