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Book Penetrating Wagner s Ring

Download or read book Penetrating Wagner s Ring written by John Louis DiGaetani and published by . This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Inside the Ring

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Louis DiGaetani
  • Publisher : McFarland
  • Release : 2015-03-14
  • ISBN : 078648246X
  • Pages : 269 pages

Download or read book Inside the Ring written by John Louis DiGaetani and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Ring of Truth

    Book Details:
  • Author : Roger Scruton
  • Publisher : Penguin UK
  • Release : 2016-06-09
  • ISBN : 0241188563
  • Pages : 466 pages

Download or read book The Ring of Truth written by Roger Scruton and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-06-09 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The ideal interpreter of the Ring ... a fascinating and valuable study ... absorbing and convincing' Sunday Times The Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times. Roger Scruton's brilliant and passionate exploration of the drama, music, symbolism and philosophy of Wagner's masterpiece - with its themes of love, death, sacrifice and freedom - shows how, ultimately, it expresses the truth about the human condition. 'Highly original and penetrating ... tremendous' Tim Blanning, Literary Review 'A rich, historical account ... After reading this book, only the most unadventurous reader would turn down the chance to see Wagner's masterpiece' Economist 'A brilliant gallop through the master's religious, musical and philosophical contexts' Sue Prideaux, Spectator 'Scruton is one of the finest philosopher-musicians since Schopenhauer' Jonathan Gaisman, Standpoint

Book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

Download or read book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book I Saw the World End

Download or read book I Saw the World End written by Deryck Cooke and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wagner's Ring has baffled and confused critics because of the highly complex meaning of its text and music. The diverse range of commentaries written on the subject since the first performance over one hundred years ago reveals just how little critics have understood The Ring. Deryck Cooke displays his masterly common sense in this study of how and why The Ring took the shape it did. This volume represents only a portion of the enormous book he had planned--his untimely death prevented him from writing a full analysis of the music. Even as it stands, I Saw The World End will give fresh understanding and appreciation to every lover of Wagner's music. -- PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION.

Book Benjamin Britten  His Life and Operas

Download or read book Benjamin Britten His Life and Operas written by Eric Walter White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition has been thoroughly revised and edited by John Evans (research scholar to the Britten Estate) who has updated the chronological list of published works and included in the bibliography the many books that have been written about the composer since his death in 1976. Although, as the title suggests, this book concentrates on Britten's operatic output, Mr White's account offers insights into the whole range of this prodigious composer's music. The text is lavishly illustrated with plates that reveal both the diversity of his operatic development and comprise a distinctive pictorial bibliography.

Book Beyond Reason

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karol Berger
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2016-11-15
  • ISBN : 0520966139
  • Pages : 549 pages

Download or read book Beyond Reason written by Karol Berger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Aspects of Wagner

Download or read book Aspects of Wagner written by Bryan Magee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1988 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many music lovers find Wagner's operas inexpressibly beautiful and richly satisfying, while others find them revolting, dangerous, self-indulgent, and immoral. The man who W.H. Auden once called "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived" has inspired both greater adulation and greater loathing than any other composer. Bryan Magee presents a penetrating analysis of Wagner's work, concentrating on how his sensational and deeply erotic music uniquely expresses the repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche. He examines not only Wagner's music and detailed stage directions but also the prose works in which he formulated his ideas, as well as shedding new light on his anti-semitism and the way in which the Nazis twisted his theories to suit their own purposes. Outlining the astonishing range and depth of Wagner's influence on our culture, Magee reveals how profoundly he continues to shock and inspire musicians, poets, novelists, painters, philosophers, and politicians today.

Book Death Devoted Heart

    Book Details:
  • Author : Roger Scruton
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2012-11-01
  • ISBN : 0199986983
  • Pages : 248 pages

Download or read book Death Devoted Heart written by Roger Scruton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. Death-Devoted Heart explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries. He also offers keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. His argument touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. Roger Scruton has written an original and provocative account of Wagner's music drama, which blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the twenty-first century.

Book Richard Wagner  Rudolf Steiner   Allegories of the Ring

Download or read book Richard Wagner Rudolf Steiner Allegories of the Ring written by George Hastings and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many great artists throughout the millennia, Richard Wagner wrote his operas as allegories which can be represented in ways that range from the mundane to the esoteric. When Wagner's cryptic esoteric messages are deciphered they tell a story about the evolution of human freedom and consciousness that would be told two generations later in a different format, by the physicist/philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The allegories of The Ring bear a message meant for today.

Book Richard Wagner and the Anti Semitic Imagination

Download or read book Richard Wagner and the Anti Semitic Imagination written by Marc A. Weiner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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".

Book Athena Sings

    Book Details:
  • Author : M. Owen Lee
  • Publisher : University of Toronto Press
  • Release : 2003-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780802085801
  • Pages : 124 pages

Download or read book Athena Sings written by M. Owen Lee and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wagner's knowledge of and passion for Greek drama was so profound that for Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner was Aeschylus come alive again. Surprisingly little has been written about the pervasive influence of classical Greece on the quintessentially German master. In this elegant and masterfully argued book, renowned opera critic Father Owen Lee describes for the contemporary reader what it might have been like to witness a dramatic performance of Aeschylus in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens in the fifth century B.C. – something that Wagner himself undertook to do on several occasions, imagining a performance of The Oresteia in his mind, reading it aloud to his friends, providing his own commentary, and relating the Greek classic drama to his own romantic view. Father Lee also uses Wagner's writings on Greece and entries from his wife's diaries to cast new light on Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and especially the mighty Ring cycle, where Wagner made extensive use of Greek elements to give structural unity and dramatic credibility to his Nordic and Germanic myths. No opera fan, argues Father Lee, can really understand Wagner saving Brünhilde without knowing the Athena who, in Greek drama, first brought justice to Athens. Written with a clarity and depth of knowledge that have characterized all Father Lee's books on the classics of Greece and Rome and made his six other volumes of opera bestsellers, Athena Sings traces the profound influence – an influence few music lovers are aware of – that Greek theatre and culture had on the most German of composers and his revolutionary musical dramas.

Book Bloodstone

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karl Edward Wagner
  • Publisher : Gateway
  • Release : 2014-05-29
  • ISBN : 057509608X
  • Pages : 224 pages

Download or read book Bloodstone written by Karl Edward Wagner and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kane. The Mystic Swordsman becomes the living link with the awesome power of a vanished superrace. In the dark swamp where toadmen croak and cower, slumbers a secret relic of the days when creatures from the stars ruled the Earth. In the booty captured in a savage raid, Kane discovers a ring, a bloodstone, which is key to the power that lies buried, inactive but not dead, within the forest. Now Kane, whose bloody sword has slashed and killed for the glory of other rulers, can scheme to rule the Earth - himself!

Book The Perfect Wagnerite A Commentary On The Niblung s Ring

Download or read book The Perfect Wagnerite A Commentary On The Niblung s Ring written by Bernard Shaw and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard Shaw's "The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Ring of the Niblung" is a major work. This book offers an in-depth examination of Richard Wagner's famous opera cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen." Shaw's commentary delves into the complex strata of Wagner's magnum opus, providing a multidimensional assessment that goes beyond typical music analysis. He introduces readers to Wagnerian mythology, complex character relationships, and the overarching plot, frequently through the lens of socialism and revolutionary thought. Shaw's opinion that the Ring Cycle might be viewed as a parable for societal reform is one of his core arguments. He sees the demise of the gods and the return of the ring to the Rhine as a metaphor for the inevitable collapse of repressive society systems and the possibility of a more egalitarian future. Shaw's distinct wit and intellectual depth shine through throughout the book as he connects with Wagner's work. His commentary extends beyond musical criticism to include political and philosophical implications. Shaw's approach encourages readers to evaluate Wagner's music dramas in the light of a broader cultural and historical backdrop. In conclusion, George Bernard Shaw's "The Perfect Wagnerite" is a thought-provoking and enduring investigation of Wagner's vast operatic masterpiece, providing readers with a novel perspective that mixes musical analysis with socio-political criticism.

Book Opera and Its Symbols

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert Donington
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 1990-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780300056617
  • Pages : 260 pages

Download or read book Opera and Its Symbols written by Robert Donington and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the use of symbolism in opera, interprets scenes from Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Stravinsky, and Britten, and stresses the importance of staging an opera in accord with the composer's intended use of symbols

Book Wagnerism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alex Ross
  • Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Release : 2020-09-15
  • ISBN : 1429944544
  • Pages : 784 pages

Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.