Download or read book Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Saint Beethoven!. . . . He was clad in somewhat untidy houseclothes, with a red woolen scarf wrapped round his waist; long, bushy grey hair hung in disorder from his head, and his gloomy, forbidding expression by no means tended to reassure. . . ." When Wagner published the first collection of his writings he was pleased to admit how well he wrote, even when young. Historians and musicians ever since have agreed that some of his most important and revelatory works were written when he was first establishing his reputation in Paris and Dresden. Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays provides translations of the first two volumes of his Gesammelte Schriften (1871-1873). These works reveal how committed he was to emphasizing Germanic qualities in his music and define his opposition to the music of France and Italy. In addition to his influential essay on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, this volume includes two early essays on Germanic myth—"The Wibelungen" and "The Nibelungen-Myth"—his homages to Carl Maria von Weber, and the complete text of his autobiographical A German Musician in Paris, with its famous "Pilgrimage to Beethoven." The volume concludes with his "Plan of Organisation of a German National Theatre" (1849), founded upon Beethoven's moral music. Listeners "inspired by Beethoven's music have been more active and energetic citizens-of-State than those bewitched by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti." Throughout these essays, as throughout his life, Wagner knew how to provoke. This edition includes the complete volume 7 of the 1898 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.
Download or read book Religion and Art written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Music and Modern Art written by James Leggio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music and Modern Art adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between these two fields of creative endeavor.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music written by Christopher R. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 1289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--
Download or read book Jewry in Music written by David Conway and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures – not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.
Download or read book The Writing of Spirit written by Sarah M. Pourciau and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the early-twentieth-century turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. But the relationship between time and system remains unexplained by the standard account of this shift. Through a new history of systematic thinking across the humanities and sciences, The Writing of Spirit argues that nineteenth-century historicism wasn’t simply replaced by a more modern synchronic perspective. The structuralist revolution consisted rather in a turn toward time’s absolutely minimal conditions, and thus also toward a new theory of diachrony. Pourciau arrives at this surprising and powerful conclusion through an analysis of language-scientific theories over the course of two centuries, associated with thinkers from Jacob Grimm and Richard Wagner to the Russian Futurists, in domains as disparate as historical linguistics, phonology, acoustics, opera theory, philosophy, poetics, and psychology. The result is a novel contribution to a pressing contemporary question—namely, what role history should play in the interpretation of the present.
Download or read book A Pagan Spoiled written by Anthony Winterbourne and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By giving due weight to these themes in particular, the complexity of Wagner's final work is seen to resolve into a feminization of the nature of religious redemption."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Ring of Truth written by Roger Scruton and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing in opera is grander than The Ring, no work more suited to the deep reading the writer gives here.” —Opera News Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times, and has fascinated both critics and devotees for over a century and a half. No recent study has examined the meaning of Wagner’s masterpiece with the attention to detail and intellectual power that Roger Scruton brings to it in this inspiring account. The Ring of Truth is an exploration of the drama, music, symbolism, and philosophy of The Ring from a writer whose knowledge and understanding of the Western musical tradition are the equal of his capacities as a philosopher. Scruton shows how, through musical connections and brilliant dramatic strokes, Wagner is able to express truths about the human condition which few other creative artists have been able to convey so convincingly. For Wagner, writes Scruton, the task of art is to “show us freedom in its immediate, contingent, human form, reminding us of what it means to us. Even if we live in a world from which gods and heroes have disappeared we can, by imagining them, dramatize the deep truths of our condition and renew our faith in what we are.” Love, death, sacrifice and the liberation that we win through sacrifice—these are the great themes of The Ring, as they are of this book. Scruton’s passionate and moving interpretation allows us to understand more fully than ever how Wagner conveys his ideas about who we are, and why TheRing continues to be such a hypnotically absorbing work. “Scruton’s presentation is grounded throughout in a deep understanding of the culture of Wagner’s era . . . the writing is clear and persuasive.” —Library Journal (starred review) “A fascinating and valuable study.” —Sunday Times
Download or read book Wagner s Parsifal written by Richard Wagner and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parsifal was Richard Wagner's last opera, and many consider it his most beautiful and moving work. Peter Bassett, author of the highly successful A RING FOR THE MILLENNIUM, has made a special study of Parsifal, looking particularly at the relationship between Wagner's sources and his text and identifying important thematic connections with other works, notably DER RING DES NIBELUNG. This guide - which includes a translation of the libretto - will be invaluable to those new to Parsifal, but will also provide fresh insights for readers who are already familiar with Wagner's final work. This new edition is illustrated with historical photographs and a new format.
Download or read book The Musical Crowd in English Fiction 1840 1910 written by P. Weliver and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works, drawing upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive.
Download or read book Wagner s Lexical Tonality written by Jonathan Christian Petty and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four scores of the Ring dramas are analyzed bar-by-bar to derive a complete linear harmonic analysis-based readout of each of its keys and claimed lexical references. The chapters on Parsif al discuss its mediaeval sources as suggested by Wagner's prose writings, letters, and religious discourse to argue for the Gnostic and alchemist basis of its libretto imagery, lexical tonality, and anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Theorizing Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
Download or read book Speaking to Our Condition written by Anthony Winterbourne and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As well as offering new insights into the way in which Wagner's intellectual debts are reflected in the ethical superstructure of the Ring, the author suggests a provocative connection between the intervention of Siegfried into the action, and a neglected corner of late nineteenth-century post-Kantian romantic-messianic thought."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism written by Benedict Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.
Download or read book Echoes of Valhalla written by Jón Karl Helgason and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf, Wagner’s Valkyrie Brünnhilde, Marvel’s superhero the Mighty Thor, the warrior heading for Valhalla in Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” and Donald Crisp’s portrayal of Leif Eriksson in the classic film The Viking—these are just a few examples of how Icelandic medieval literature has shaped human imagination during the past 150 years. Echoes of Valhalla is a unique look at modern adaptations of the Icelandic eddas (poems of Norse mythology) and sagas (ancient prose accounts of Viking history, voyages, and battles) across an astonishing breadth of art forms. Jón Karl Helgason looks at comic books, plays, travel books, music, and films in order to explore the reincarnations of a range of legendary characters, from the Nordic gods Thor and Odin to the saga characters Hallgerd Long-legs, Gunnar of Hlidarendi, and Leif the Lucky. Roaming the globe, Helgason unearths echoes of Nordic lore in Scandinavia, Britain, America, Germany, Italy, and Japan. He examines the comic work of Jack Kirby and cartoon work of Peter Madsen; reads the plays of Henrik Ibsen and Gordon Bottomley; engages thought travelogues by Frederick Metcalfe and Poul Vad; listens to the music of Richard Wagner, Edward Elgar, and the metal band Manowar; and watches films by directors such as Roy William Neill and Richard Fleischer, outlining the presence of the eddas and sagas in these nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Altogether, Echoes of Valhalla tells the remarkable story of how disparate, age-old poetry and prose originally recorded in remote areas of medieval Iceland have come to be a part of our shared cultural experience today—how Nordic gods and saga heroes have survived and how their colorful cast of characters and adventures they went on are as vibrant as ever.
Download or read book Judaism in Music and Other Essays written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.
Download or read book Art Play Labour the Music Profession in Germany 1850 1960 written by Martin Rempe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era.
