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“[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
Chronicles the events and people, successes and failures, of Wagner's life. Draws on primary sources from the Wagner family archives to show a man of great personal charm--and of overbearing egoism, selfishness and cruelty. His support for the revolutions of 1848 forced him into exile, but he easily won the fervent support of kings and emperors.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The power of Wagner's music to enchant, to cast a spell, to transport the listener to states of hedonistic delight, has often been remarked - sometimes appreciatively and sometimes not. Indeed, no other composer arouses such fiercely divergent responses as Richard Wagner. For Baudelaire,Wagner's music induced a feeling of being engulfed, intoxicated. For Nietzsche, Wagner was like a disease: "Everything he touches falls sick."In The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, Barry Millington, a leading authority on Wagner, presents an engaging, accessibly written overview of the life and works one of the world's most influential and controversial composers. This richly illustrated book considers a wide range of themes, including Wagner'soriginal sources of inspiration; his compositional process; his relationship with his wife, Cosima, and with his mistress, Mathilde Wesendonck; his perplexing ideology; the anti-Semitism that is undeniably present in the operas; their proto-cinematic nature; and the turbulent legacy both of theBayreuth Festival and of Wagnerism itself.Millington illuminates these issues in a series of chapters, each exploring a theme through text, illustrations, and documents in elegantly designed spreads, thus avoiding the conventional formats of illustrated biography and documentary study. The results are often surprising. Drawing on the verylatest biographical and musicological scholarship - much of it undertaken by the author himself - Millington reassesses received notions about both Wagner's life and his music, demolishing tired cliches and ill-informed opinion in favor of proper critical understanding.Marking the bicentenary of the birth of Richard Wagner, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth offers readers a fascinating reappraisal of this most provocative of composers and the incomparable music he made.
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.
’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.