Being Wagner

The perfect introduction to the Master.

Wagner was more than a composer--he was a cultural phenomenon. The author seeks to explain this phenomenon. One claim is that Wagner's music dramas served to provide encouragement and inspiration to Victorians struggling with the problems of a changing and challenging era. Intellectual developments (including the theories of Charles Darwin and the impact of historical scholarship on Biblical studies) had struck a severe blow against religious orthodoxy. Thus, the English strove to retain their inherited or instinctive beliefs and at the same time to accept the conclusions of natural and social science. Frustrated by the academic arguments, many persons turned to less intellectual substitutes, including Wagnerism. Almost all of Wagner's plots involve some form of redemption and hunger for the infinite. The author also claims that Wagnerism drew on the Victorian need for social justice, and points out that just as many Wagnerians sought emancipation from confining materialist philosophies or simply delighted in sexual liberation.

Richard Wagner as poet? Yes! This hitherto unpublished study invites the reader to see Wagner's texts not just as opera librettos but as dramatic poems in their own right. An authority on German literature, Robertson offers an engaging account of the poems in the light of nineteenth-century drama and the changing currents of social and religious thought. John George Robertson was foundation professor of German Language and Literature in London University, 1903-33. He was the husband of Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. Their lifelong love of Wagner's operas, which began when they met in Leipzig as students in the 1880s, is evident in this book.

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.

Few major artists have aroused the ire and adulation of successive generations as persistently as Richard Wagner. He was the centre of controversy during his lifetime and yet, when he died, he was the most idolized man in Germany. The situation has not changed much since then. Simon Williams explores the reasons for this adulation and antipathy by examining an aspect that may be a fundamental cause for this radical division in the reception of Wagner's work, the phenomenon of heroism. Williams analyses this heroism as a function of Wagner's theatre and music, beginning with a definition and examination of the concept of the heroic. The book also discusses all thirteen stage works by Wagner and the phenomenon of heroism and Wagner's adaptation of the figure of the Romantic hero. Williams offers a theatrical, musical, and cultural re-evaluation of one of the most enduring figures in the arts.

The operas of the German composer Richard Wagner had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his works. He went on to revolutionise the music form through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He achieved these ideas most fully in his epic cycle of operas 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', notable for complex textures, rich harmonies and the elaborate use of leitmotifs. Delphi’s Great Composers Series offers concise illustrated guides to the life and works of our greatest composers. Analysing the masterworks of each composer, these interactive eBooks include links to popular streaming services, allowing you to listen to the pieces of music you are reading about. Evaluating the masterworks of each composer, you will explore the development of their works, tracing how they changed the course of music history. Whether a classical novice or a cultivated connoisseur, this series offers an intriguing overview of the world’s most famous and iconic compositions. This volume presents Wagner’s masterworks in succinct detail, with informative introductions, accompanying illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus features. (Version 1) * Concise and informative overview of Wagner’s masterworks* Learn about the operas that made Wagner a celebrated composer* Links to popular streaming services (free and paid), allowing you to listen to the masterpieces you’re reading about* Features a special ‘Complete Compositions’ section, with an index of Wagner’s complete works and links to streaming services* English translations of the librettos for the major operas, including works appearing for the first time in digital print* A wide selection of the composer’s prose works, including fiction, pioneering essays and Wagner’s celebrated autobiography* Includes Wagner’s letters to Franz Liszt — explore the composer’s personal correspondence* Features six biographies on the great composer — explore Wagner's intriguing musical and personal life Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting eBooks CONTENTS: The MasterworksSymphony in C MajorDas LiebesverbotFaust OvertureRienziDer fliegende HolländerTannhäuserLohengrinDas RhinegoldDie WalküreTristan und IsoldeWesendonck LiederDie Meistersinger von NürnbergSiegfriedSiegfried IdyllGötterdämmerungParsifal Complete CompositionsIndex of Wagner’s Compositions Selected LibrettosDer fliegende HolländerLohengrinDas RhinegoldDie WalküreTristan und IsoldeSiegfriedGötterdämmerungParsifal Selected ProseAutobiographic SketchOn German OperaArt and RevolutionThe Art-Work of the FutureJudaism in MusicA Communication to My FriendsOpera and DramaBeethovenWhat is German?An End in ParisOn ConductingReligion and Art The LettersCorrespondence of Wagner and Liszt The AutobiographyMy Life The BiographiesRichard Wagner: His Life and His Dramas by W. J. HendersonLife of Wagner by Ludwig NohlRichard Wagner, Composer of Operas by John F. RuncimanWagner by Paul RosenfeldWagner as I Knew Him by Ferdinand PraegerRichard Wagner by Rupert Hughes Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of exciting titles

Simon Callow, the celebrated author of Orson Welles, delivers a dazzling, swift, and accessible biography of the musical titan Richard Wagner and his profoundly problematic legacy--a fresh take for seasoned acolytes and the perfect introduction for new fans. Richard Wagner's music dramas have never been more popular or more divisive. His ten masterpieces, created against the backdrop of a continent in severe political and cultural upheaval, constitute an unmatched body of work. A man who spent most of his life in abject poverty, inspiring both critical derision and hysterical hero-worship, Wagner was a walking contradiction: belligerent, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, demanding, visionary, and poisonously anti-Semitic. Acclaimed biographer Simon Callow evokes the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner lived and takes us through his most iconic works, from his pivotal successes in The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin, to the musical paradigm shift contained in Tristan and Isolde, to the apogee of his achievements in The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal, which debuted at Bayreuth shortly before his death. Being Wagner brings to life this towering figure, creator of the most sublime and most controversial body of work ever known.