Father Lee's books on the classics of Greece and Rome and made his six other volumes of opera bestsellers,Athena Singstraces 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) supported the unification of Europe and reflected on this like few other philosophers before or after him. Many ofhis works are concerned with the present state and ...future of European culture and humanity. Resisting the "nationalist nonsense" and "politics of dissolution" of his day, he advocated the birth of "good Europeans, " i.e. "supra-national" individuals and the "amalgamation of nations." Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe analyzes the development of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideal of European culture based on his musical aesthetics. It does so against the background of contemporary searches for a wider, cultural meaning beyond Europe's economic-political union. The book claims that Nietzsche always propagated the "aestheticization" of Europe, but that his view on how to achieve this changed as a result of his dramatically altering philosophy of music. The main focus is on Nietzsche's passion for and later aversion to Wagner's music, and, in direct connection with this, his surprising embrace of Italian operas as new forms of "Dionysian" music and of Goethe as a model of "Good Europeanism."
Richard Strauss' fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941, make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on ...texts by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss's compositions.
ABSTRACT
This article applies Hatten's (1994) concept of the ‘arrival 64${6 \atop 4}$’ – a cadential 64${6 \atop 4}$ that resolves tonal or thematic instabilities without necessarily proceeding to ...V(7) – to cadences and cadential gestures in Wagner's Die Walküre. It identifies and describes three essential types of arrival 64${6 \atop 4}$ chord: a cadential 64${6 \atop 4}$ becoming I64${6 \atop 4}$ and launching a new leitmotivic passage (type 1); one continuing in the cadential progression and initiating a new leitmotivic passage (type 2) and one continuing in the cadential progression and becoming a rhetorical highpoint (type 3). Ultimately, it demonstrates that examples of each type produce an aurally illuminating, ‘marked’ effect within Wagnerian ‘musical prose’ in conjunction with the dramatic circumstances.
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.
In the fall of 1938, following Kristallnacht, the symphonic orchestra in Palestine cancelled the performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. No one could foresee that this would be the beginning ...of a never-ending boycott. The boycott began in a society struggling for its existence and collective identity; it continues in a well-established culture that maintains close ties with Germany and German culture, when numerous Israeli institutions are involved in commemorating the Holocaust. At present Wagner is known in Israel mainly as a symbol of the Holocaust. From the late twentieth-century Wagner is the only composer who aroused strong opposition when attempts were made to publicly play his music. Analysis of this controversy sheds light on the changes that have taken place in Israel -- from a pioneering to a traditional society, and from a socialist to a capitalistic one. In the Wagner Year "The Ring of Myths" appears in a revised edition, including interpretations from new perspectives on the place of the Holocaust in Israeli society and the processes of change until 2012.
The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew ...Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.
Significantly, the ’Big Bang’ in reception history of Richard Wagner’s work took place in a place that was torn between the province and the residence, tradition and progress, idea and realization: ...in the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach. Here Franz Liszt's future-oriented work and the legacy of the Weimar Classic combined under the reign of an ambitious Weimar court to a not unproblematic synthesis, the consequences of which did not leave Wagner unaffected. The contributions of the volume examine these interactions between culture and politics.
Der rezeptionsgeschichtliche ¼Urknall½ von Richard Wagners Werk fand bezeichnenderweise an einem Ort statt, der sich in einem Spannungsfeld zwischen Provinz und Residenz, Tradition und Fortschritt, Idee und Verwirklichung befand: im Großherzogtum Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. Hier verbanden sich Franz Liszts auf die Zukunft ausgerichtetes Wirken und das Erbe der Weimarer Klassik unter der Regentschaft eines ambitionierten Weimarer Hofes zu einer nicht unproblematischen Synthese, von deren Folgen auch Wagner nicht unberührt blieb. Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen diese Wechselwirkungen zwischen Kultur und Politik.
Beyond reason Berger, Karol
2016., 20161122, 2016, 2016-11-15
eBook
Beyond Reasonrelates 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, andParsifal. 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.
Since the 1840s, critics have lambasted Wagner for lacking the ability to compose melody. But for him, melody was fundamental - 'music's only form'. This incongruity testifies to the surprising ...difficulties during the nineteenth century of conceptualizing melody. Despite its indispensable place in opera, contemporary theorists were unable even to agree on a definition for it. In Wagner's Melodies, David Trippett re-examines Wagner's central aesthetic claims, placing the composer's ideas about melody in the context of the scientific discourse of his age: from the emergence of the natural sciences and historical linguistics to sources about music's stimulation of the body and inventions for 'automatic' composition. Interweaving a rich variety of material from the history of science, music theory, music criticism, private correspondence and court reports, Trippett uncovers a new and controversial discourse that placed melody at the apex of artistic self-consciousness and generated problems of urgent dimensions for German music aesthetics.
