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A superbly insightful and moving exploration of Wagner's last opera, by one of Britain's leading intellectuals Wagner's last music-drama tells the story of Parsifal, the 'pure fool, knowing through compassion', who has been called to rescue the Kingdom of the Grail from the sins that have polluted it. The Grail is a symbol of purity in a world of lust and power, but although Parsifal is the culmination of Wagner's life-long obsession with the religious frame of mind, the redemption sought by his characters is far from the Christian archetype. For Wagner, redemption occurs inthis life, when compassion prevails over enslavement, and purity replaces spiritual pollution. His music here ties together suffering and contrition, sin and forgiveness, downfall and redemption in an inextricable knot, healing the fractures and uniting the warring elements in human life in a way that is clear, convincing and uncanny. More than any other of his works, Parsifal expresses in music a depth of feeling for which we do not have words.This short but penetrating book, by a writer who was uniquely both a leading philosopher and musicologist, shows us how Wagner achieves this profound work, explaining the story, its musical ideas, and their coming together into a sublime whole which gives us the musical equivalent of forgiveness and closure. There are few writers who can so enhance our understanding of one of the greatest works in western music.

By the time he created these images, Rackham was England's leading illustrator, famous throughout the world for his interpretations of fairy tales and myths. These illustrations from the original 1911 and 1912 editions, widely regarded as the greatest representations of Wagner's drama, constitute Rackham's masterworks. 64 full-page color images and 9 vignettes.Dover Original.

William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the composer as his "last card," explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career. This book offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar manuscript sources, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works. Fresh analytic perspectives are revealed, casting the dramatic meaning of Parsifal in a new light. Much debated aspects of the work, such as Kundry's death at the conclusion, are discussed in the context of its stage history.Path-breaking as well is Kinderman's analysis of the religious and ideological context of Parsifal. During the half-century after the composer's death, the Wagner family and the so-called Bayreuth circle sought to exploit Wagner's work for political purposes, thereby promoting racial nationalism and anti-Semitism. Hitherto unnoticed connections between Hitler and Wagner's legacy at Bayreuth are explored here, while differences between the composer's politics as an 1849 revolutionary and the later response of his family to National Socialism are weighed in a nuanced account. Kinderman combines new historical research, sensitive aesthetic criticism, and probing philosophical reflection in this most intensive examination of Wagner's culminating music drama.

William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the composer as his "last card," explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career, and offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar manuscript sources, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works. Fresh analytic perspectives are revealed, casting the dramatic meaning of Parsifal in a new light. Much debated aspects of the work, such as Kundry's death at the conclusion, are discussed in the context of its stage history.Path-breaking as well is Kinderman's analysis of the religious and ideological context of Parsifal. During the half-century after the composer's death, the Wagner family and the so-called Bayreuth circle sought to exploit Wagner's work for political purposes, thereby promoting racial nationalism and anti-Semitism. Hitherto unnoticed connections between Hitler and Wagner's legacy at Bayreuth are explored here, while differences between the composer's politics as an 1849 revolutionary and the later response of his family to National Socialism are weighed in a nuanced account. Kinderman combines new historical research, sensitive aesthetic criticism, and probing philosophical reflection in this most intensive examination of Wagner's culminating music drama.

Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold is a milestone in the composer's outlput and in the history of music in general. It marked Wagner's return to operatic composition after a hiatus of five years, and signified his definitive break with earlier operatic conventions. it also represents a reconsideration of the whole question of dramatic-musical form, and the role of tonality in articulating this form.Warren Darcy traces here the genesis of Das Rheingold through the various textual and musical sketches and drafts to the full score, and also develops a theoretical framework within which the opera may be meaningfully analysed. Using Wagner's manuscripts as a point of departure, Darcy discusses the formal, harmonic, and linear structure of the work. In so doing, he challenges a number of contemporary views about the opera, including those of Curt von Westernhagen and Carl Dahlhaus.

A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination. Richard Wagner's operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagner's Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagner's environmental imagination came from, how it was received by audience members and reconceived by stage directors, and how it refracts his politics and shapes their legacies. By tracing ecological dimensions of the composer's essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagner's environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time. The book begins by examining the way Wagner's political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagner's essays and dramas invite a range of interpretations, for Paige, they point to an all-encompassing image of music drama-as-climate. The book then turns to the ways Wagnerian drama—and opera more generally—at once participates in the industrial-technological lineage of climate change and helps spectators grapple with the challenges of living in a warming world. In providing the first close examination of Wagner's artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagner's Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability.

Wagner's Ring, an important phenomenon of the German drama tradition, is situated and examined alongside other major works of the canon. Wagner defines tragedy as a mythological drama. The theoretical foundation of the Ring is a complex dialectic of history and myth. By contrasting the Ring with the dramas of Schiller, Hebbel, Hofmannsthal, and Brecht different facets of Wagner's work are uniquely highlighted beyond theoretical generalizations or broad overviews. This series of comparisons offers fresh insight into the interrelationships of the Ring with the previous German drama tradition, and also investigates its influence on twentieth-century drama and opera.Scholars of German literature and culture will appreciate this innovative interpretation and study of the Ring. New ideas proposed include the suggestions that Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy might have served as a covert source for the Ring and that Ariadne auf Naxos and Mahagonny represent parodies of the Ring. The theory underlying the Ring will attract musicologists and interdisciplinary literary scholars interested in the interrelationship between words and music and literature and opera.

This volume uses the historic staging and legacy of the 1903 production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, directed and conducted by Gustav Mahler, to explore a wide range of interdisciplinary issues in the history of the opera, performance, and the reception and interpretation of Wagner's work.The production marked a turning point in twentieth-century opera, as Mahler and the designer Alfred Roller broke with nineteenth-century naturalistic traditions and used new technologies to transform the aural and visual experience of opera. With chapters contributed by scholars from musicology, art history, theatre studies, and other disciplines, this book provides a uniquely multifaceted perspective on Wagner's opera in the historical setting of the early twentieth century. Chapters in the first part address specific aspects of the 1903 production, including staging, lighting, and performance practice, while the second part sets the production in wider political, artistic, and literary context. Together, they show how the visual and musical elements of the staging interacted to express new artistic philosophies. Enriching our understanding of Wagner, stage history, and the cultural ferment emerging from fin-de-siècle Vienna, this book will be of interest to researchers of music, theatre, and performance studies, and art and cultural history.

This is the first literal, word-for-word translation of Wagner’s epic masterwork with the full German text. Stewart Spencer's version is at once reliable and readable, adhering closely to the original verse form and to Wagner’s poetic intentions. The German text is given in parallel, and Spencer also contributes illuminating footnote and an introductory essay. Other specially commissioned essays discuss the Cycle’s musical structure, its philosophical implications, its medieval sources and Wagner’s own changing attitude to its meaning. An appendix of Wagner’s rejected versions, copious notes on the translation, a glossary of the names of characters in the Ring, an extensive bibliography and reviews of CD- and video-recordings conclude the volume.

This book is a study of the prose writings of Richard Wagner and their relevance to an understanding of his music and drama, as well as their relation to music criticism and aesthetics in the nineteenth century in general. As a by-product of Wagner's many-faceted career as musician, conductor, cultural critic and controversial ideologue, the writings are documents of undisputed interpretative value. This study focuses on Wagner's words on music, and interprets them in the light of the musical, aesthetic and critical contexts that generated them. Professor Grey considers Wagner's ambivalence concerning the idea of 'absolute music' and the capacity of music to project meaning or drama from within its own system of referents. Particularly relevant are Wagner's appropriation of a Beethoven legacy, the metaphors of musical 'gender' and 'biology' in Opera and Drama and the critical background to ideas of 'motive' and 'leitmotif' in theory and practice.

This book is a study of the prose writings of Richard Wagner and their relevance to an understanding of his music and drama, as well as their relation to music criticism and aesthetics in the nineteenth century in general. As a by-product of Wagner's many-faceted career as musician, conductor, cultural critic and controversial ideologue, the writings are documents of undisputed interpretative value. This study focuses on Wagner's words on music, and interprets them in the light of the musical, aesthetic and critical contexts that generated them. Professor Grey considers Wagner's ambivalence concerning the idea of 'absolute music' and the capacity of music to project meaning or drama from within its own system of referents. Particularly relevant are Wagner's appropriation of a Beethoven legacy, the metaphors of musical 'gender' and 'biology' in Opera and Drama and the critical background to ideas of 'motive' and 'leitmotif' in theory and practice.

Previous studies of Wagner's operas have tended to approach the works as chunks of autobiography, philosophical speculations or historical-political comments on the age in which they were written. Professor Dahlhaus dissociated himself from all such ventures. His aim is to reveal, by careful analysis of the works from Der fliegende Hollander to Parsifal, the dominant features of 'music drama' and how Wagner achieves such profound, unified effects. Professor Dahlhaus cites music examples only when they are germane to his argument and requires from his readers no more than a limited amount of technical musical knowledge. This is not, therefore, an exclusively specialist study. Rather it will help the enthusiastic beginner to come to terms with these great works of art as well as offering many valuable insights to the experienced Wagnerian. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of music history, theory, opera and philosophy.

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.

Through his reading of primary and secondary classical sources, as well as his theoretical writings, Richard Wagner developed a Hegelian-inspired theory linking the evolution of classical Greek politics and poetry. This book demonstrates how, by turning theory into practice, Wagner used this evolutionary paradigm to shape the music and the libretto of the Ring cycle. Foster describes how each of the Ring's operas represents a particular phase of Greek poetic and political development: Das Rheingold and Die Walküre create epic national identity in its earlier and later stages respectively; Siegfried expresses lyric personal identity; and Götterdämmerung destructively culminates with a tragi-comedy about civic identity. This study sees the Greeks through the lens of those scholars whose work influenced Wagner most, focusing on epic, lyric, and comedy, as well as Greek tragedy. Most significantly, the book interrogates the ways in which Wagner uses Greek aesthetics to further his own ideological goals.

In Wagner's Theatre, Patrick Carnegy presents the turbulent story of Wagner and his interpreters over the course of the twentieth century. Carnegy gives vivid accounts of Gustav Mahler's radical reinvention of the Wagnerian stage, and of the post-war rehabilitation of Wagner and his work after Hitler's appropriation. He also offers sharply written reappraisals of those great Wagnerian conductors Klemperer, Toscanini, Karajan and Solti. Carnegy provides revealing accounts of the inside-workings of the Royal Opera House and of English National Opera at troubled points in their recent history. In a fascinating conversation with Sir Michael Tippett, the composer talks with unique authority about the problems facing would-be musical dramatists today. Wagner's Theatre is an essential insight into how interpretations of Wagner have developed, and how we can respond to them.

In Wagner's Theatre, Patrick Carnegy presents the turbulent story of Wagner and his interpreters over the course of the twentieth century. Carnegy gives vivid accounts of Gustav Mahler's radical reinvention of the Wagnerian stage, and of the post-war rehabilitation of Wagner and his work after Hitler's appropriation. He also offers sharply written reappraisals of those great Wagnerian conductors Klemperer, Toscanini, Karajan and Solti. Carnegy provides revealing accounts of the inside-workings of the Royal Opera House and of English National Opera at troubled points in their recent history. In a fascinating conversation with Sir Michael Tippett, the composer talks with unique authority about the problems facing would-be musical dramatists today. Wagner's Theatre is an essential insight into how interpretations of Wagner have developed, and how we can respond to them.

This book analyses the ideas of the Swedish journalist, feminist, and literary author Elin Wägner (1882-1949), as conveyed in her book Väckarklocka (1941), in a European feminist context. This context is presented in terms of three elements. Firstly, the German sociologist/educationalist Mathilde Vaerting and her sociology of power played an important role in Wägner's development of a theory of matriarchy. Secondly, the influence of the Austrian feminist Rosa Mayreder and her theory of masculine civilization and feminine culture are analyzed in relation to Wägner's development of what might be called an early ecological feminism. Thirdly, the mainly unknown Women's Organization for World Order (WOWO) is presented.0s and 1930s, which wanted to strengthen women's position and confidence as political citizens by providing them with a historical past where women ruled (matriarchy). Thereby they not only reinvented a past, but also revitalized the emergence or eternity of patriarchy. These women discussed the possibility of women offering an alternative to the prevailing order. A special analysis is made of Mayreder's and Wägner's way of discussing what woman is and in what ways she can challenge the system. Both argued that women ought to have the same rights and duties as men, but that this should not require them to adapt to the distorted male system. This study argues that this position, easily characterized as "essentialist" in modern feminist terms, is in fact functional and strongly emancipatory in its time and context.In this reevaluation of Väckarklocka Katarina Leppänen has established this important Swedish novel as a text central to the development of the feminist movement. Elin Wägner's Alarm Clock is a book suitable for students of Swedish Literature and European Feminism.

Wagner's Hitler is an important and controversial contribution to the literature on Hitler's Germany.

Mark Berry explores the political and religious ideas expounded in Wagner's Ring through close attention to the text and drama, the multifarious intellectual influences upon the composer during the work's lengthy gestation and composition, and the wealth of Wagner source material. Many of his writings are explicitly political in their concerns, for Wagner was emphatically not a revolutionary solely for the sake of art. Yet it would be misleading to see even the most 'political' tracts as somehow divorced from the aesthetic realm; Wagner's radical challenge to liberal-democratic politics makes no such distinction. This book considers Wagner's treatment of various worlds: nature, politics, economics, and metaphysics, in order to explain just how radical that challenge is. Classical interpretations have tended to opt either for an 'optimistic' view of the Ring, centred upon the influence of Young Hegelian thought - in particular the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach - and Wagner's concomitant revolutionary politics, or for the 'pessimistic' option, removing the disillusioned Wagner-in-Swiss-exile from the political sphere and stressing the undoubtedly important role of Arthur Schopenhauer. Such an 'either-or' approach seriously misrepresents not only Wagner's compositional method but also his intellectual method. It also sidelines inconvenient aspects of the dramas that fail to 'fit' whichever interpretation is selected. Wagner's tendency is not progressively to recant previous 'errors' in his oeuvre. Radical ideas are not completely replaced by a Schopenhauerian world-view, however loudly the composer might come to trumpet his apparent 'conversion'. Nor is Wagner's truly an Hegelian method, although Hegelian dialectic plays an important role. In fact, Wagner is in many ways not really a systematic thinker at all (which is not to portray him as self-consciously unsystematic in a Nietzschean, let alone 'post-modernist' fashion). His tendency, rather, is agglomerative,

While much has been published abroad about the German filmmaker and author Hans Jürgen Syberberg, this is the first English monograph about him. Author Solveig Olsen presents a biographical overview of the controversial artist and his body of work, and offers an in-depth analysis of Syberberg's film of Richard Wagner's Parsifal and his later works.Syberberg gained international fame as a filmmaker with the films of his "German Cycle," which included Our Hitler, a study of the Hitler potential in human nature. Parsifal of 1982 concluded the German Cycle. Preserving Wagner's libretto and score, the film uses the visual component to imbue the work with a surprising interpretation. In addition to the medieval story about the Grail seeker, the director draws on several other frames of reference, such as the theories of Freud and Jung, alchemy, and Syberberg's main aesthetic views and philosophy that have gone unrecognized until now. Olsen explores the role of Parsifal as Wagner's artistic and philosophical testament, and the implications of Syberberg's reinterpretation.

Harkness and Wagner's Biology and Medicine of Rabbits and Rodents, Fifth Edition is a practical reference in small mammal husbandry and health, encompassing the fields of laboratory animal medicine and pet practice. Part of ACLAM's series of laboratory animal books, this text offers concise but complete coverage on rabbits and the most common rodent species, with an emphasis on biology, clinical procedures, clinical signs, and diseases and conditions. By providing useful, accessible assessment and diagnostic information, Harkness and Wagner's Biology and Medicine of Rabbits and Rodents aids the practitioner in diagnosing and treating conditions in small mammals.

Today, more than a century after its first performance, Richard Wagner's The Ring of Nibelung endures as one of the most significant artistic creations in the history of opera. This monumental work not only altered previously accepted concepts of music and drama but also inspired creative and intellectual efforts far beyond the field of opera.Previous studies of the Ring have appealed only to those already acquainted in some way with the Wagnerian art. For the uninitiated, Wagner and his landmark creation have seemed forbidding, and those eager to learn about the masterpiece have faced a vast and frequently esoteric body of commentary. Professor Cord addresses the interests of the non-specialist by taking the reader first into Wagner's unique intent, and then through the complete history of the Ring.Cord, who has attended forty performances of the Ring, considers the conception of the poem, its development into a music-drama exemplifying Wagnerian thought, its introduction to the world, and the reactions and interpretation it elicits.

Commentary on and a concise, lucid interpretation of the opera world's most complex masterwork, expanded from the author's popular intermission talks during Met Opera broadcasts.“Anyone, whether knowledgeable or not, will profit by reading it...”– Opera Quarterly