Author: Mary A. Cicora
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how Wagner's dramas use their legendary or mythological raw material in a specifically 19th-century Romantic way to create meaning. It is argued that by means of Romantic irony, internal self-reflection or self-consciousness, each work deconstructs its own mythological or legendary nature. Musicologists with an interest in Wagner's works, and literary scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary applications of literary-critical theory, will appreciate this unique application of literary, theoretical, and critical concepts to the understanding of his music-dramas. This work will also appeal to scholars of German literature and of German cultural history. It discusses Wagner's single dramas from Holl^Dander to Parsifal.
Author: Mark Berry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108916139
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
The Companion is an essential, interdisciplinary tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner's Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, and giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent chapters, written by leading Wagner experts, focus on musical topics such as 'leitmotif', and structure, and provide a comprehensive set of character portraits, including leading players like Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried. Further chapters look to the mythological background of the work and the idea of the Bayreuth Festival, as well as critical reception of the Ring, its relationship to Nazism, and its impact on literature and popular culture, in turn offering new approaches to interpretation including gender, race and environmentalism. The volume ends with a history of notable stage productions from the world premiere in 1876 to the most recent stagings in Bayreuth and elsewhere.
Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571132376
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
New essays demonstrating and exploring the abiding fascination of Wagner's controversial work.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
Author: Michael Saffle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135839530
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
Richard Wagner: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer.
Author: Simon Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139451669
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
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.
Author: Katherine Rae Syer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Examines the impact of contemporary ideas about the psyche and neglected yet crucial artistic influences on the psychological dimension of Wagner's operas, especially Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the Ring. Wagner's Visions studies crucial influences on Wagner's dramatic style during the years before and just after the failed Dresden revolutionary uprising of 1849. Offering a detailed examination of Die Feen, Wagner's least-known complete opera, together with analysis of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the four Ring dramas, Katherine Syer explores the inner experiences of Wagner's protagonists. Sources ofparticular political significance include the fables of the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, the Iphigenia operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck, and the legacy of the martyr Theodor Körner, whose poetry became the lingua franca of the revolutionary movement to liberate and unify Germany. Syer's book offers fresh insights into the historical context that gave rise to Wagner's dramatic art, revealing how his distinct and powerful imagery is intimately bound up with the crises and instabilities of his era. Katherine R. Syer is associate professor of theatre and musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Author: Clive Bloom
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030408663
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 867
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Book Description
By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.
Author: David Gallagher
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.
Author: Thomas Licata
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307688X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Electroacoustic music, a flourishing medium for over half a century, remains today, in a wide array of technological forms, one of the major areas of creative activity in music. However, it has long been overlooked in theoretical studies—possibly in part because it does away with traditional scores and notation. In this landmark collection, a group of distinguished composers and theorists who have actively worked in the field present detailed analyses of important electroacoustic works while also demonstrating some recent approaches to the analysis of the music of this medium. Included here are discussions of such significant works as Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955/56), Iannis Xenakis' Diamorphoses (1957), and Jean-Claude Risset's Contours (1982). Overall, the collection aims to elucidate the sonic design of each of the electroacoustic music works under investigation, using its best examples as a lens through which to examine an unduly neglected genre. Demonstrating recent techniques in the analysis of electroacoustic music, the volume also considers various compositional approaches as well as computer applications that have become an irreplaceable tool in the composing of this music. So little has been written about this 20th-century art form that Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives is at once a fresh, bold step forward in musicology and analysis.
