Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521359009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 812

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Book Description
A reprint of the first English paperback edition of Richard Wagner's autobiography.

Author: Martin Geck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924629
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
“[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

Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781019386156
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this autobiography, Richard Wagner reflects on his life, his music, and his political beliefs. A must-read for fans of opera and classical music. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429944544
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
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.

Author: Rich Wagner
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310317606
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Your career is compelling. Your ministry at church is God’s calling. But do you realize how these outside activities capture your heart and steal your time and energy from your family? Adventure becomes what you want to do, while family is what you are supposed to do. Now author Rich Wagner offers a bold alternative. In this personal and revealing book, the author challenges Christian men to harness their career ambitions and limit their ministries while their children are at home. Wagner shows how the pull of business success and the call to church ministries are compelling–even seductive. But if you allow your heart to be captured by career and church, you put your kid’s spiritual lives at risk. Far too many Christian children grow up with the vision of a loving Father in heaven, but live with the reality of an earthly father who seems more devoted to outside interests than he is to them. As a result, many children in Christian families today drift away from their faith as they become adults. Wagner reveals how accepting his challenge will not only result in spiritually healthy kids, but also give you the true adventure for which every Christian man yearns.

Author: Derek Watson
Publisher: Schirmer Trade Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nicholas Vazsonyi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139486462
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
All modern artists have had to market themselves in some way. Richard Wagner may just have done it better than anyone else. In a self-promotional effort that began around 1840 in Paris, and lasted for the remainder of his career, Wagner claimed convincingly that he was the most German composer ever and the true successor of Beethoven. More significantly, he was an opera composer who declared that he was not composing operas. Instead, during the 1850s, he mapped out a new direction, conceiving of works that would break with tradition and be literally 'brand new'. This is the first study to examine the innovative ways in which Wagner made himself a celebrity, promoting himself using every means available: autobiography, journal articles, short stories, newspaper announcements, letters, even his operas themselves. Vazsonyi reveals how Wagner created a niche for his works in the crowded opera market that continues to be unique.

Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description

Author: Jacob Katz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
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.

Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: William Collins
ISBN: 9780008105693
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagner's world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of music's most influential figures.The perfect introduction to the Master. A hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner's music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music. They have never been more popular, nor so violently controversial and divisive. His music is still banned in Israel - the only classical composer whose music is banned in the western world. His ten great mature masterpieces constitute an unmatched body of work, created against a backdrop of poverty, revolution, violent controversy, critical contempt and hysterical hero-worship. As a man, he was a walking contradiction, aggressive, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, heroic, visionary and poisonously anti-Semitic. At one point, he had four lengthy operas written with no hope of being performed when, as if in a fairy-tale, he was rescued by a beautiful young king with limitless wealth which he bestowed on the composer. When one of those works, Tristan and Isolde, was at last performed, it revolutionised classical music at a stroke. Finally he fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating a vast epic to rival the work of the great Greek playwrights, a music drama in four massive segments, ushering gods and dwarves, heroes and thugs, dragons and rainbows onto the stage, the apotheosis of German art as he saw it, so extreme in its demands that he had to train a generation of singers and players to perform it, and erect a custom-built theatre to house it. Wagner died, exhausted, after creating one final piece - Parsifal - that seems to point to an even more radical new future for music. Simon Callow recalls the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner worked, recording the almost superhuman effort required to create his work, and evoking the extraordinary effect he had on people - this composer like no other who ever lived, extreme in everything, creator of the most sublime and most troubling body of work ever known.