The Tristan Chord

The Tristan Chord PDF Author: Bryan Magee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805071894
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
And he unflinchingly confronts the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity, and anti-Semitism are as repugnant as his achievements are glorious."--Jacket.

The Tristan Chord

The Tristan Chord PDF Author: Bryan Magee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805071894
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
And he unflinchingly confronts the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity, and anti-Semitism are as repugnant as his achievements are glorious."--Jacket.

The Tristan Chord

The Tristan Chord PDF Author: Glenn Skwerer
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783525754
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
2019 Walter Scott Prize Academy recommendation 'Succeeds brilliantly ... a gripping and disturbing portrait of the young Hitler' Simon Mawer, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Glass House Salzburg, 1945: Eugen Reczek, a middle-aged Austrian desk clerk, is interned by the American occupiers. The reason: he is Hitlers Jugendfreund – ‘The Friend of the Führer’s Youth’. Linz, 1905: An upholstery apprentice by day and fledgling violist by night, Eugen meets fifteen-year-old Adolf Hitler at the local opera, and for the next four years they see each other almost daily. Eugen is captivated but also troubled by Hitler: his almost complete isolation, his morbid preoccupation with his dead father, and his obsession with a young woman to whom he has never said a word. They move together to Vienna – Adolf to study art; Eugen to study music – but as Adolf’s money runs low, he becomes increasingly drawn to the racist gutter press of Vienna, and so to hatred: of women, of sex, of all things sensual. When Eugen begins a relationship with the Jewish mother of one of his piano students, it is only a matter of time before their suppressed conflict will ignite. Now, with the Third Reich in ashes, Eugen sits in a barren room writing his memoir. In a voice by turns intelligent, sceptical, pained, nostalgic and appalled, he tries to come to terms with the course of his own life and with the unfathomable criminality of his boyhood friend – his Hitler.

Desire in Chromatic Harmony

Desire in Chromatic Harmony PDF Author: Kenneth M. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019092344X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde PDF Author: Arthur Groos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521431387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Seven leading international writers discuss the genesis, libretto and music, and performance and reception history of Wagner's Tristan.

The Tristan Chord

The Tristan Chord PDF Author: Bettina Von Kampen
Publisher: Enfield & Wizenty
ISBN: 9781894283854
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Near the end of World War II in Bayreuth, Germany, a composer meets a musically gifted SS officer. The officer has been posted to Bayreuth to perform with other SS members in the chorus of Wagner's Die Meistersinger. The soldier has committed atrocities at Dachau, but his artistic nature is moved by the composer's unfinished opera, which he then steals. The story shifts to contemporary Canada, where the soldier's sister, Johanna, lives near her son Robert, also a gifted musician. The novel turns on Johanna's encounter with a Holocaust survivor and the re--emergence of the opera manuscript that had been in her brother's possession. In a moving climax, Johanna comes to terms both with her complicity in covering up her brother's past, and with the redemptive power of music.

Wagner and Philosophy

Wagner and Philosophy PDF Author: Bryan Magee
Publisher: ePenguin
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A contribution to the literature of 19th-century culture, this is a study of the close links between Wagner and the philosophy of his age. The author tries to make sense of both the man and his music by placing Wagner in the context of 19th-century thought. His sympathy for Wagner's music is tempered by an independence of mind which allows him to rethink much of the hostility towards Wagner. Revealing his anti-Semitism as virulent, but certainly not unusual, Magee argues that there is no reason to regard him as a proto-fascist and that an opinion of his politics should not cloud the judgment of his music.

Aspects of Wagner

Aspects of Wagner PDF Author: Bryan Magee
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192840127
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
Many music lovers find Wagner's operas inexpressibly beautiful and richly satisfying, while others find them revolting, dangerous, self-indulgent, and immoral. The man who W.H. Auden once called "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived" has inspired both greater adulation and greater loathing than any other composer. Bryan Magee presents a penetrating analysis of Wagner's work, concentrating on how his sensational and deeply erotic music uniquely expresses the repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche. He examines not only Wagner's music and detailed stage directions but also the prose works in which he formulated his ideas, as well as shedding new light on his anti-semitism and the way in which the Nazis twisted his theories to suit their own purposes. Outlining the astonishing range and depth of Wagner's influence on our culture, Magee reveals how profoundly he continues to shock and inspire musicians, poets, novelists, painters, philosophers, and politicians today.

A Chord in Time: The Evolution of the Augmented Sixth from Monteverdi to Mahler

A Chord in Time: The Evolution of the Augmented Sixth from Monteverdi to Mahler PDF Author: Mark Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351578138
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
For centuries, the augmented sixth sonority has fascinated composers and intrigued music analysts. Here, Dr Mark Ellis presents a series of musical examples illustrating the 'evolution' of the augmented sixth and the changing contexts in which it can be found. Surprisingly, the sonority emerged from one of the last remnants of modal counterpoint to survive into the tonal era: the Phrygian Cadence. In the Baroque period, the 'terrible dissonance' was nearly always associated with negative textual imagery. Charpentier described the augmented sixth as 'poignantly expressive'. J. S. Bach considered an occurrence of the chord in one of his forebear's motets 'remarkably bold'. During Bach's composing lifetime, the augmented sixth evolved from a relatively rare chromaticism to an almost commonplace element within the tonal spectrum; the chord reflects particular chronological and stylistic strata in his music. Theorists began cautiously to accept the chord, but its inversional possibilities proved particularly contentious, as commentaries by writers as diverse as Muffat, Marpurg and Rousseau reveal. During the eighteenth century, the augmented sixth became increasingly significant in instrumental repertoires - it was perhaps Vivaldi who first liberated the chord from its negative textual associations. By the later eighteenth century, the chord began to function almost as a 'signpost' to indicate important structural boundaries within sonata form. The chord did not, however, entirely lose its darker undertone: it signifies, for example, the theme of revenge in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Romantic composers uncovered far-reaching tonal ambiguities inherent in the augmented sixth. Chopin's Nocturnes often seem beguilingly simple, but the surface tranquillity masks the composer's strikingly original harmonic experiments. Wagner's much-analyzed 'Tristan Chord' resolves (according to some theorists) on an augmented sixth. In Tristan und Isolde, the chord's mercurial

Wagnerism

Wagnerism PDF 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.

Death-Devoted Heart

Death-Devoted Heart PDF Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199986983
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. Death-Devoted Heart explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries. He also offers keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. His argument touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. Roger Scruton has written an original and provocative account of Wagner's music drama, which blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the twenty-first century.