Unmasking Wagner’s Grail

Unmasking Wagner’s Grail PDF Author: Tyler Cole Mitchell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered through his own belief system, Wagner’s Parsifal ambivalently presents homoeroticism, wavering between an idealized pure love and a destructive, even unnatural, force of desire. I was initially inspired by Laurence Dreyfus’s work Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, which struck me as a fresh exegesis of Wagner’s oeuvre, embracing the overt sexual nature of his dramatic text, music, and philosophical writings. Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne provide methodologies for narration and androgyny from which I draw. Wagner demonstrates homoerotic sensibilities through both heroic and villainous characters, within an exotic medieval Spain (and a Zauberschloß), and through opposing sonic worlds of communal diatonicism and chromatic sensuality. Exploring this work from a perspective energized by recent musicological gender studies and musico-textual semiotics and relations, my reading of Parsifal is thus primarily corrective. Wagner’s final music drama offers a manifestation of love and sensuality with all the contradictions and fears of Wagner’s experiences and imagination.

Unmasking Wagner’s Grail

Unmasking Wagner’s Grail PDF Author: Tyler Cole Mitchell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered through his own belief system, Wagner’s Parsifal ambivalently presents homoeroticism, wavering between an idealized pure love and a destructive, even unnatural, force of desire. I was initially inspired by Laurence Dreyfus’s work Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, which struck me as a fresh exegesis of Wagner’s oeuvre, embracing the overt sexual nature of his dramatic text, music, and philosophical writings. Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne provide methodologies for narration and androgyny from which I draw. Wagner demonstrates homoerotic sensibilities through both heroic and villainous characters, within an exotic medieval Spain (and a Zauberschloß), and through opposing sonic worlds of communal diatonicism and chromatic sensuality. Exploring this work from a perspective energized by recent musicological gender studies and musico-textual semiotics and relations, my reading of Parsifal is thus primarily corrective. Wagner’s final music drama offers a manifestation of love and sensuality with all the contradictions and fears of Wagner’s experiences and imagination.

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal PDF 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.

Wagner's Parsifal

Wagner's Parsifal PDF Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190623543
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
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.

Wagner and Literature

Wagner and Literature PDF Author: Raymond Furness
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719008443
Category : Literature, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Examines the influence of Wagner on European literature and culture, from Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche to the surrealist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the decadent illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.

The Social Construction of What?

The Social Construction of What? PDF Author: Ian Hacking
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674254279
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality. Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse—very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.

Wagner and the Art of the Theatre

Wagner and the Art of the Theatre PDF Author: Patrick Carnegy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300106954
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Chapitre 6, p. 175-207, consacré à Adolphe Appia.

Tristan and Isolde

Tristan and Isolde PDF Author: Joan Tasker Grimbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136745572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
A substantial introduction traces the Tristan and Isolde legend from the twelfth century to the present, emphasizing literary versions, but also surveying the legend's sources and its appearance in the visual arts, music and film. The nineteen essays are a mix of new, new English, revised, and 'classic'. It contains an extensive bibliography.

The Mystery of the Grail

The Mystery of the Grail PDF Author: Julius Evola
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1620558564
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this important study of the meaning of the Grail, one of Europe's greatest esoteric philosophers discloses the pre-Christian and initiatic sources of this symbolic motif that is so central to Western mythology and culture. He demonstrates how the main features of the legend are from an older tradition analogous to the great heroic sagas and cycles of the North, and that the Grail itself is a symbol of initiation. Evola uncovers the hidden meaning in the often surreal adventures of the knights who searched for the Grail, interpreting them as inner experiences and tests for the seeker. He also explores the history of the myth in the Middle Ages, its use by the Knights Templar and the Cathars, its legacy during the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, and its links with Rosicrucianism, alchemy, and Masonry. This excursion into the realm of the Grail throws new light on an endlessly fascinating subject.

The Musician

The Musician PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 844

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Book Description


In the Shadow of Du Bois

In the Shadow of Du Bois PDF Author: Robert Gooding-Williams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067426391X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.