Stories from Wagner's Operas

Stories from Wagner's Operas PDF Author: Gladys Davidson
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473340950
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
This vintage book contains a collection of stories based upon Wagner's operas told by Gladys Davidson. Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly famous for his operas. These masterfully retold stories are highly recommended for all fans of Wagner's work and would make for worthy additions to any collection. Contents include: "The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Hollaender)", "Tannhauser", "Lohengrin", "Tristan and Isolda", "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg)", "The Nibelungs' Ring. (Der Ring der Nibelungen)", "The Rhinegold", "The Valkyrie (Der Walkuere)", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text.

Stories from Wagner's Operas

Stories from Wagner's Operas PDF Author: Gladys Davidson
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473340950
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Get Book Here

Book Description
This vintage book contains a collection of stories based upon Wagner's operas told by Gladys Davidson. Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly famous for his operas. These masterfully retold stories are highly recommended for all fans of Wagner's work and would make for worthy additions to any collection. Contents include: "The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Hollaender)", "Tannhauser", "Lohengrin", "Tristan and Isolda", "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg)", "The Nibelungs' Ring. (Der Ring der Nibelungen)", "The Rhinegold", "The Valkyrie (Der Walkuere)", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text.

The Stories of Wagner's Operas

The Stories of Wagner's Operas PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


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.

Stories of the Wagner Opera

Stories of the Wagner Opera PDF Author: H. A. Guerber
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
In 'Stories of the Wagner Opera' by H. A. Guerber, readers are taken on a journey through the intricate and captivating world of Richard Wagner's operas. Guerber's writing style is both informative and engaging, providing detailed retellings of the plots of Wagner's most famous operas such as 'The Ring of the Nibelung' and 'Tristan and Isolde'. The book also delves into the historical and cultural context of Wagner's works, offering readers a deeper understanding of the significance of these operas in the world of classical music. Guerber's clear and concise writing makes this book accessible to both opera aficionados and newcomers alike. Through his storytelling, Guerber brings to life the magic and drama of Wagner's operas, making this book a must-read for anyone interested in the world of classical music. H. A. Guerber's expertise and passion for the subject shine through in 'Stories of the Wagner Opera', making it a valuable addition to any music lover's library.

The Wagner Operas

The Wagner Operas PDF Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691027166
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose. "This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way."--Robert Bailey, New York University

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.

Judaism in Music and Other Essays

Judaism in Music and Other Essays PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297661
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse PDF Author: Laurence Dreyfus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674018818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.

Being Wagner

Being Wagner PDF 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.

The Stories of Wagner's Operas

The Stories of Wagner's Operas PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operas
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description