Richard Wagner As Poet and Thinker
Richard Wagner As Poet and Thinker

Author: Bruce Steele

Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing

Published: 2015-03-22

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1925003566

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Richard Wagner as poet? Yes! This hitherto unpublished study invites the reader to see Wagner's texts not just as opera librettos but as dramatic poems in their own right. An authority on German literature, Robertson offers an engaging account of the poems in the light of nineteenth-century drama and the changing currents of social and religious thought. John George Robertson was foundation professor of German Language and Literature in London University, 1903-33. He was the husband of Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. Their lifelong love of Wagner's operas, which began when they met in Leipzig as students in the 1880s, is evident in this book.

The Poetry and Philosophy of Richard Wagner
The Poetry and Philosophy of Richard Wagner

Author: Zona Gale

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781020312120

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This book examines the poetic and philosophical themes in the works of Richard Wagner, a German composer and philosopher. Through a close analysis of his music dramas and writings, the author reveals the complex and nuanced ideas that underpin Wagner's artistic vision, as well as the enduring influence of his ideas on Western culture. 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.

A Study of Wagner
A Study of Wagner

Author: Ernest Newman

Publisher:

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13:

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Before Ernest Newman began to scrutinize the details of Wagner's life, a preoccupation of several decades which resulted in his monumental biography in four volumes, he wrote this extended essay on Wagner as composer and thinker. As critical an observer as Newman was to become of Wagner the man, he viewed the work of the poet and musician with the warmest of praise: "The muse of poetry seems to have dipped her wings into the lucid stream of music, disturbing it with suggestions of a world it had never reflected before, deepening its beauty by closer associations with the actual world of men. This was the brain of Wagner. There is none like him, none; it is almost safe to say there will be none like him to the end of time." -- Back cover.

The Philosophies of Richard Wagner
The Philosophies of Richard Wagner

Author: Julian Young

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0739199935

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In addition to being a great composer, Richard Wagner was also an important philosopher. Julian Young begins by examining the philosophy of art and society Wagner constructs during his time as a revolutionary anarchist-communist. Modernity, Wagner argued, is to be rescued from its current anomie through the rebirth of Greek tragedy (the original Gesamtkunstwerk) in the form of the “artwork of the future," an artwork of which his own operas are the prototype. Young then examines the entirely different philosophy Wagner constructs after his 1854 conversion from Hegelian optimism to Schopenhauerian pessimism. “Redemption” now becomes, not a future utopia in this world, but rather “transfigured” existence in another world, attainable only through death. Viewing Wagner’s operas through the lens of his philosophy, the book offers often novel interpretations of Lohengrin, The Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. Finally, Young dresses the cause of Friedrich Nietzsche’s transformation from Wagner’s intimate friend and disciple into his most savage critic. Nietzsche’s fundamental accusation, it is argued, is one of betrayal: that Wagner betrayed his early, “life affirming” philosophy of art and life in favor of “life-denial." Nietzsche’s assertion and the final conclusion of the book is that our task, now, is to “become better Wagnerians than Wagner.”

Wagner As I Knew Him
Wagner As I Knew Him

Author: Ferdinand Ferdinand Praeger

Publisher:

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781539321132

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SELDOM has the proverb "The child is father to the man" been more completely verified in the life of any prominent brain-worker than in that of Richard Wagner. The serious thinker of threescore, with his soul deep in his work, is the developed school-boy of thirteen lauded by his masters for unusual application and earnestness. All his defects and virtues, his affections and antipathies, can be traced to their original sources in his childhood. No great individuality was ever less influenced by misfortune or success in after-life than Wagner. The mission he felt within him and which he resolutely set himself to accomplish, he unswervingly pursued throughout the varied phases of his eventful career. Beyond contention, Richard Wagner is, I think, the greatest art personality of this century,-unequalled as a musician, great as a poet as regards the matter, moral, and mode of expression, whilst in dramatic construction a very Shakespeare.

Aspects of Wagner
Aspects of Wagner

Author: Bryan Magee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 9780192840127

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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.

The Rest Is Noise
The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-10-16

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 1429932880

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Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.