Die Sieger and Die Wibelungen: How Parsifal is the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-270
Author(s):  
Paul Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Strong Belief ◽  
German Opera

Abstract Nineteenth-century German opera composer Richard Wagner was very knowledgeable about Buddhism and its teachings, at least for a European of that time, and he incorporated his knowledge of those teachings into his last five music dramas: The Ring of the Nibelung (a four-opera cycle) and his final opera, Parsifal. The Ring is traditionally performed separately from Parsifal, but this article explains how there is a basis to connect these five great works into one cycle, even to the extent where the performance of a five-opera cycle would one day become a reality. The basis for this connection includes Wagner’s own strong belief in reincarnation, as well as Buddhism’s general teaching and explanation of karma and rebirth.

scholarly journals The Flying Dutchman, English Spectacle and the Remediation of Grand Opera

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Vernacular Art ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Liberal Imagination ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
German Opera

AbstractRichard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered ‘upon a new path, that of Revolution against our modern Public Art’, that is,grand opéra. Wagner’s revolution has often been described in light of the poetics of return and homecoming that contributed a new sense of identity to (German) opera. The present article is written against the grain of this conviction, and highlights the cosmopolitan career of the phantom ship and of the vernacular art forms – the nautical theatre and the phantasmagoria – that maintained the seafaring image at the forefront of the liberal imagination, first in Britain, and then in Paris, where Wagner arguably seized on it. Specifically, it explores the significance of ‘apparitional images’ to mid-nineteenth-century opera and Wagner’s turn to a regime of modern spectacle, inspired by the art of phantasmagoria, inDer fliegende Holländer.

Reading a staging/Staging a reading

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Levin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
National Party ◽  
Critical Reading

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production of Der fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.

Wagner and the Romantic Hero. By Simon Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 193. $75 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-159
Author(s):  
Herbert Lindenberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Past ◽  
Romantic Hero

Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.

A Crash Course in Chopinology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kregor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Franz Liszt ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Western World ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Hector Berlioz ◽  
The World ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn

As the Western world celebrated the dawn of its third millennium, devotees of nineteenth-century art music started to prepare for a spate of bicentennials. By 2013, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner had been honoured with symposia, concerts, exhibitions and premieres the world over. These events offered opportunities for participants to take stock of who these composers once were, who they are now, and how they might endure to the next milestone anniversary.

Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German School

Abstract Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

From Theatre to Theatricality—How to Construct Reality

1995 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Technical Language ◽  
Short Period

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dominance of language, so typical of Western culture since the Renaissance, was increasingly challenged. As early as 1876, Nietzsche wrote on Richard Wagner in Thoughts Out of Season:He was the first to recognize an evil which is as widespread as civilization itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province— the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity—and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say, thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive confusion of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilization, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make this misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go.The disease of language which Nietzsche here diagnoses, can be described as a degeneration of language from the state of being a polyfunctional, ambiguous, flexible semiotic system that allows people to express their feelings, constitute their selves and communicate with each other, into a restrictive technical language.

Nietzsche’s Portraiture

1998 ◽  
pp. 91-96
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Late Period ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Individual Level

Richard Wagner always represented for Nietzsche the Germany of that time. By examining Nietzsche's relationship to Wagner throughout his writings, one is also examining Nietzsche's relationship to his culture of birth. I focus on the writings from the late period in order to clarify Nietzsche's view of his own project regarding German culture. I show that Nietzsche created a portrait of Wagner in which the composer was a worthy opponent-someone with whom he disagreed but viewed as an equal. Wagner was such an opponent because he represented the disease of decadence which plagued the culture and from which Nietzsche suffered for a time, but of which he also cured himself. In other words, Nietzsche emphasized his overcoming and revaluation of Wagner because he wanted his readers to understand it as a metaphor for his larger battle with decadence in general. The goal of this portraiture is to demonstrate on an individual level what could be done on a cultural level to revitalize culture. Through an analysis of Nietzsche's portrait of Wagner in the late period, I will claim that in order to understand Nietzsche's revaluation of decadent values in nineteenth century German culture, one must understand his relationship with the composer.

The Idea of National Opera, c. 1800*

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Leopold
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
The Other ◽  
German Language ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Century Thought

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of many composers who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thought more and more about a German-language opera. The idea of a German national opera was intensively discussed in Mannheim, and also put into practice with Ignaz Holzbauer's setting of Anton Klein's libretto Günther von Schwarzburg (1777). The idea of the national opera took hold in Europe during the nineteenth century. Is the German national opera, which composers and writers on music from Richard Wagner to Hans Pfitzner see as starting with Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz, a historical reality or a historiographical construct? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes a brief look at the situation of opera around 1800, for only in Germany, and not in the other two leading opera nations, Italy and France, can a development at this time be observed in which the idea of a national opera takes shape.

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