The Darker Side of Genius

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781584652403
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (524 download)

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Book Synopsis The Darker Side of Genius by : Jacob Katz

Download or read book The Darker Side of Genius written by Jacob Katz and published by . This book was released on 2002-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism considered in the context of his time, place, and aspirations rather than in relation to his later appropriation by the Nazis.

Richard Wagner and the Jews

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Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786491388
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Wagner and the Jews by : Milton E. Brener

Download or read book Richard Wagner and the Jews written by Milton E. Brener and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well known that Richard Wagner, the renowned and controversial 19th century composer, exhibited intense anti–Semitism. The evidence is everywhere in his writings as well as in conversations his second wife recorded in her diaries. In his infamous essay “Judaism in Music,” Wagner forever cemented his unpleasant reputation with his assertion that Jews were incapable of either creating or appreciating great art. Wagner’s close ties with many talented Jews, then, are surprising. Most writers have dismissed these connections as cynical manipulations and rank hypocrisy. Examination of the original sources, however, reveals something different: unmistakeable, undeniable empathy and friendship between Wagner and the Jews in his life. Indeed, the composer had warm relationships with numerous individual Jews. Two of them resided frequently over extended periods in his home. One of these, the rabbi’s son Hermann Levi, conducted Wagner’s final opera—Parsifal, based on Christian legend—at Wagner’s request; no one, Wagner declared, understood his work so well. Even in death his Jewish friends were by his side; two were among his twelve pallbearers. The contradictions between Wagner’s antipathy toward the amorphous entity “The Jews” and his genuine friendships with individual Jews are the subject of this book. Drawing on extensive sources in both German and English, including Wagner’s autobiography and diary and the diaries of his second wife, this comprehensive treatment of Wagner’s anti–Semitism is the first to place it in perspective with his life and work. Included in the text are portions of unpublished letters exchanged between Wagner and Hermann Levi. Altogether, the book reveals astonishing complexities in a man long known as much for his prejudice as for his epic contributions to opera.

Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination

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Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803297920
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (979 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination by : Marc A. Weiner

Download or read book Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination written by Marc A. Weiner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the most hotly contested debates in contemporary cultural life: the question of how anti-Semitism figures in the operas of Richard Wagner. Until now, scholars have generally acknowledged Wagner's anti-Semitism but have argued that it is irrelevant to the operas themselves. Marc A. Weiner challenges that traditional view by asserting that anti-Semitism is a crucial, pervasive feature in Wagner's operas. Weiner argues that the operas exemplify and contribute to a vast collection of images that are patently anti-Semitic - and that were readily recognized as such by nineteenth-century German audiences. These images were associated particularly with the body. Through a careful examination of Wagner's music, libretti, and stage directions, Weiner reconstructs iconographies of corporeal images - iconographies of the eye, voice, smell, gait, and sexuality - that were essential to the operas and were "associated with anti-Semitism and the longing for an imagined German community".

Judaism in Music

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Publisher : Blurb
ISBN 13 : 9780464900054
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Judaism in Music by : Richard Wagner

Download or read book Judaism in Music written by Richard Wagner and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous "Ring" Trilogy composer Richard Wagner argues in this essay that Jewish involvement in European culture always had a negative and distorting impact. Jews, Wagner wrote, did not have the European "folkish soul" required to create genuinely European art, and, as a result, were only imitators who crassly deformed all that they produced. As a result, he said, all art-be it musical or otherwise-from Jewish sources was always shallow and a mockery of true art. Along the way, he discusses the Jewish type, and their broader influence in society. First published in 1850, "Judaism in Music" created a storm which forever earned him the hatred of the Jewish lobby in Germany and elsewhere. Originally issued under a pseudonym, Wagner republished the book in 1869, along with a supplement, under his own name. In the supplement, Wagner discusses the reaction to the original essay's publication, and goes on to discuss how the Jews controlled the major newspapers and theaters of his day, and how the media turned against him after the 1850 essay saw the light of day. This edition also contains Wagner's 1878 essay "What is German," which contains further remarks on Jewish activities within Germany.

Jewry in Music

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139505351
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis Jewry in Music by : David Conway

Download or read book Jewry in Music written by David Conway and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures – not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.

Forbidden Music

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300154313
Total Pages : 505 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Forbidden Music by : Michael Haas

Download or read book Forbidden Music written by Michael Haas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div

A Knight at the Opera

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Publisher : Purdue University Press
ISBN 13 : 1557536015
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (575 download)

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Book Synopsis A Knight at the Opera by : Leah Garrett

Download or read book A Knight at the Opera written by Leah Garrett and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannh user played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. Readers will see how Tannh user evolves from a medieval knight to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannh user as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.

Wagnerism

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429944544
Total Pages : 784 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Wagnerism by : Alex Ross

Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Wagner Clan

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Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 1555848478
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (558 download)

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Book Synopsis The Wagner Clan by : Jonathan Carr

Download or read book The Wagner Clan written by Jonathan Carr and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2009-01-19 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This chronicle of renowned composer Richard Wagner and his descendants features “a cast of characters who are positively operatic in their histrionics” (The Guardian). Richard Wagner was many things—composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite—and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy. In his “lively and wry” history of the legendary composer and his family, biographer Jonathan Carr also offers fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Arturo Toscanini, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Adolf Hitler—a passionate fan of the Master’s music and an adopted uncle to Wagner’s grandchildren (The New York Times). Stretching from the revolutions of 1848 to the darkest days of World War II and through to the present incarnation of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival, The Wagner Clan is “a smart, insightful look into German history” and a family whose saga is as gripping as any opera (New York Post). “Jonathan Carr’s history is formidable . . . [A] compendious and enthralling story.” —The Economist “The grandiose life of Richard Wagner—the pronouncements on art and the German soul, the petty groveling for money and favors, the intermittently atrocious politics and intermittently glorious music—was a tough act to follow. Carr . . . follows Wagner’s descendants through three generations as they fight each other for control of the Bayreuth Festival and, at opportune times, embrace, reject or sweep under the rug their forebear’s status as Nazism’s spiritual godfather. . . . Carr’s sprightly, fluent narrative places the family in its historical and intellectual context without reducing it to the symbolic effigy it has often become.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Wagner

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300067453
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (674 download)

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Book Synopsis Wagner by : Paul Lawrence Rose

Download or read book Wagner written by Paul Lawrence Rose and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been acknowledged that Richard Wagner was a virulent antisemite, yet the composer has also been characterized as an idealistic revolutionary, and historians have puzzled over the paradox of these conflicting elements in his character. In this fascinating book, Paul Lawrence Rose argues that Wagner did not suddenly change from a progressive revolutionary into a reactionary racist; for him, as for many other Germans, the idea of revolution always contained a racial and antisemtic core. Rose approaches Wagner on varying levels so as to see him as he really was: he places Wagner within the context of mid-nineteenth-century German revolutionary culture; he studies the composer's whole range of theoretical and artistic works, tracing his career and the evolution of his thought; and he considers Wagner's personality and his personal relationships (especially with those Jews who considered themselves his friends). Rose demonstrates that Wagner's conversion to antisemitism dates not from 1850--the year in which his infamous essay Judaism in Music was published--but from his conflict with the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer three years earlier over the Berlin production of Rienze. This affects our understanding of the genesis of the Ring operas. In addition, Rose offers fresh and stimulating interpretations of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal, based on an analysis of their revolutionary and antisemitic elements.

Judaism in Music and Other Essays

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Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803297661
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (976 download)

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Book Synopsis Judaism in Music and Other Essays by : Richard Wagner

Download or read book Judaism in Music and Other Essays written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Richard Wagner and His World

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400831784
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Wagner and His World by : Thomas S. Grey

Download or read book Richard Wagner and His World written by Thomas S. Grey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wagner (1813-1883) aimed to be more than just a composer. He set out to redefine opera as a "total work of art" combining the highest aspirations of drama, poetry, the symphony, the visual arts, even religion and philosophy. Equally celebrated and vilified in his own time, Wagner continues to provoke debate today regarding his political legacy as well as his music and aesthetic theories. Wagner and His World examines his works in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Seven original essays investigate such topics as music drama in light of rituals of naming in the composer's works and the politics of genre; the role of leitmotif in Wagner's reception; the urge for extinction in Tristan und Isolde as psychology and symbol; Wagner as his own stage director; his conflicted relationship with pianist-composer Franz Liszt; the anti-French satire Eine Kapitulation in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; and responses of Jewish writers and musicians to Wagner's anti-Semitism. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Karol Berger, Leon Botstein, Lydia Goehr, Kenneth Hamilton, Katherine Syer, and Christian Thorau. This book also includes translations of essays, reviews, and memoirs by champions and detractors of Wagner; glimpses into his domestic sphere in Tribschen and Bayreuth; and all of Wagner's program notes to his own works. Introductions and annotations are provided by the editor and David Breckbill, Mary A. Cicora, James Deaville, Annegret Fauser, Steven Huebner, David Trippett, and Nicholas Vazsonyi.

Nietzsche's Jewish Problem

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400873908
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Nietzsche's Jewish Problem by : Robert C. Holub

Download or read book Nietzsche's Jewish Problem written by Robert C. Holub and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, Nietzsche's views about Jews and Judaism have been subject to countless polemics. The Nazis infamously fashioned the philosopher as their anti-Semitic precursor, while in the past thirty years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The increasingly popular view today is that Nietzsche was not only completely free of racist tendencies but also was a principled adversary of anti-Jewish thought. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem offers a definitive reappraisal of the controversy, taking the full historical, intellectual, and biographical context into account. As Robert Holub shows, a careful consideration of all the evidence from Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings and letters reveals that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem demonstrates how this is so despite the apparent paradox of the philosopher’s well-documented opposition to the crude political anti-Semitism of the Germany of his day. As Holub explains, Nietzsche’s "anti-anti-Semitism" was motivated more by distaste for vulgar nationalism than by any objection to anti-Jewish prejudice. A richly detailed account of a controversy that goes to the heart of Nietzsche’s reputation and reception, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem will fascinate anyone interested in philosophy, intellectual history, or the history of anti-Semitism.

A Portrait of Mendelssohn

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300127863
Total Pages : 605 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis A Portrait of Mendelssohn by : Clive Brown

Download or read book A Portrait of Mendelssohn written by Clive Brown and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn’s music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. In this valuable book Clive Brown weaves together a rich array of documents—letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more—to present a balanced and fascinating picture of the composer and his work. Rejecting the received view of Mendelssohn as a facile, lightweight musician, Brown demonstrates that he was in fact an innovative and highly cerebral composer who exerted a powerful influence on musical thought into the twentieth century. Brown discusses Mendelssohn’s family background and education; the role of religion and race in his life and reputation; his experiences as practical musician (pianist, organist, string player, conductor) and as teacher and composer; the critical reception of his works; and the vicissitudes of his posthumous reputation. The book also includes a range of hitherto unpublished sketches made by Mendelssohn. The result is an unprecedented portrayal of the man and his achievements as viewed through his own words and those of his contempories.

Twilight of the Wagners

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312264048
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis Twilight of the Wagners by : Gottfried Wagner

Download or read book Twilight of the Wagners written by Gottfried Wagner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-05-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wagner chronicles his family's itinerary with National Socialism, from his great-grandfather's anti-Semitic pamphlets to his father's, uncle's and grandparents' close relationship with Adolf Hitler. The discovery of his family's past led him on a crusade to examine the hatred and racism he knew growing up in Bayreuth. 16-page photo insert.

Aspects of Wagner

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780192840127
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Aspects of Wagner by : Bryan Magee

Download or read book Aspects of Wagner written by Bryan Magee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1988 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

With My Own Eyes

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Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9780874516395
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (163 download)

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Book Synopsis With My Own Eyes by : Jacob Katz

Download or read book With My Own Eyes written by Jacob Katz and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1995 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lovely and moving memoir, the world's most distinguished scholar of Jewish social history recalls a life that in many ways encapsulates the arduous path of the remnant of East European Jewry through the cataclysmic events of this century. After a childhood in the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, Jacob Katz left his native Hungary to attend the famous Yeshiva of Pressburg. He later entered the University of Frankfurt, where in 1934 he received the last doctorate granted to a Jew in Nazi Germany. Heeding ominous undercurrents, Katz immigrated to Palestine-Israel in 1936. There he witnessed the birth of the new state and the growth of the prestigious Hebrew University. With My Own Eyes, guided by the hand and eye of the consummate historian, poignantly recreates the atmosphere of the period in which the author has lived.