Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674064291
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Wagner and the Erotic Impulse by : Laurence Dreyfus

Download or read book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813Ð1883) 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 WagnerÕs obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as TannhŠuser, Die WalkŸre, 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 SchopenhauerÕs Òmetaphysics of sexual love.Ó 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, WagnerÕs achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyedÑas never beforeÑhow music could act on erotic impulse.

Richard Wagner and the Jews

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Author :
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

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226924629
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (269 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Wagner by : Martin Geck

Download or read book Richard Wagner written by Martin Geck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-09-18 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner’s compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. A landmark study of one of music’s most important figures “People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years . . . will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.” —Tablet “Geck describes a Wagner who is grounded, focused and even cautious, a savvy realist and ironist rather than a flamboyant, flailing ideologue . . . Suffused with his readings of contemporary productions of the operas, Geck’s musical analyses are succinct and superb” —New York Times “As an editor of Wagner’s Complete Works, Geck brings a deep familiarity with the composer to his task.” —Weekly Standard “A thoroughly approachable yet consistently provocative study.” —Thomas S. Grey, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner

Book on Music

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674049437
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (494 download)

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Book Synopsis Book on Music by : Florentius

Download or read book Book on Music written by Florentius and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited here for the first time is Florentius de Faxolis' music treatise for Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. The richly illuminated small parchment codex bears witness to the musical interests of the cardinal, himself an avid singer. The author's unusual insights into the musical thinking of his day are discussed in the ample commentary.

This is Pop

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674013216
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (132 download)

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Book Synopsis This is Pop by : Eric Weisbard

Download or read book This is Pop written by Eric Weisbard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is an inquiry that crosses stylistic categories of pop music and writing pop music.

Bach's Continuo Group

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Bach's Continuo Group by : Laurence Dreyfus

Download or read book Bach's Continuo Group written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Bach's cantatas, masses, passions, and chorales were originally performed under the composer's direction, which instruments played the basso continuo, the line that establishes the harmonic framework? This book answers this and other fundamental questions and probes the rationale behind Baroque performance conventions.

Opera and Modern Culture

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520251601
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Opera and Modern Culture by : Lawrence Kramer

Download or read book Opera and Modern Culture written by Lawrence Kramer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Outstanding. Kramer's scholarship is as impeccable as his insights are at once original and consistently brilliant. The presentation is thorough, and the argument is well anchored in theory, history and musical detail. Kramer's discourse is crystalline and jargon free. The connections from one chapter to another are seamless. The story is, simply stated, a page-turner."—Richard Leppert, editor of Theodor W. Adorno's Essays on Music "Lawrence Kramer's Opera and Modern Culture is remarkable both for its imaginative exploration of important issues and for the rich array of the author's engagements with other thinkers. In particular, by decentering without dismissing the composer (who could dismiss Wagner?), he makes works of reception—productions of Salome on video, uses of the Lohengrin Prelude by Charlie Chaplin and W.E.B. Du Bois—central texts in the process of understanding the phenomenon of opera, rather than footnotes to an idea that he really does dismiss: 'the work itself.'"—James Parakilas, author of Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano and Introduction to Opera (forthcoming)

Bach and the Patterns of Invention

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067423829X
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Bach and the Patterns of Invention by : Laurence Dreyfus

Download or read book Bach and the Patterns of Invention written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new interpretation of the music of J.S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach's music "against the grain" of contemporaries, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.

The Rest Is Noise

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429932880
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rest Is Noise by : Alex Ross

Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Symphonic Aspirations

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674033597
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (335 download)

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Book Synopsis Symphonic Aspirations by : Karen Painter

Download or read book Symphonic Aspirations written by Karen Painter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-15 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can music be political? Germans have long claimed the symphony as a pillar of their modern national culture. By 1900, the critical discourse on music, particularly symphonies, rose to such prominence as to command front-page news. With the embrace of the Great War, the humiliation of defeat, and the ensuing economic turmoil, music evolved from the most abstract to the most political of the arts. Even Goebbels saw the symphony as a tool of propaganda. More than composers or musicians, critics were responsible for this politicization of music, aspiring to change how music was heard and understood. Once hailed as a source of individual heroism, the symphony came to serve a communal vision. Karen Painter examines the politicization of musical listening in Germany and Austria, showing how nationalism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, and socialism profoundly affected the experience of serious music. Her analysis draws on a vast collection of writings on the symphony, particularly those of Mahler and Bruckner, to offer compelling evidence that music can and did serve ideological ends. She traces changes in critical discourse that reflected but also contributed to the historical conditions of the fin de siecle, World War I, and the Nazi regime.

Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674831025
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century by : Tomás Marco

Download or read book Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century written by Tomás Marco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the exhilarating impact of Isaac Albeniz at the beginning of the century to today's complex and adventurous avant-garde, this complete interpretive history introduces twentieth-century Spanish music to English-speaking readers. With graceful authority, Tomas Marco, award-winning composer, critic, and bright light of Spanish music since the 1960s, covers the entire spectrum of composers and their works: trends and movements, critical and popular reception, national institutions, influences from Europe and beyond, and the effect of such historic events as the Spanish Civil War and the death of Franco. Marco's penetrating aesthetic critiques are threaded throughout each phase of this rich account. Marco provides detailed coverage of the key figures, induding a chapter devoted entirely to Manuel de Falla--Spain's most celebrated twentieth-century composer--and a panoramic survey of recent arrivals on the contemporary music scene. Exploring the rise and fall of the zarzuela, the author highlights innovative works in this authentic Spanish genre. He analyzes the attempts to find an audience for Spanish opera; demonstrates the flowering of symphonic and chamber music at the beginning of this century; traces currents such as romanticism, impressionism, and neoclassicism; and tracks the influence of Spain's distinctive regional folk traditions. Covering musical innovation after Spain's emergence from its period of isolation, Marco notes the speed with which many composers absorbed the work of Stravinsky and Bartok, the twelve-tone system, aleatory forms, electronic techniques, and other European developments. English-speaking scholars, musicians, critics and general readers have for decades been without full information on the rich and varied work coming out of Spain in this century. This lively history fills a long-felt need and fills it superbly, with the knowledge and insights of a major figure in the musical world.

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.

Just Around Midnight

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416597
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Just Around Midnight by : Jack Hamilton

Download or read book Just Around Midnight written by Jack Hamilton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Jimi Hendrix died, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet ten years earlier, Chuck Berry had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become white? Jack Hamilton challenges the racial categories that distort standard histories of rock music and the 60s revolution.

Freedom and the Arts

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674069897
Total Pages : 647 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom and the Arts by : Charles Rosen

Download or read book Freedom and the Arts written by Charles Rosen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.

Music and the Historical Imagination

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674591295
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Music and the Historical Imagination by : Leo Treitler

Download or read book Music and the Historical Imagination written by Leo Treitler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Treitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780964031746
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (317 download)

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Book Synopsis City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music by : Michael Scott Cuthbert

Download or read book City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music written by Michael Scott Cuthbert and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music explores how space, urban life, landscape, and time transformed plainchant and other musical forms. Thirteen essays address a wide range of topics and regions--from Beneventan chant in Italy and Dalmatia, to music theory in medieval France, to later transformations of chant in Iceland and Spain.

Wagner's Melodies

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107014301
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Wagner's Melodies by : David Trippett

Download or read book Wagner's Melodies written by David Trippett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wagner's Melodies places the composer's ideas about melody in the context of the scientific discourse of his age.