Wagner as Man and Artist PDF Download

Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Author: M. Owen Lee
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802082916
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Father Lee traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politicsand argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.

Author: M. Owen Lee
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692952
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger has always called forth superlatives from those who have fallen under its spell. Toscanini wanted to lay his baton down for the last time only after he had conducted a performance of it. Paderewski called it 'the greatest work of genius ever achieved by any artist in any field of human endeavour.' H.L. Mencken declared, 'It took more skill to plan and write it than it took to plan and write the whole canon of Shakespeare.' And yet Wagner's many-splendoured comedy has come under severe criticism in recent years for what has been called its 'dark underside,' its 'fascist brutality,' and its 'ugly anti-Semitism.' In Wagner and the Wonder of Art, renowned opera expert M. Owen Lee addresses that criticism. He also provides an introduction to the opera and an analysis that will surprise even those veteran operagoers who may not have explored the work's intricate structure and the emotional drama at its centre. The book includes the on-air commentary that Father Lee gave during the first radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera after the events of 9/11. He thought it necessary, after attempting to refute the charges leveled against Wagner's opera, to say something about its truthfulness, its life-affirming music, its insight into the madness that can destroy human lives, and its witness to the importance of art for the survival of our civilizations.

Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879100520
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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A biography of Wagner the man, the beginning composer, and the mature artist

Author: Ernest Newman
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780331650587
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Excerpt from Wagner as Man and Artist It is in keeping with the whole character of the man that he Should have left us more copious documentary material concerning himself than any other artist has ever done. Publicity was as much a necessity to him as food and air. The most interesting person in the universe to him was always himself and he took good care that the world Should not suffer from any lack of know ledge oi a phenomenon which he rightly held to be unique. It would be a Sign of unwisdom to despise him for this. It has to be recognised that whatever criticism the contemporary moralist might have to pass upon this or that portion of Wagner's conduct with the outer world, he was always the soul of purity and stead fastness in the pursuit of his ideal. He believed he had come into the world to do a great and indispensable work and if he occasion ally sacrificed others to his ideal, it must be admitted that he never hesitated to sacrifice himself. Regarded purely as an artist, no man has ever kept his conscience more free from stain. And it is precisely this ever-present burning sense of the inherent greatness of his mission that accounts primarily for his constant pouring-out of himself, not only in music - his musical output. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429944544
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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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.

Author: Ronald Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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"Ronald Taylor has set out to provide in a single volume a substantial all-round life-and-work to place alongside the many specialist and partial studies of Wagner. He essays to cover all main aspects of Wagner within a coherent biographical framework, basing his account on primary sources such as Wagner's autobiographical writings and letters, the reminiscences of Liszt, Nietzsche and other friends and associates, and the complete diary of Cosima, first published in 1977. The restless existence that Wagner led from his schooldays to the end of his life, his revolutionary activity, his love affairs, his pursuit of luxury and his perpetual debts, his extraordinary self-centredness and manipulation of others, the famous men and women around him, the heaven-sent patronage of the lonely and eccentric arch-romantic King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the building of his personal temple, the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth--this is the stuff of absorbing biography. And there can be scarcely any other composer whose life was so bound up with the events of his time, and so compellingly illustrative of them, as Wagner's. The 1830 Revolution in France and the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, the heady radical and hedonistic notions of the Young German movement, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the urge towards German political unification--these played crucial parts in moulding his mind. Ronald Taylor not only discusses Wagner's compositions as works of art, but shows how each of them, from Die Feen to Parsifal, is grounded in its creator's intellectual and spiritual development. He considers, for example, the allegorical significance of The Ring in terms of Wagner's views on society and human relationships, the indelible mark left by the experience of being spurned by the bourgeois taste of 1830s Paris, and demonstrates how a work which contains such nationalistic elements can at the same time be one of the overwhelming achievements in European culture. The elaborate structure of ideas and theories that surrounds Wagner's music is further revealed by succinct accounts of his political, social, and musical thinking at all periods of his career as expressed in his key writings on culture and society, the role of the artist in the community, the musical scene in nineteenth-century Europe, and many other subjects. In a postscript the main lines of the controversies--musical, philosophical and psychological--that have raged over Wagner from his lifetime onwards are shown in a balanced selection of statements by prominent, and diverse, figures such as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Debussy, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, Bruno Walter, Adorno and Boulez." --Jacket.

Author: Ethan Wagner
Publisher: Phaidon Press
ISBN: 9780714849775
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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"This book offers clear advice on how to navigate the contemporary art world, from assessing sales information and dealing with galleries to discovering new talent and accessing the best work."--P. [4] of cover.

Author: Anne M. Wagner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520268474
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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“In this much-needed and courageous book, Anne Wagner lays down a gauntlet to all those interested in modern and contemporary art: to think anew about these works by canonic artists, and about the relationship of art to recent history and politics. Wagner presents an exhilarating and innovative set of closely worked historical arguments that are remarkably timely, and her lucid prose makes complex ideas and critical debates accessible to a broad audience.”—Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art, UCL “In A House Divided, Anne Wagner takes on the so-called post-war era in American art and asks searching questions about what that term might mean now, amid cultural division and perpetual war. Far more than a sum of its parts, this collection of essays is essential reading on American artists' ‘post-war’ responses to nationalism, state violence, and the 1960s.”—Mignon Nixon, author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art