Wagner's Opera Research Articles

Nineteenth-Century Richard Wagner: Unconventional Female Roles and Emerging Feminist Discourse

Operas of the 19th century adhered to realism, often drawing inspiration from real-life situations. In the social context of the era, women were often relegated to positions of weakness and lacked societal status, rendering them subject to the scrutiny of male perspectives. However, Richard Wagner's operas distinguished themselves by endowing female characters with prominence and authority. This article seeks to investigate Wagner's effective empowerment of women, focusing on the plot and role analysis of Brnnhilde, the female character from "Die Walkre." Subsequently, a combination of document analysis and literature review are synthesized, showing the diverse perspectives of scholars who have examined Wagner's individualism and his portrayal of female characters in his operas. Ultimately, it is apparent that the formidable female figures in Wagner's operas boldly challenge prevailing social norms, embodying the essence of love and redemption. While scholars hold varying interpretations regarding Wagner's approach to feminism, it is irrefutable that these non-traditional female characters occupy central positions in his works, infused with profound emotions and at the core of dramatic storytelling.

Are Richard Wagner's operas a potential tool to teach medical students and young doctors humanities?

Abstract There is an increasing interest in using poems and novels as a powerful resource to teach medical students ethical and professional behavior, virtues, and to illustrate the complexity of the doctor–patient relationship. This approach as part of a narrative medicine provides a framework for approaching a patient’s problems more holistically and also offers a method for addressing existential inner qualities such as grief, hope, and despair that are part of illnesses. Occasionally, operas (mainly Italian) have also been used for this purpose. I however, propose that medical students may learn a lot from a deeper confrontation with the operas from the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Certainly, Wagner had a rather self-centered personality, also known for his notorious nationalistic and anti-Semitic essays, but his complete Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) encompasses almost every human feeling, conflict, and psychological problem including suffering, compassion, redemption, etc. Wagner’s opera somewhat reflected his unsteady life. Wagner was convinced that his art could fill the void left by the retreat of traditional religion, suggesting that humanity may achieve freedom through the perception of beauty uniting communities through shared aesthetic experience. Not a very modest approach and not a very likable character, but a great composer. After a short biography, I will provide some (because of the complexity of the subject, naturally limited) arguments on what medical students can learn from Wagner operas, even though I am convinced that Wagner and his music are not easy to digest, even for experienced opera lovers.Key messages

James Joyce's Liebestod : Fascism as Civil War

Abstract: The ending of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake rewrites the Liebestod , or love-death aria, at the end of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde . Joyce's parody of the Liebestod replaces the fascist myth of national redemption with endless cycles of love and suffering in history. The novel's circularity thereby forms a riposte to the redemption narrative in fascist politics. Joyce's composition and revision of Finnegans Wake from 1922, during the Irish Civil War, to 1939, when he left Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation, illustrate how he understood racial, sexual, and bourgeois desires in nationalism through an artistic trope like the Liebestod , and how he used it to narratively resist the seemingly teleological ascent of fascism in Europe. Further, civil war provides a model for parodying the ideology of racial supremacy by casting it as an attack on one's countrymen and kin.

Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural ed. by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco

Reviewed by: Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural ed. by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco Walter Aaron Clark Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural. Edited by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco. (Comares música.) Granada: Comares, 2021. [xi, 397 p. ISBN 9748413690520 (paperback), €33.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography. Ludwig van Beethoven's legacy is not one that we associate with Spain. At least it is not immediately apparent what sort of influence he and his music might have exercised on Spanish composers, concert artists, and audiences. We associate Beethoven with the genre of the symphony, but symphonic organizations were slow to develop in Spain during the 1800s, and Beethoven's symphonies only gradually gained traction with concert audiences there. And Spanish composers themselves never cultivated the symphony with any notable results. True, they composed an abundance of orchestral music, especially tone poems, ballets, and concertos, many of which have found a secure niche in the canonical repertoire. But one strains to think of a single Spanish symphony that has achieved the stature of Isaac Albéniz's Catalonia, Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat, or Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. For whatever reason, Spanish composers were simply not drawn to the musical abstractions of the symphony—which is not to say they never composed them. Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (1806–1826) was a young composer whose promising career as a symphonist was cut short by a premature demise. And though they are far better known for their zarzuelas and operas, both Tomás Bretón and Ruperto Chapí essayed symphonic works. Joaquín Turina's Sinfonia sevillana (1920) also comes to mind, though it may be the exception that proves the rule, since it is as much a three-movement tone poem as it is a symphony. And yet it should not come as a complete surprise that the Iberian penetration of the Austro-Germanic heritage of which Beethoven was the crowning glory is on full display here. Joseph Haydn was hugely popular in Spain, and his Die Sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze was an orchestral work commissioned by the city of Cadiz in 1786. And in the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner's operas and operatic philosophies were adopted and adapted by many admirers, including Felipe Pedrell, Albéniz, and Enrique Granados, among others. To be sure, this heritage was not confined to symphonies and operas. As this volume makes perfectly clear, the impact of Beethoven's chamber music and piano sonatas was immense, felt first within the salons of the elite before it made its way to concert venues populated by a growing middle class. Thus, Beethoven, a larger-than-life symbol of Viennese classicism and incipient romanticism, is not out of place in Iberian music history, and it was about time that someone undertook to examine his undoubted impact in both Spain and Portugal. That someone is Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, a leading musicologist in Spain and professor at the Universidad de La Rioja in Logroño. She assembled a dream team of scholars for this trailblazing collection of essays, which will be of great interest and value not only to Hispanists but also to anyone interested in the global scope of Beethoven interpretation and reception. The editor's insightful introduction concerns issues of reception, discourses, and canonicity relative to Beethoven. As she astutely points out, "Almost two centuries after his death, Beethoven is today the most-programmed composer, an icon of practices associated with 'classical music' and one that constitutes a model for certain attitudes and behaviors, an example of an idea of emancipated humanity that was defined at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 1, my trans.). She then establishes the necessary tenor and parameters for the volume, which offers a generous collection of twenty essays, divided into nine major parts, by twenty-five scholars. This collection is the outgrowth of a 2020 [End Page 393] conference dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth and organized by the "Música y Prensa" group of the Sociedad Española de Musicología. Yet, as the editor advises, these...

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Nietzsche's Rejection of Wagner

Nietzsche's late anti-Wagner tracts receive little attention from political scientists, yet they offer important insights into Nietzsche's philosophical thought and into the relationship of art to political behavior. For Nietzsche, both the romantic and the 'Christian' elements of Wagner's operas embody the 'slave morality' that is characteristic of modernity. 'Decadent' art like Wagner's tends to deaden the listener to the moral demands of real life, and instead promotes a longing for a transfigured exterior world. This can be manifested politically in the form of ideological movements that aim to destroy the old order and erect a new utopian order in its place. In these writings Nietzsche positions himself against expansive romanticism and nihilism, and emerges as a surprisingly strong classicist, albeit an unconventional one.

Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera, by Gabriela Cruz

<i>Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera</i>, by Gabriela Cruz

Wagner's Shakespeare: Das Liebesverbot, the Problem Comedy and the Carnivalesque

This paper explores Wagner's early comedic opera, Das Liebesverbot. Though his ‘mature comedy’ Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been the focus of much scholarly attention, the composer's first and only other foray into the genre has been much less studied and often outright dismissed. While contemporary scholars have increasingly looked to Wagner's pre-Dutchman operas, they often read them purely in light of his later works; with this examination of his adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, I offer a consideration of the young composer's work in its own right. After considering issues of textual and cultural adaptation, this paper offers close readings of several passages of the opera, in tandem with parallel scenes from the original play-text, to show how Wagner's transformation of this not-quite-so-comedic comedy into an expression of the carnivalesque reveals an expansive and cosmopolitan artistic and political philosophy during a period during which he was greatly influenced by the authors of the Junges Deutschland movement. Such a reconsideration disrupts the standard conception of a composer who is still often considered, in his own words, the ‘most German being’. Here, we see Wagner at arguably his most cosmopolitan, adapting the work of an English playwright he revered, altering the plot so that it ostensibly aligned with the ideological outlook of his German revolutionary colleagues, and setting it to music of a decidedly French and Italian flavour, all this in a way that still preserves many of the same, seemingly contradictory themes present in the original play.

Recent Research in Singing

Recent Research in Singing Donald Simonson Click for larger view View full resolution Donald Simonson The following list of recent research in singing is a brief sampling of dissertations/theses published during the last year. It is by no means comprehensive and reflects only a small fraction of the available documents. If you have published recent research in singing, voice pedagogy, voice science, vocal repertoire, pedagogic methodology, or other topics of interest to the membership of NATS, please send citations and abstracts to Donald Simonson at drs@iastate.edu for review and possible inclusion in future columns. ________ Brown, Julie A. "The Unique 'Pelléas et Mélisande:' A Closer Look at Claude Debussy's One and Only Opera." MA Thesis, Webster University, St. Louis, 2021, 96 pages; ProQuest 2542413613. "French composer Claude Debussy's compositions symbolize the definition of twentieth century music. His use of unresolved wandering dominant seventh chords, the use of ninth, elevenths, and thirteenth chords, the use of pentatonic and whole-tone scales, and extreme dynamics and orchestral timbre are trademark characteristics of his style. However, it is the uniqueness of his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, that elevates Debussy's music to a higher level and establishes his notoriety in the world of opera. The purpose of this thesis is to discover the various methods Debussy used in composing Pelléas et Mélisande that would classify Debussy's opera in its own category of uniqueness. This thesis also takes an in-depth look at the background of the opera and the libretto of Pelléas et Mélisande. It provides information on the plot, an analysis of the unaccompanied recitative and vocal inflection of the libretto with passing tones and neighbor tones, and the motifs Debussy used to establish his characters, and is supported by musical examples. Debussy's symbolism is discussed as well as his use of polytonality, polyrhythms, poly-meters, dynamic changes, and tempo changes. Finally, this thesis will show a comparison between Debussy's opera and Wagner's opera and give an orchestral and harmonic score analysis of Pelléas et Mélisande to discover what makes Debussy's one and only opera so unique." (ProQuest/Author Abstract) ________ Brown, Ryan Russell. "'We Tell Each Other Stories': Musical Dramaturgy in Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard." DMA Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2021, 181 pages; ProQuest 2555923452. "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of choral organizations which pay their members has increased greatly. Along with the emergence of these professional choirs, there is an increased focus on considering the audience experience. One of the ways that professional choral organizations are seeking to elevate the audience experience is through storytelling. Consequently, professional choirs are commissioning and performing oratorios with greater frequency. Considering Matthew Shepard, a modern chamber oratorio composed by Craig Hella Johnson, serves as [End Page 533] an archetype of this new era of musical dramaturgy in choral music. Interviewing conductors of professional choirs and investigating practices in script-writing, the author applies modern concepts of narrative discourse to oratorio. The author explores musical dramaturgy within Considering Matthew Shepard using 'action analysis' and suggests performance practices which highlight the musical dramaturgy within the work." (ProQuest/Author Abstract) ________ Chan, Vania L. "Mindful Singing: Exploring Mindfulness and Self-Regulation in Classical Singing." PhD Dissertation, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2020, 166 pages; Access through the following link, Chan_Vania_L_2020_PhD.pdf (4.712Mb). "The harmonious partnership between the mind and body lies at the core of practice and performance for classical singers. Mindfulness (staying in the present moment) and Self-regulation (understanding and controlling one's own learning environment) are key concepts that when applied to the discipline of classical singing, could help to enhance the growth of efficient learning skills and healthy vocal development. This paper gathers the philosophies and perspectives of respected researchers (including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and K. Anders Ericsson), and organizes them into three separate stages: 1) Mindfulness Stage One—which involves mindfulness meditation, developing awareness and increased concentration by paying exclusive attention to the breath, 2) Self-Regulation—which centers on deliberate practice, the experts' approach to acquiring...

Performing obstacles in Wagner's opera music (on the example of the role of a Tangouzer)

Performing obstacles in Wagner's opera music (on the example of the role of a Tangouzer)

The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith Sarah McCarroll (bio) Matthew Wilson Smith. The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 221 b/w illus. $39.95. To assert that the theatre is a place where larger political, social, cultural, and/or scientific developments are embodied via performance is nothing new. What is new in what Matthew Wilson Smith has to say about the performance of developing philosophical and medical discourses of the human nervous system during the nineteenth century is his understanding of the ways in which those discourses did not just influence dramatic texts or themes, but lie at the heart of dramatic structures, presentational styles, and the expected effects that productions had on audiences. In The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre, Smith traces a move from a gestural, representational drama to one in which representation has been fully disrupted, one which "sought to play directly on the nerves of spectators through non-representational and sensorial means and did not so much eschew representation as profoundly destabilize it by means of direct effects upon the audience's sensorium" (11). The question this move immediately raises is how theatre, a form with embodied representation at the heart of its traditional act, can function in the absence of a stable notion of representation; in short, how mimesis is possible for the neural subject. Smith's answer to this question is ultimately found in the work of Antonin Artaud, which emerges here not as the radical epistemological (one might even say ontological) departure from "traditional" theatrical forms it is often positioned as being, but as the endpoint of a century-long "decay of the language of gesture as an accurate representation of mental states [from which] modern European theater emerged" (183), one in which can be seen "a gradual transition from the dominance of a discourse of gestural representation to one of nervous sensation" (183). As Smith sure-handedly explores these cross-fades from the gestural to the nervous to the sensational, he pairs the work of neurologists, philosophers, and others interested in the mind-body problem with close readings of dramatic texts. It is these analyses that make The Nervous Stage a thoroughly enjoyable experience for the reader. Smith examines the ways texts as varied as Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, Richard Wagner's operas, the horror dramas of the Grand Guignol, and August Strindberg's Miss Julie, among others, showcase what Smith sees as "two fundamental shifts" (8) that occurred as the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic era, which in its turn ceded to the Victorian age, which was brought to an abrupt halt by the cataclysm of World War I. Those shifts were: "1. Where gestures once served as a window into a person's hidden inner life, nerves increasingly fulfilled the same function. 2. Where sympathies once helped to construct the liberal subject and [End Page 119] the promise of a liberal social order, the stimulation and networking of neural sensations increasingly operated in their place" (8; emphasis in original). Each of the texts Smith examines in his roughly chronological journey along the path of these shifts is clearly and cogently connected to the scientific works that influenced (or in some cases, were influenced by) its presentation of characters' external demonstrations of the visible signs of internal, invisible, nervous/neural operations. The lines of intellectual and artistic transmission are clearly drawn in The Nervous Stage; it is always clear what evidentiary value Smith is claiming for the texts and events he examines. It is particularly welcome that Smith so clearly positions his work ("I am differentiating historical studies of relations between neurology and the theater … from the application of contemporary neuroscience and/or cognitive science to theatrical practices. … The methodology and aims of such works are quite different from those of the cultural historian" [12]). In addition to clearly laying out the aims of his work, Smith is notably effective at providing nuanced yet concise historical and theoretical summaries that keep his...

THINKING THE DEATH DRIVE BEYOND DEATH IN DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER*

AbstractThis article argues that Richard Wagner's opera Der fliegende Holländer, which may seem representative of the death drive, is essentially concerned with birth. As Slavoj Žižek has suggested, the opera bears striking parallels to Freud's Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). Yet deeper insights on the opera can be reached in light of the theory developed by dissident psychoanalyst Otto Rank in Das Trauma der Geburt (1924). An analysis of the images used by Wagner in his libretto reveals an ambivalent relation to the maternal, with fantasies focusing on the close union between mother and child, the birth process that tears the child away from the mother, and the child's desire to return to the womb.

The idea of the eternal return in flash fiction of symbolists and the types of its functioning contexts

The article identifies the types of contexts in which the idea of the eternal return in the small prose symbolists functions. The first type of contexts includes works based on pretext. F. Sologub transposes evangelical plots into modernity and, relying on the Nietzschean idea of eternal return, emphasizes their importance for the present. In the novel "Lohengrin" Sologub transposes R. Wagner's legendary mythological plot, borrowed from medieval German legends and tales, into the modern bourgeois world, revealing the correspondences between the past and the present. Appeal to allusions and reminiscences in characterizing the characters helps the author to show their difference from the characters of Wagner's opera. The second type of contexts is formed by novels in which writers create their own myths. This is “Princess Zara” by N. Gumilyov, “Inventions (Evening story)” by Z. Gippius and “The Marble Head” by V. Bryusov. In “Princess Zara”, author offers an elegant myth about the immaculate beauty of the Light Virgin of the forests, which periodically changes the outer shell. His myth Gumilyov interweaves in a picturesque view, rich in African exotic and actualizing the sight, hearing, touch and smell of the reader. In the novel "Fiction" Gippius creates a paradoxical situation where the heroine, on the threshold of adulthood, learns about it in every detail, which allows the writer to raise the question of whether a person needs or does not need to know her future and if it is possible to vary and comprehend own life. “The Marble Head” of Bryusov is a complex “text-myth”, written in the form of rondo, which is artistically organized by symbolist ideas about the role of Beauty / Art in human life and about contrasting Beauty with the gray prose of life. "Marble head" can be viewed as a novel of the insight conflict, revealing the moral and psychological crisis of hero. The development of the novel internal conflict is plotted by Bryusov in a form that is based on the representation of V. Solovyov on the triadic nature of world development: thesis – antithesis – synthesis.

Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer

Reviewed by: Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer Nicholas Vazsonyi Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera. By Gundula Kreuzer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 348. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0520279681. Gundula Kreuzer has written an imaginative, highly original, and stunningly researched book. It is not just about Wagner, but is instead a minihistory of selected technologies employed by European theater going as far back as the baroque and right up to our own time, where Wagner serves as a fulcrum and point of constant reference. Wagner is also the frame, more specifically, of Robert LePage's controversial 2010 production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The star of that production was a giant mechanical contraption, dubbed "the machine," that was a permanent fixture on the stage and, because of its capacity to have its contours almost infinitely varied, could, in theory, be made to fit all the various locations of Wagner's seventeen-hour epic. Kreuzer's selection of LePage's production is a master-stroke, because, as she shows throughout her book, his decision to make a piece of technology the visible centerpiece of this production harkens back to the original conceptual and practical problems Wagner faced when he first staged the Ring at his purpose-built theater in Bayreuth—except in reverse. How was Wagner to create the realistic illusion of his multifarious worlds without revealing the ponderous mechanisms of doing so? While Wagner wanted to mask the use of technology as much as possible, his theater ironically became quickly known as marking a seismic leap in the use of technologies for the creation of a sort of natural realism that would ultimately require film technology to be fully realized. So, in a sense, Wagner failed twice over: he neither managed to conjure the kind of other-worldly realism he sought, while at the same time he was unable to fully conceal his methods for trying to do so. By contrast, LePage made technology his centerpiece and also proudly declared that, in so doing, he was being faithful to Wagner's original intentions. Not only was LePage's contention a complete distortion of Wagner, but, as Kreuzer deftly shows, an artistic failure reminiscent of the first Bayreuth to boot. Each of the terms in the main title—curtain, gong, and steam—is given its own chapter, but preceding them is a section on Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, with particular focus on the famous Venusberg scene that opens the work. In a remarkable and inventive reading, Kreuzer suggests that Venus, who stages an alternate reality [End Page 375] that entices and captivates Tannhäuser, is actually anticipating what Wagner aspired to achieve on stage, especially with the Ring. Venus creates a perfected world of total illusion that fully masks the source of production which, in this case, is magic. Wagner used technology to attempt the same effect, but ultimately failed. This is in many respects the central thesis of the book. However, I am not really doing full justice to Kreuzer's intricate and extended reading of Tannhäuser, and so simply recommend it as required reading for anyone who is working with this opera. In any event, only with the advent of the cinematic experience has Wagner's vision of the Venusberg been realized. One would think this puts Kreuzer in the camp of those who have long claimed that, had Wagner been alive in the twentieth century, he would have been a filmmaker. But in her epilogue, Kreuzer again surprises by arguing, and convincingly, that, on the contrary, Wagner was committed to the idea of three-dimensionality, to the physical presence of people on the stage. The chapter on "curtain" sets Kreuzer's general approach, which is executed similarly in the following two chapters on "gong" and "steam." It opens with an at-once broad but also quite detailed history of the curtain in European theater. Kreuzer also looks carefully at the scores of dozens of operas both preceding and concurrent with Wagner, to explore how the timing and speed of curtains both at the beginning...

«Tannhauser» R. Wagner in the mainstream of the evolutionary ways of the German musical theater: mythopoetic and genre-style aspects

Purpose of the article is to reveal the poetic-intonational uniqueness of R. Wagner's opera «Tannhаuser» in the mainstream of the evolutionary, mythopoetic and genre-style specificity of the German musical theater of the 19th century. The methodology of the work is based on the intonational concept of music in the perspective of intonational-stylistic, etymological analysis, succession from B. Asafiev and his followers, and also on interdisciplinary and historical-culturological approaches. The latter allow us to identify the spiritual and semantic and style peculiarities of the musical theater of R. Wagner and distinguish it from the pan-European cultural area of the mid-19th century. The scientific novelty of the work is to broaden the understanding of the poetics of the musical theater of R. Wagner, in particular, the opera «Tannhаuser», which serves as one of the exemplary samples of the German opera of the period, and at the same time demonstrates a deep connection with the genre-style and mythological poetry of the culture of «the great German century» (Hugo von Hofmannsthal). Conclusions. The intonational-dramatic, spiritual and semantic characteristics of Wagner's «Tannhаuser» demonstrate the stylistic duality that is indicative of the German musical theater of the mid-19th century, based on the intersection of the romantic and Biedermeier traditions. The romantic quality of the «Tannhаuser» is also evident in the obvious parallels between the image of the protagonist (Minnesinger) and the contemporary (for the era of R. Wagner) artist, concerned with the search for the ideal; and in the accentuation of the idea of duality, revealed at the level of opposition between the real and the surreal. With the musical characteristic of the latter (the grotto of Venus), an innovative musical language is associated, based on a wide range of musical expressive means (chromatic, tonal instability, timbre richness, etc.). At the same time, the poetics of Wagner's «Tannhаuser» demonstrate the connection with the spiritual-style qualities of the German Biedermeier, revealed in the associations of the plot of the opera with the parable of the «prodigal son»; in a certain idealization of the characteristics of the real world, based on the typology of pastoral and traditions of church singing; in the spiritual concept of the image of Elizabeth, ascending to the sacred-mystery sources and their genre-typological characteristics.

The Inhabitants of Kharkov and the Wagnerian Festival in Bayreuth: Cultural Contacts

The purpose of the present article is to reveal the peculiarities of the origin and development of cultural contacts between Kharkiv cultural figures and R. Wagner, with his descendants, with the Wagner Opera Festival in Bayreuth, and the Wagner Society in Kharkiv. The role of Kharkiv scholars at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth is shown in connection with the study and popularization of the creative heritage of the German master. Particular attention is paid to the unknown facts of the creative biography of Kharkiv musician J. Rubinstein. The object of the research is the musical culture of Kharkiv and Bayreuth in the 19th – 20th centuries. The subject of research is the specificity of the origin and development of cultural contacts between Kharkiv cultural figures and R. Wagner, with the Wagner Opera Festival in Bayreuth, and the Wagner Society in Kharkiv. The scientific novelty of the study primarily lies in revealing of unknown facts in the creative biography of Joseph Rubinstein, talented musician from Kharkiv. Based on archive materials, which are published in translation for the first time, we shed light on the tragedy of his personality that shows up in hard relationship with R. Wagner. That approach is a contrast to the tendency of literature mythologization of the forgotten artist’s image. Research methods : historical which has allowed considering the concrete phenomena of a musical life of Kharkiv and Bayreuth in certain development, and also comparative which has given the chance to investigate similarity and differences between these phenomena. On the basis of archival materials, the peculiarities of Rubinstein’s creative path are traced, which are connected with complicated relationships with R. Wagner and his entourage. The involvement of a Kharkiv musician is emphasized not only to the birth but also to the direct embodiment of the theatrical projects of the German masters. The author has pointed out the involvement of a Kharkiv musician not only to the birth, but also to the direct embodiment of theatrical projects of the German masters. The role of M. Baag-Popova, who was involved in the revival of the opera festival in Bayreuth after the Second World War, was emphasized in the organization of the Wagner Society. Her work at the secretariat of the orchestra and in the press office of the festival has lasted for 12 years. After visiting Kharkov (1996), two Wagnerian Societies were organized – in Kharkiv and Kyiv, which were headed respectively by H. Verkina and M. Cherkashina-Gubarenko. As result , the uniqueness of creative contacts between figures of the musical culture of Kharkiv and Bayreuth is proved. The results of the 20 year activity of the Wagner Society in Kharkiv were summed up, the main directions of its work were described: scientific and educational (various projects, reports, discussions, Olympiads concerning the music Wagner theater, works of his contemporaries and followers, during which deal with various musical – theatrical interpretations of Wagner’s texts); Concert (concerts-lectures with the participation of students of the secondary specialized school, students of the musical college and the university of arts, artists of the Philharmonic and the Opera House). It is also about the implemented measures to create musical dedications in honor of R. Wagner and their performance in memorial concerts.

Love and its Obstacles

Love and its Obstacles Gardner McFall (bio) Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult D. Nurkse Alfred A. Knopf www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549019/love-in-the-last-days-by-d-nurkse/ 104 Pages; Print, $27.00 For nearly thirty years, D. Nurkse has written seriously and prolifically about common human experience (marriage, divorce, the birth of his first child, death of his parents, illness, surgery) as well as world events (the draft, the Iraq War, 9/11), but his recurring, most powerful preoccupation has been love, which is masked and distilled in his eleventh volume, a book-length poetic sequence, Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Choosing to reinterpret the twelfth century story of the tragic lovers Tristan and Iseult during the "last days" (presumably human kind's last days) allows the poet to posit the supremacy of love across time as well as the nature of the last days, with its harsh intolerance for passionate, transgressive love. It also shows that love burns fiercest with obstacles in its path. While it helps to have a copy of Joseph Bedier's The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (tr. Hilaire Belloc [2005]) and Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (tr. Montgomery Belgion [1956]) when reading the book, it's not imperative since, as de Rougemont states: "There is no reason to have read Beroul's Tristan or M. Bedier's, and no need to have heard Wagner's opera, in order to undergo in the course of everyday life the nostalgic domination of such a myth . . . The myth operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever." Still, several points in de Rougemont's book concerning the Tristan myth are borne out in Nurkse's twenty-first century retelling: 1) "Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself;" 2) Passion involves suffering; and 3) "Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league." In Love in the Last Days as well as Bedier's version of the story, Tristan and Iseult's passion derives from a love potion they mistakenly drink as Tristan sails to take the Irish princess Iseult to marry his uncle and liege, King Mark of Cornwall. Yoking imagery to theme, Nurkse ascribes to the potion a flavor of "honey and bile," foretelling the couple's love and doom, though he suggests the pair is attracted to each other before they ever taste it. Tristan says: "Her high cheek bones made me slightly seasick. / I concentrated on her faults, as Ovid advises. / A mole on her cheek. But that was what fascinated me." De Rougemont calls the philtre "passion's alibi," the excuse for their ship-board affair and adultery at court. Although Tristan and Iseult's love is transgressive by conventional standards, which gives the story its tragic arc, Nurkse's volume pits love against the law; the reader can easily conclude that love is a higher calling, holding within it the possibility of love's existence beyond time, in eternity or Avalon, the enchanted island where the lovers presumably reunite after death. Love inthe Last Days, dedicated tothememory of Marc Bloch, comprises thirty-nine poems, mostly monologues, divided into a prelude (told by a harper), four sections dedicated to the advancing story, and a coda which returns to the harper, who is tortured to death for being "a chronicler of heretic adulterers." Most of the monologues are Tristan's, though Iseult speaks in several, one of which is titled "Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me." Nurkse gives monologues to the animals, landscape, and inanimate objects so the volume never bogs down in ponderous narration, but advances through a bristling juxtaposition of perspectives. Any person, creature, or thing in a position to have a view about the lovers has a voice, including Iseult's servant Brangien; the Leper to whom the king gives Iseult as punishment for her infidelity; Tristan's horse Beau Jouer that carries the lovers into Morois; Tristan's loyal dog Houdain; the...

The Holy Grail in Holocaust Literature: Skibell's A Blessing on the Moon and Wolfram's Parzival

The Holy Grail in Holocaust Literature:Skibell's A Blessing on the Moon and Wolfram's Parzival Ryan Muckerheide (bio) Elements of Yiddish and German folklore permeate many Holocaust narratives, but Joseph Skibell chooses perhaps the most potent Christian symbol of all as a key image in his 1997 novel A Blessing on the Moon. The legend of the Holy Grail has intrigued people of many nations since it acquired its modern form in the late twelfth century. In the early thirteenth century, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach produced his version of the Grail quest, named after its protagonist, the young knight Parzival. Wolfram's Parzival would become the standard German interpretation of the Grail legend for centuries and would be the foundation for Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal. Skibell also used many elements of the Parzival legend in his novel, but he transformed them in a unique and powerful way. A Blessing on the Moon is a novel of transformation and redemption, and in its use of the Parzival story, the novel brings into conversation the Jewish, Christian, and mystical paths to redemption. Theodore Adorno, in an oft-quoted and just as oft-misunderstood statement, once said that "[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34). Adorno did not mean that art was no longer possible, but that after the barbarism and horror of the Holocaust, "how could one continue to talk blithely of 'culture,' of artistic forms, of art, of beauty as though nothing had disturbed the value and significance of such discourse . . ." (qtd. in Schiff, xix). The term "Holocaust novel" itself reflects this loss of formal integrity through the blurring of boundaries between autobiography, fiction, and history. Skibell's A Blessing on the Moon further erodes these boundaries. Not only is the main character based on Skibell's own greatgrandfather, but the novel is fantastical—all of the action takes place in a surreal netherworld between death and life. Like many Holocaust novels, Blessing on the Moon is a profoundly Jewish text—and not only because of its subject matter. The events in the novel are set in a Hasidic context and based on a movement within Judaism dating from the eighteenth century and popular in eastern Europe. Two of the principal characters are Hasidim, a term which means "pious" and in this context is similar to the learned hermits of medieval romance. The title of the novel refers to a blessing given when the first crescent of the new moon is sighted. According to Arthur Green, the Jewish mystics, known as Kabbalists, viewed [End Page 39] the new moon as a time of relief from danger. The monthly diminishing of the moon until it is finally out of sight recalls an ancient legend about God punishing the moon because she wanted to rule equally with the sun. The moon is taken to be shekhinah [God's presence in the world] and her disappearance reflects her subjugation to the forces of evil, a condition that God is said to regret and mourn. The moon's reappearance at Rosh Hodesh is thus a time for rejoicing and hope for that day when 'she will no longer be diminished.' Redemption will mean that shekhinah will no longer vanish from view and that God's presence will be felt and seen throughout the universe. (165) In the novel, the moon is brought crashing to earth by the actions of the two Hasidim, Kalman and Zalman, who, while being chased by the Nazis, unintentionally travel to the moon in a mystical boat. Once there, they discover that the moon is covered in silver. They load as much as they can into the boat, which they have tied to the moon. When they get back in, the boat sinks back to earth and pulls the moon with it. The moon, which represents shekhinah, or the presence of God among humans, is lost, and thus the earth is thrown into the metaphorical darkness of Nazi atrocities. The Grail, like the moon, is a powerful and fluid symbol. It appears in many different forms, but all have certain characteristics in common: They provide food and drink, usually whatever food and drink one...

Wagner and Paris: The Case of Rienzi (1869)

The French reception of Wagner is often based on the two pillars of the 1861 Tannhäuser production and that of Lohengrin in 1891. Sufficient is now known about the composer's earliest attempt to engage with Parisian music drama around 1840 to be able to understand his work on Das Liebesverbot, Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, his editorial and journalistic work for Schlesinger, and his emerging relationship with key figures in Parisian musical life, Meyerbeer most notably. A clearer picture is also beginning to emerge of Wagner's position in French cultural life and letters in the 1850s. Wagner's position in Paris during the 1860s, culminating in the production of Rienzi at the Théâtre- Lyrique in 1869, is however complex, multifaceted, and little understood. Although there were no staged versions of his operas between 1861 and 1869, the very existence of a successful Parisian premiere for an opera by Wagner in 1869—given that there would be almost nothing for two decades after 1870—is remarkable in itself. The 1860s furthermore saw the emergence of a coherent voice of Wagnérisme, the presence of French Wagnéristes at the composer's premieres all over Europe and a developing discourse in French around them. This may be set against a continuing tradition of performing extracts of Wagner's operas throughout the 1860s, largely through the energies of Jules Pasdeloup, who—as director of the Théâtre-Lyrique—was responsible for the 1869 Rienzi as well. These competing threads in the skein of Wagner-reception in the 1860s are tangled in a narrative of increasingly tense Franco-German cultural and political relationships in which Wagner, his works, and his writings, played a key role. The performance of Rienzi in 1869 was embedded in responses to the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866, the republication of Das Judenthum in der Musik in 1869, and the beginnings of the Franco-Prussian War.

The Southern Slope of Monsalvat: How Spanish Wagnerism Became Catalan

This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.