Wagnerian Opera Research Articles

Spiritual Succor or Sacrilege? British Catholic Responses to and Interpretations of Wagner’s Parsifal

Abstract: Scholarly knowledge about the interplay of Wagnerian opera and British church history has advanced on an uneven front and has yet to reach lofty heights. Relatively little has been published about how Parsifal , Richard Wagner’s final and arguably most religious opera, was perceived in the United Kingdom. The present study begins to fill that gap by investigating how a spectrum of British Catholics diversely debated such crucial themes as the extent to which Parsifal was a Christian work, the possible mimesis of the Mass in the Holy Grail scenes, the construction of the title character as a symbolic Christ figure, and whether the staging of this work, whose spiritual content was widely acknowledged, could appropriately be performed in a secular setting like the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

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

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

Epistles from UMass

482 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) encourages such an approach. Moreover, in her discussion about Kafer’s “curative imagination,” Cheyne misses an opportunity to discuss how readers might feel towards the lived experiences of those identified as disabled when it comes to dealing with chronic pain or choosing whether or not to undergo curative procedures. Cheyne’s book is relevant to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in genre studies, literary studies, and cultural disability studies, be it critics or scholars. It is important to emphasize the cultural aspect of Cheyne’s approach because those interested in critical disability studies may be troubled by the areas mentioned in the previous paragraph. The book will also be wellreceived by instructors in both writing and literature classes, writers and teachers of creative writing, and those interested in the medical humanities.—Brenda Tyrrell, Miami University, OH Epistles from UMass. Samuel R. Delany. Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2019. xvi+171 pp. $17.95 pbk. Samuel R. Delany (as he is known on the title pages of his books, but Chip Delany in less formal contexts) is not only one of the best and most interesting writers of our time, but also an unusually versatile one. He has excelled in a number of varieties of fiction: most prominently sf, of course, but also historical fiction, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary realism—not to mention several fictional texts whose genres Delany seems to have virtually invented, such as that remarkable “pornotopic fantasy” (his own term), The Mad Man (1994). He is nearly as distinguished as a writer of nonfiction. He is one of our great autobiographers and also an important scholar, critic, and theorist—of sf, but also of a great many other things, from Wagnerian opera to comic books. The personal letter is yet another of the forms in which Delany has worked, though here his achievement is probably better appreciated by those fortunate enough to be among his correspondents than by the reading public at large. Delany’s letters are notable for their length (the first one I received, before I had ever met him, filled about 20 typed pages), their variety, and their combination of witty high spirits and intellectual rigor. Someday, I hope and expect, industrious scholars will produce a published edition of Delany’s collected correspondence. I cannot guess exactly how large in bulk it will be, but feel sure that it will run to many volumes. So far, however, only a small fraction of this material is available in print. A generation ago, Voyant Publishing brought out 1984: Selected Letters (2000), a fascinating volume that fills 350 closely printed pages and that represents only a selection of the letters Delany composed during or close to the Orwellian year (specifically, between June 1983 and January 1985). I reviewed 1984 in SFS 27.3 (Nov. 2000). Now Wesleyan (Delany’s principal publisher for many years) has brought out this much smaller book. The main text of Letters from Amherst consists of five letters written between February 1989 and September 1991—that is, a few years after the period covered in 1984, and when Delany had taken up his first full-time and permanent academic position as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (he would later go on to hold 483 BOOKS IN REVIEW professorships at SUNY-Buffalo and then at Temple University). Each of the letters is the length of a substantial essay (the longest letter in 1984 is as long as a short book). Three are addressed to the late librarian and bibliographer Robert Bravard, one to the scholar and critic Kathleen Spencer, and one to the fiction writer Erin McGraw. The volume also contains an appendix titled “Letters to Iva,” which includes ten much shorter letters that Delany wrote between July 1984 and August 1988 to his daughter Iva Hacker-Delany (born in 1974 to Delany and the distinguished poet Marilyn Hacker) while she was away at summer camp. The five main letters are not quite so purely narrative as the subtitle of the volume might lead one to expect. But they do contain some...

The aesthetics of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus explained by means of acoustic measurements and simulations

Abstract The Bayreuth Festspielhaus (BF) is unique; the theatre was conceived by Richard Wagner to host the complex of Ring and it was opened in 1876. After this date, the BF played a key role in the development of the modern opera house and no other opera house is so discussed among non acousticians for its acoustics. Some solutions applied for the first time in this theatre influenced later opera houses: the position of all seats within the line of sight of the stage, the dimming of the lights during representations, the double proscenium arch and–the most relevant one–the use of a deep orchestra pit (mystic gulf). However, in spite of the worldwide fame of the BF, the values assumed by the main room acoustics criteria in this hall have been reported and analysed in few works. The aim of the present work is to analyse the key role played by BF in the history of the opera basing on acoustic measurements and then propose tools for an immersive virtual experience of this space. All the main acoustic room criteria have been extracted and commented taking into account the peculiarity of the Wagnerian opera. Measured criteria have been related to the subjective impressions reported in the non technical literature. Furthermore, a numerical model of the theatre has been created. The model was calibrated by using the measured room criteria, following state-of-the-art techniques. A whole orchestra (105 musicians) plus singers (3 singers and a choir of 10 persons) was simulated on a computer. The present and the original acoustics of the hall were recreated by rendering binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) for three listener positions in the audience. These tools allow to experience the Wagner's idea of a “new opera” from a perceptual point of view. The CAD model and the simulated BRIRs of the BF are freely available for academic uses.

Una notte all’Opera con Gadda

In Gadda’s enthralling short story Teatro (1927), a first-person narrator describes a night out at the opera and the plot of the melodrama being performed. The latter is an imaginative concentration of characters and situations which, however, are based on plausible or authentic events. This article examines the fragments of historical fact that weave their way into the fictional plot in an effort to better understand the performance practice which is depicted through Gadda’s distorted lens. It emerges that the primary model for his parody is Wagnerian opera, which was still at the centre of a heated artistic debate. Lastly, a quote from Baudelaire is identified, one that would over time continue to resurface in Gadda’s writings.

THE STARS, MILDEW, RUST AND THE WASTE LAND IN THE STORY OF THE GRAIL*

When the Grail emerged unobtrusively for the first time shortly after 1180 in The Story of the Grail authored by Chrétien de Troyes it was hardly noticeable. It emerged in the context, viewed from certain angles, of a table ritual on the occasion of a feast presented by the Fisher King to young Perceval whom he invited to share his table. When it appeared before the two table guests it did not stop in front of them but disappeared into a side chamber. It was accompanied by a plate, a serving dish on which to carve meat. But it was also preceded by a bleeding lance whose presence at the feast seemed wholly out of context and inexplicable. The rather cryptic description of the grail, replete with hidden meanings and ambiguities, started a myth, more evocative than anything the Middle Ages had ever known. The Grail theme remained in evidence throughout the Middle Ages, then disappeared from the 16th to the 19th century, then sprang into life vividly once more in the form of Wagnerian opera as Parzifal. Today all manifestations of the Grail are egregiously misrepresented as if it had always been the Holy Grail. It behooves us to take another look at its earliest manifestation before all the transformations and Christianisations to which it was subjected by western culture1. In fact, the original Grail had nothing at all in common with Christianity.

Lighting in Theatrical Performance as a Dynamic Medium

Designing for the theatre is a tasking endeavour, particularly at an amateur level with a restriction of resources, time, and past experience. The question of where to draw inspiration, what research can be done, and the interplay between theories of stage lighting becomes a central issue for an aspiring lighting designer in an unfamiliar or, in some cases, an entirely new setting. With the majority of impactful lighting theory originating from the advent of electrical lighting at the turn of the twentieth century, most of its concepts derive from the staged realism from Belasco and, in direct opposition, Appia’s notions of theatre transcending reality with lighting providing depth and description of space. With opposing concepts and an intangible media, creating mood, tone, and mise en scène through light requires significant forethought, as well as the ability to perceive a stage language lacking corporeality. With all of these present challenges, I attempt, through theory and practical examples, to describe the process of lighting a theatrical performance as well as what constitutes lighting in the theatre. I will attempt to examine the use of colour, texture, motion, and contrast as a vehicle for stage dialogue, as well as question the importance of lighting in performance and its place in the hierarchy of mise en scène, as defined by Appia in his research of Wagnerian opera and Eurhythmics.

Recent Studies of Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner, by Raymond Furness. Critical Lives series. London, Reaktion Books, 2013. 224 pp. $16.95 US (paper). Richard Wagner: A Life in Music, by Martin Geek, translated by Stewart Spencer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012. xviii, 444 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and Total Work of Art after Wagner, by Adrian Daub. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014. viii, 228 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). Richard Wagner was theoretical vegetarian, who thought it would reduce prison violence to feed prison inmates meatless diet. He also apparently thought there was species of vegetarian tiger thrived on shores of Canadian lakes. That gave him hope for other carnivores. He had solution, too, to problem of Inuit peoples forced by their Arctic habitat to live on seal meat; they could be transported to tropics, where they could adapt to nuts and fruits. This sort of resolute theory pushing was of course feature of his thinking and writing about music and theatre, too. He was encouraged in this habit by philosophers he read, especially by example of Schopenhauer. Of three books to be considered here--all aimed roughly at two-hundredth anniversary of Wagner's birth in 1813--Furness's is most accessible, Geek's is most considerable and Daub's most eccentric since it is not about Wagner but about his shadow. They have characteristically different ways of dealing with Wagner's love of theorizing. I. Raymond Furness aims to recount saga of Wagner's tempestuous life and discuss operas and music dramas chronologically (p. 13). That is straightforward way to introduce reader to Wagner's world. But he also reads and interprets for us great swath of Wagner's prose writings, demystifying theories and finding sensible positions among Wagnerian eccentricities. Born in 1813, and raised as Richard Geyer, teenaged Wagner began to write. Furness spends time on his early text Leubald, a tangled and wild conflation of at least five Shakespeare plays (p. 17). After finishing high school, young man changed his name back to Wagner, studied composition, and already by 1832 had composed his Symphony in C major, breakthrough beyond his ambitious but undistinguished juvenilia. Wagner pleads for rejection of Romantic operas and demands new forms in an essay on The German Opera' published in 1834. He met and married an actress, Minna Planer, and completed and produced Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). Then couple moved to Paris to seek their fortune (1939-42). Furness tells story of their penury and disappointments in Paris, highlighting Rienzi, grand tragic opera finished at end of 1840. It was one of his greatest first night successes when premiered in 1842 in Dresden. But it stands in deep contrast to his 1841 project, The Flying Dutchman, which was performed in 1843, closely followed by his appointment as Royal Saxon Court's director of music. Although Rienzi achieved fruitful relationship between text and music, its story of hero's rise and fall is very much part of tinsel world of nineteenth century opera (p. 44, quoting John Deathridge). Dutchman, on other hand, was the first truly Wagnerian opera (p. 47). It has music that outdid Mendelssohn in its portrayal of sea. And theme of redemption through love he would make quintessentially his own (p. 46). It was in Dresden in summer of 1845, the seeds were sown from which would blossom nearly all of Wagner's mature works (pp. 51-2). He worked on Tannhauser, and conceived ever more revolutionary ideas about reforms needed in opera, in culture generally, and indeed in society. In 1848, year of Communist Manifesto, there were protests in streets of Dresden, and armed uprisings in Paris and Vienna. Wagner expressed his enthusiastic support, and when violent revolution reached Dresden in 1849 he was driven to exile. …

Édouard Dujardin, Wagner, and the Origins of Stream of Consciousness Writing

Abstract Édouard Dujardin's novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) has long been acknowledged as an important influence on the stream of consciousness style (called monologue intérieur by Dujardin) found in James Joyce's Ulysses. Dujardin wrote the book during the period he edited the short-lived Revue wagnérienne. The study shows how monologue intérieur was connected to experimental literary trends debated on the pages of the Revue as well as in the Symbolist movement more generally. Two of these trends were vers libre and the construct of an interiorized mental theater, and both were grounded in particular perceptions of Wagnerian opera. Dujardin and his Symbolist colleagues appreciated Wagner's move to abstraction, but thought he had not gone far enough. The article illustrates how putative syntactical freedoms in Wagner's work encouraged vers libre, how a song cycle Dujardin composed to his own vers libre tested the boundaries between literature and music against a Wagnerian backcloth, and how a “paraphrase” of the Amfortas monologue in the first act of Parsifal published in the Revue produced a theater of the mind. The invention of monologue intérieur emerges as a rich and multivalent point of intersection between Wagnerian opera and modernity.

Édouard Dujardin, Wagner, and the Origins of Stream of Consciousness Writing

Abstract Édouard Dujardin's novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) has long been acknowledged as an important influence on the stream of consciousness style (called monologue intérieur by Dujardin) found in James Joyce's Ulysses. Dujardin wrote the book during the period he edited the short-lived Revue wagnérienne. The study shows how monologue intérieur was connected to experimental literary trends debated on the pages of the Revue as well as in the Symbolist movement more generally. Two of these trends were vers libre and the construct of an interiorized mental theater, and both were grounded in particular perceptions of Wagnerian opera. Dujardin and his Symbolist colleagues appreciated Wagner's move to abstraction, but thought he had not gone far enough. The article illustrates how putative syntactical freedoms in Wagner's work encouraged vers libre, how a song cycle Dujardin composed to his own vers libre tested the boundaries between literature and music against a Wagnerian backcloth, and how a “paraphrase” of the Amfortas monologue in the first act of Parsifal published in the Revue produced a theater of the mind. The invention of monologue intérieur emerges as a rich and multivalent point of intersection between Wagnerian opera and modernity.

Music and 'Weltanschauung': Franz Brendel and the Claims of Universal History

The genre of ‘universal history’ was a symptomatic product of the rise of historical consciousness in the nineteenth century. This essay examines one particular case of this historiographical model: Franz Brendel’s Geschichte der Musik, first published in 1852. The essay shows how Brendel used Hegelian historicist notions in order to formulate a historical-philosophical narrative, which in turn could sustain trends within his contemporary musical culture. Brendel offered an original interpretation of musical Hegelianism that led him to a distinctive view of the ‘music of the future’, one that differs from Hegel’s aesthetic account of music on the one hand, and from Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk on the other. The essay is centred on Brendel’s proposal that Wagnerian opera and Liszt’s symphonic poems signify the beginning of a new epoch in music history in which artistic creation is joined by a ‘world-view’.

John Francis Barnett's "Ancient Mariner": From Ballad to Cantata

Previous articleNext article No AccessJohn Francis Barnett's "Ancient Mariner": From Ballad to CantataRodney Stenning EdgecombeRodney Stenning Edgecombe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 1Winter 2012Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers: A Selection: 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045514 Views: 11Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Joyce’s Phoneygraphs: Music, Mediation, and Noise Unleashed

This essay considers the interaction between music and noise in Joyce’s narrative texts, arguing that Joyce’s increasing fascination with noise reflects a burgeoning skepticism about music’s formal autonomy and an ear for music’s ideological mystifications. Building on recent works in “sound studies,” which examine sound as a site of anxiety about urbanization and mechanical reproduction, the essay explores Joyce’s abandoned collaboration with the noise-music composer George Antheil on a staging of “Cyclops,” using megaphones and “phoneygraphs.” While “A Painful Case” reflects on the symbiotic relationship between solipsistic music and public noise, A Portrait struggles to detach musical rhythms from their symbolic associations. In unmooring sounds from their referents, however, Stephen leaves music open to the sort of musical misreadings found throughout Ulysses . The admixture of music and noise in Ulysses deflates the bombastic idealism of Wagnerian opera and defamiliarizes music as a “phoneygraph”—a medium and a form of false writing.

Opera Buffa and the Debunking of U.S. Hegemony in Neruda's "La United Fruit Co."

A major tenet of Marx's dialectical materialism is that every thing that exists (thesis) gives rise to its opposite (antithesis). In Pablo Neruda's poem La United Fruit Co., the opposing forces are good versus evil, or more specifically, capitalism and U.S.-backed military dictators versus the land and peoples of Latin America. In this composition we see the malevolent side of the U.S. capitalist machine pilfering the fruits and riches of Latin America. This capitalist exploitation sets up the redemption of the people by the inevitable communist revolution, which takes place at the end of Canto general. Thus this capitalist phase in Canto general is merely transitional, a necessary stage of evil that will give birth to the need for the revolution. This paper will show that the maleficent mythological world presented in La United Fruit Co. reflects an historical period in flux that mirrors the Western world's economic and cultural march towards modernity. However, in the aesthetic realm, Neruda chooses to mock the nascent U.S. hegemony by employing the buffoonish, comic opera, rather than the serious Wagnerian opera that dominated the 19th century during the era of the rise of national literatures in Latin America. This paper will analyze the role of the trumpet in proclaiming the dawning of a new era in La United Fruit Co. as well as its connections to Apocalyptic literature of the Bible. From there we will draw parallels within the poem to the economic and cultural milieu of the mid 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. We will conclude with an analysis of the operatic and theatrical components of the poem, and how these serve to sharpen the poet's critique of the United States. The poem opens with the blaring of a trumpet, which in Christianity has several meanings, most of which can be applied to Neruda's poem. In the Old Testament a trumpet is generally associated with a call to battle or the end of a battle, (1) the beginning of a king's reign (2) or a signal of Yahweh's presence. (3) Several elements lend the poem a post-battle quality: the sleeping dead (line 13), the restless war heroes (lines 13-15), sanguinary flies (line 29), dead Indians (line 37) and rotting fruit (line 41). The new king whose reign is signaled is obviously the United States, and God's presence is noted in this poem as Jehovah. In the New Testament trumpets appear primarily in Revelations and they are a signal or an alarm for the coming of Christ. Seven angels blare seven trumpets, (4) and each blast signals another phase of the Apocalypse, or the transition which marks the end of the physical world and the beginning of the spiritual world in which the dead will be resurrected and Christ will reign. In Neruda's poem, the dead, of course, are represented in La United Fruit Co. by the muertos dormidos (line 12), las tumbas populares (line 26), and the indios sepultados (line 37). The first alludes to the founding fathers of the independent republics; the latter two are in reference to the peoples of Latin America, with the indigenous citation alluding to the hopeless economic future of Latin America after the exploitation of its natural resources. By pointing out the dead, the poet calls attention to their need for redemption, especially in a vile and evil world ruled by a ruthless, capitalist God and his despotic minions, characterized as blood-thirsty flies. Of further importance is that a salient element of Apocalyptic literature is the future salvation of the dead after the triumph of God over evil at the end of the present world, which in Canto general is paralleled by the messianic poet figure overcoming the malevolent capitalist world. In many regards, the creation myth presented in La United Fruit Co. mimics the biblical Genesis: both are characterized as a paradise before the arrival of sin; the fruit in the poem represents sin, as it does in the Bible; sin is the cause of the injustices of both worlds; and the Biblical consequences of sin results in life-long labor, the same sentence that awaits the indigenous peoples of Central America. …

The Wagner clan: the saga of Germany's most illustrious and infamous family

Richard Wagner was many things--composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite--and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy. Now, in The Wagner Clan, biographer Jonathan Carr retraces the path of the renowned composer and his descendants with great verve. Along the way, Carr offers glimpses of Franz Liszt (whose illegitimate daughter Cosima married Wagner); the mad King Ludwig II, who saved Wagner from penury by becoming his sponsor; Friedrich Nietzsche; Arthur Schopenhauer; Richard Strauss; Gustav Mahler; Alberto Toscanini; Joseph Goebbels; Hermann Goring; and the Wolf himself, Adolf Hitler, a passionate fan of the Master's music and an adopted uncle to Wagner's grandchildren. Wagner's British-born daughter-in-law, Winifred, was a close friend of Hitler's and seemed momentarily positioned to marry him after the death of her husband. All through the war the Bayreuth Festival, begun by the Master himself, was supported by Hitler, who had to fill out the meager audience with fighting men and SS officers. After the war's devastation, the festival was dark for a decade until Wagner's offspring--with characteristic ambition and cunning--revived it. With the sweeping scope of a Wagnerian opera, The Wagner Clan stretches from the revolutions of 1848 to today to show how the history of Europe and that of the Wagners are inextricably intertwined. Jonathan Carr has drawn on extensive interviews with members of the family and on rare archival material to deliver a riveting chronicle of the ascent, decline, and rehabilitation of the German nation and its most infamous family.

Laughter: In Ravel's time

Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

Meta Seinemeyer in the United States: The Wagnerian Opera Festival of 1923

Meta Seinemeyer in the United States: The Wagnerian Opera Festival of 1923 Get access Vicki Kondelik Vicki Kondelik Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 20, Issue 3, SUMMER , Pages 396–421, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbh058 Published: 01 September 2004

Meta Seinemeyer in the United States: The Wagnerian Opera Festival of 1923

Journal Article Meta Seinemeyer in the United States: The Wagnerian Opera Festival of 1923 Get access Vicki Kondelik Vicki Kondelik Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 20, Issue 3, SUMMER , Pages 396–421, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbh058 Published: 01 September 2004

Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses: Agnon's Biblical Zoo

The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif, whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and sacrificed on the altar of the most primitive version of Jewish theodicy.