Wagner's Opera Research Articles

Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen (review)

Book Reviews 163 both permitted and limited the radicalism, and if so, what is its significance? Thomas Aquinas was far from a friend to Jews; his writings mark the presence of the new scholastic enemy to the Jews, but also contain thresholds beyond which the thinking can hardly be considered "Catholic." As far as one can establish from the study, figures such as Petrus Venerabilis, Duns Scotus, or Johann Eck (thank goodness) do not play a role in the Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century. Abraham a Santa Clara, however, found favor. Why one and not the other? Was there no model other than the expressive baroque Jewish enemy for the shepherd to follow on the path through the tribulations of modernity? A further examination oftraditional adaptations could shed light on such questions as which aspects ofthe Catholic anti-Judaism were old, which were "modem," and, importantly, which were both simultaneously-and which ones were, in the final analysis, compatible with non-Catholic models ofargumentation. This might illuminate the elements enabling the 20th-century radicalization of hostility toward Jews, which led to genocide. Johannes Heil Zentrum fur Antisemitismusforschung Technische Universitat Berlin Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen, by David J. Levin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 207 pp. $29.95. David Levin's study offers an important contribution to two ongoing and equally heated debates: the controversy among music historians and cultural historians on Wagner and antisemitism-I mention only the excellent study by Marc Weiner, RichardWagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination-and the extensive writings on representations of Jewishness, and the Jewish body in particular; here Sander Gilman's work on stereotypes (e.g., in Jewish Self-Hatred) has been very influential. Levin focuses on the Nibelungen material in its reworkings for the operatic stage and the silent screen and enlists the iconography of antisemitism in a detailed analysis of more basic problems ofrepresentation. By describing what he calls the ideological trajectory ofthe material in aesthetic terms, he not only reformulates the underlying questions ofidentity, power, and community within and through the domain of the aesthetic, but through his allegorical approach he also forges an alliance between aesthetic and ethical questions that allows him to reconstruct the transferences from aesthetics to politics that, in his view, fuel the antisemitic imagination. Following an introductory discussion ofthe proliferation and problematization of narration in the original Nibelungenlied, the study sets out to trace the continuous dissemination ofthis famous epic into the highly conflicted terms ofGerman modernity: Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Fritz Lang's two-part 164 SHOFAR Spring 2000 Vol. 18, No.3 silent film classic Die Nibelungen. Two-thirds of the book deals with Wagner and his struggle with dramaturgical questions (musical concerns remain largely absent); onethird is devoted to the film adaptation and the necessary translation of the central problem of narration into the terms of vision and visuality. Motivated perhaps by the desire for greater relevance, the postscript extends some ofthese ideas into contemporary film culture (e.g., Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl), a somewhat puzzling and not entirely convincing move. The individual readings are largely informed by theoretical concerns and focus on the multi-layered reflection in the texts on the act of narration, whether in relation to specific representations, including ofcharacters coded as Jewish (e.g., Mime, Alberich, Hagen), or to the respective formal means (e.g., Wagner's use of language and his concern with dramaturgy, Lang's and Harbou's ambitions to tum film into the modem folk art). Here Levin relies heavily on psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., Freud on interpretation and reiteration), and, an almost obligatory reference in cultural studies today, Zizek (e.g., on fantasy and ideology). The author's insistence on locating the discourse of antisemitism in aesthetic registers offers a welcome departure from, and necessary complement to, more traditional studies that tend to focus on representations rather than representation as such. Therein lies the study's contribution to the study of antisemitism and, more generally, the discursive functions and aesthetic effects of alterity. The comparative perspective adds much to our understanding of the elusiveness ofracialized fantasies in high culture as well as...

The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy

What is musical meaning? Where does it reside and how can it be known? Does it make a difference to its meaning if the music is composed with or without words, as a symphony or a song? Why is it claimed that music can express human feelings with an immediacy not possible in other languages or arts? What is contained in the claim that music is autonomous, or that it is prophetic and can articulate a 'politics for the future'? Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses these classic questions of German Romanticism. On the way, she offers an account of the peculiar relation that was established between philosophy and music in the nineteenth century; a philosophical and political reading of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger; an account of the Wagner-Hanslick debate on musical formalism; an argument for resituating musical autonomy in the spirit of Wagner's Gesamtkuntswerk; an account of the competing performance ideals embodied in Wagner's Bayreuth; and an interpretation of Wagner's legacy as experienced by composers exiled from Nazi Germany. Goehr's historical and musicological enquiries are unified by a philosophical study of the impact of a transcendental or critical perspective on philosophical theory. She argues that philosophy needs to take its limits seriously to accommodate the primacy of music's practice.

Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal

This highly original book draws on narrative and film theory, psychoanalysis, and musicology to explore the relationship between aesthetics and anti-Semitism in two controversial landmarks in German culture. David Levin argues that Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Fritz Lang's 1920s film Die Nibelungen creatively exploit contrasts between good and bad aesthetics to address the question of what is German and what is not. He shows that each work associates a villainous character, portrayed as non-Germanic and Jewish, with the sometimes dramatically awkward act of narration. For both Wagner and Lang, narration--or, in cinematic terms, visual presentation--possesses a typically Jewish potential for manipulation and control. Consistent with this view, Levin shows, the Germanic hero Siegfried is killed in each work by virtue of his unwitting adoption of a narrative role. Levin begins with an explanation of the book's theoretical foundations and then applies these theories to close readings of, in turn, Wagner's cycle and Lang's film. He concludes by tracing how Germans have dealt with the Nibelungen myths in the wake of the Second World War, paying special attention to Michael Verhoeven's 1989 film The Nasty Girl. His fresh and interdisciplinary approach sheds new light not only on Wagner's Ring and Lang's Die Nibelungen, but also on the ways in which aesthetics can be put to the service of aggression and hatred. The book is an important contribution to scholarship in film and music and also to the broader study of German culture and national identity.

The Void of Utopian Potentials: Heiner Muller's Production of Tristan und Isolde

Heiner Muller's opera debut with the production of Tristan and Isolde at the 82nd Bayreuth Richard Wagner Festival in July of 1993 came as a surprise.1 Long before the premiere, the news about Muller's appointment at one of Germany's world-famous, yet also controversial institutions of high culture2 gave room for speculation about the outcome of the event. How would the East German playwright, known for his uncompromising efforts at excavating the contradictions of German culture and history, approach Wagner's music drama? How would he stage a piece from the nineteenth-century composer whose musical modernism and-now suspect-monumentalism brought him as much fame and appraisal as his notorious anti-Semitism and nationalism distrust?3 Muller's opera debut was a surprise also for another reason. After all, he was hardly known for having a particularly strong interest in opera, let alone a taste for the music of Wagner (though he does claim that Wagner's dramaturgical ingenuity had always been important to him).4 And did not the Brechtian dimension of his thinking seem to be at odds with any deeper engagement with the work of Wagner? Again, was it not Brecht who, in a politically and aesthetically substantiated verdict against Wagner, had insisted that Wagner's operas should not be performed because of their educational and ideological abuse by the Nazis?5 Yet Brecht's postwar stance against Wagner was relativized when in the 1970s several Brecht students, such as Ruth Berghaus,6 who sought to contextualize Wagner within the parameters of dialectical enlightenment, showed a renewed interest in Wagner and staged path-breaking productions of his work. In his autobiography, Muller describes his relation to opera as having been disturbed for a long time.7 He mentions seeing a performance of Tristan and Isolde in 1948 that, however, made no lasting impression on him. It was primarily through the music of the Brechtian composer Hanns Eisler and through his collaboration on Paul Dessau's modern opera Lancelot in the late sixties, that he discovered the potential of music in theater and beyond.8Yet it was not until much later that he developed a more genuine interest in opera.9 Nevertheless, the work with Dessau and his modern opera resulted in a short article entitled Sechs Punkte zur Oper [Six Points about Opera] that appeared in the East German theater journal Theater der Zeit in 1970. In this article, Muller argues for the larger utopian potential of opera in comparison to the theater, and he maintains the possibility that opera in the GDR might generate an innovative theater practice: What one cannot yet say, one can perhaps already sing [Was man noch nicht sagen kann, kann man vielleicht schon singen].10 This peculiar and surprising programmatic optimism about the innovative aesthetic and social function of opera, which regards opera music as a vehicle for utopias, must be understood against the backdrop of the playwright's repeated disillusionment with East German censorship. This includes the scandal surrounding the premiere of his play about the land reform, Die Umsiedlerin, in 1961, and the critique to which the notorious eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee in 1964 subjected his industrial play, Der Bau. These experiences led Muller to turn to Greek mythology in order to address topical issues of power and politics in his plays. Eventually he abandoned the theme of socialist reconstruction altogether and focused on larger questions of German history and civilization, depicting what Joachim Fiebach has aptly described as the collision of human bodies with ideas.11 The increased hermeticism as well as the surreal and allegorical forms of representation in his plays since the 1970s are a consequence of these concrete historical experiences as a result of which negation became for Muller the only form of expressing the unbearable impossibility of social innovation.12 More than a decade after the publication of his article on opera, in one of his numerous televised conversations with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge that took place shortly after the premiere of his production of Tristan and Isolde, Muller's profoundly pessimistic outlook with regard to the function of opera clearly replaced his earlier optimism. …

Music Education: Closed or Open?

Music education is not so obviously problematic until it surfaces in schools and colleges, until it becomes and institutionalized. If we want to strum a guitar, get into the plot of a Wagner opera, play a sitar, or sing in a chorus, then finding a teacher, reading a book, or joining a performing group may be all we need to do. There is no need to form a curriculum committee, produce a rationale, or declare a list of objectives. The informal student can copy jazz riffs from recordings, ask friends about fingering or chord patterns, learn by imitation-sitting next to Nelly, or widen musical experience by watching television, listening to the radio, or exploring record shops. Formal instruction may not be necessary. Yet for some, the formal systems may be crucial points of access. For others, the contribution of educational institutions to their personal education will be negligible and could even be negative in effect. In Britain, there is certainly a history of research reporting negative attitudes to in the curriculum compared with other subjects.1 Unlike most if not all other and college curriculum subject areas, in the case of many alternative avenues of access are open. The easy accessibility of from the ends of the earth, high levels of music-specific information technology-including sound generation, recording, and reproduction; these developments along with the rapid dissemination of popular musics compete with conventional curricula in schools. One consequence is that students may have very little time for school music and are likely to see it as a quaint musical subculture. Very early in the twentieth century, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze drew attention to this tendency of education to detach itself from mainstream culture.

Hanslick, Wagner, Chomsky: Mapping the Linguistic Parameters of Music

Eduard Hanslick's The Beautiful in Music (1854) is a classic of musical aesthetics. Its influence has been profound, not least as a polemic against Wagner's Opera and Drama (1851). The polemic was defended by the author in his preface to the seventh edition of 1885, which contains the oft-quoted evaluation of music drama as ‘formlessness exalted into a principle’. The Hanslick/Wagner debate defines an aesthetic and theoretical ground zero around which significant forces have been arrayed. The results have been complex and mixed. While Wagner's music prevailed and his theories were generally dismissed, Hanslick's rejection of music as a medium for expressing feelings articulated an approach brought to fruition by Heinrich Schenker (who unsurprisingly shared Hanslick's negative view of Wagner as well as his polemical tendencies).

Martin Bernstein: An Appreciation

O n 14 December 1994, Martin Bernstein, scholar, musician-conductor, teacher extraordinaire, and former Professor and Chairman of the Music Department at New York University, celebrated his 9oth birthday. We salute him here for his important contributions to musicology and to the training of musical scholars in the United States, during his long and influential career. Bernstein's pioneering efforts in the area of Baroque and Classic performance practice awoke generations of American students to its potentialities and importance long before such courses became commonplace in music departments across the country. His work on J. S. Bach, particularly the editing of numerous Bach cantatas and conducting their performances with the Washington Square Chorus and Orchestra at NYU and for the American Bach Society, introduced many students and concert-goers to hitherto unfamiliar Bach compositions. Bernstein's seminars on 19th-century instrumental music and Wagner operas led many young scholars to specialize in these subjects at a time when Renaissance music was still the field of choice.

Weber, Wagner and Thoughts of Death

This article seeks to show the ways in which an addition made to the second edition of The Protestant Ethic can be illuminated by placing it in the context of Weber's personal life and how that text can also illuminate various personal concerns and relationships that characterised Weber's life, in particular during his last year alive in Munich. Aspects of Weber's personal life are explored making use of Marianne Weber's account of her husband's life, although her account is subjected to some critical analysis. It is shown that key concerns in Weber's life at this time included death, family responsibilities and eroticism. The addition (which basically involves the quotation of Siegmund's answer to Brünnhilde - the herald of death in Wagner's opera Die Walküre), relates to these themes, and in the context of The Protestant Ethic opens up a whole range of intertextual affinites which serve to highlight the way in which Weber drew on a cultural heritage to give expression to his ideas and emotions. This complexity also relates to Weber's relationships with Else Jaffé, Mina Tobler, Marianne Weber and his sisters, Klara and Lili; and it is to these relationships that I seek to relate Weber's use of Wagner. However, it is argued that the reference to Wagner in The Protestant Ethic, when understood in the context of Weber's life, is overdetermined, and that it is difficult to specify precisely what Siegmund's speech meant to Weber and to the persons in his immediate circle. It is argued that rather than this indeterminancy undermining the biographical perspective of the paper, the complexity of Weber's relationships and emotions that is uncovered serves to capture the dilemmas of `real' life.

The complete operas of Richard Wagner

Wagner's operas can be counted among the most important works of art of the nineteenth century. But Wagner was a composer around whom violent artistic, political, and literary controversies raged during his lifetime. Even today, Wagner's music seems to arouse either adulation or antipathy. In The Complete Operas of Richard Wagner, as in the first four volumes of his famous series on the great opera composers, Charles Osborne first describes the composer's life at the time he wrote each opera, thus providing a biographical thread which runs through the book; follows it with a thorough examination of the libretto and its sources; and lastly tells the story of the opera, which he links to the major musical features. This book is, in effect, a musical biography of Wagner, tracing his development from his first complete opera, Die Feen, to his last, Parsifal. It serves as an invaluable guide to the often perplexing Wagner oeuvre both for the regular opera-goer and the armchair listener.

Richard Wagner (1813–1883)

Mark Jones continues this occasional series by taking a look inside Wagner's tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung which was first performed complete in 1876 at Wagner's own opera house in Bayreuth.

Ernest James William Barrington, 17 February 1909 - 15 December 1985

Ernest James William Barrington was born on 17 February 1909 in Putney, the only son of William Benedict and Harriet Barrington. Little is known of his father and mother except that his father was a church warden and clerk at a local brewery, Messers Mann Crossman & Company. Ernest Barrington attended Christ’s Hospital School at Horsham where his interests and ability in music soon became evident. He studied with a Mrs Wright and is remembered by a contemporary school fellow, Sir William Glock, the noted musicologist and one-time Music Controller of the BBC, as a gifted pianist with an enviable fluency. This ability was demonstrated by the fact that he became an ARCO in 1926 at the age of seventeen and an LRAM the year later. In this year, 1927, he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, on an organ scholarship. Music and zoology began to vie for his interest. He took four years over his degree, gaining a first class honours B.A. in zoology in 1931. He obtained a grant from the Christopher Welch Trust during his four years at Oxford which enabled him not only to read zoology but also music. He completed the paper work for his Mus.B. But did not complete the degree. While at Oxford Ernest Barrington came under the influence of two great zoologists, T.S. Goodrich the Linacre Professor of Zoology and G.R. de Beer, fellow of Merton College and lecturer in comparative and experimental embryology. Gavin de Beer was Barrington’s tutor and was also knowledgeable about music and enjoyed playing the piano. For one pupil, at least, tutorial periods occasionally ended in a session of ebullient duet playing. As a student opera was not neglected and together with his undergraduate, and lifelong, friend Tom Hughes, Barrington went often to London, particularly to Wagner operas.

Books

Journal Article Books Get access Svoboda: Wagner Josef Svoboda's Scenography for Richard Wagner's Operas Jarka BurianMiddletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983 118 pages, $35.00 Carolyn Abbate Carolyn Abbate Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 3, Issue 2, Summer 1985, Pages 164–166, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/3.2.164 Published: 01 July 1985

A Study of Intertextuality: Thomas Mann's Tristan and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde

A Study of Intertextuality: Thomas Mann's Tristan and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Stevie Anne Bolduc University of Colorado When Ducrot and Todorov undertake to define intertextuality in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, they present a definition rooted in linguistics. Their major premise is that language contains not merely a descriptive orientation but also a dynamic thrust that gives full play to a creative, "differentiated infinity whose unlimited combinatorial never finds a frontier."1 They view the text as not existing in any one particular time niche; Rather, meanings anterior and posterior to the experiencing of the text at a given time become integral to its totality. In addition, they view the reader-writer relation as essential for intertextuality, forming two productivities that intersect, creating a new space with their intersection (Ducrot and Todorov, p. 357). This theory of language obviously can be extended to a wider perspective where intertextuality embraces character development, presentation of theme, setting, literary structure, and genre; the interface of these literary elements creates an inexhaustible potential for character interpretation and thematic amplification; the text then becomes open to a limitless genesis of significations. Intertextuality allows a fruitful perspective for analysis of the thematic implications of any given literary text, as well as analysis of character, setting, and symbolic implications. The novels and stories of Thomas Mann provide excellent illustrations of intertextuality in literature, for the precision of his writing technique, character development, and thematic presentation depends ultimately upon the complex interactions among the many elements of literary structure within one text and among several texts. Mann's early novella Tristan provides an eloquent paradigm for this point. He constructs his text upon elements of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde — specifically, a parallel plot structure, characterizations, and narrative line, and a contrasting setting and theme. 1. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, tr. Catherine Porter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 358. Stevïe Anne Bolduc83 Sophia Schnitman, in her excellent analysis "Musical Motives in Thomas Mann's Tristan," discusses the relationship of Thomas Mann's Tristan to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and traces in detail Mann's use of leitmotif to support her thesis that Tristan has a musical structure based on Wagner's opera.2 Mann, however, uses not only leitmotif to provide a structural basis for Tristan, but also the three-part structure of Wagner's opera (exposition, climax, and resolution) and the triangle relationship of lovers. Further, Mann employs specific musical composition techniques in his literary context. The parallels to Wagner's musical structure enhance Mann's thematic contrasts to the famous Wagnerian love theme.3 In order to discuss the structural parallels between Wagner's opera and Mann's novella, one must distinguish between literary structure and musical structure. Literary structure refers to plot structure, narrative details, thematic development, character development, use of symbols, and setting. Musical structure is accomplished by means of thematic development: repetition, contrast, variation, and concentration, as well as the formal structural divisions.4 The literary structures of Mann's Tristan and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde contain many similarities ofnarrative line, plot division, setting, characterization, symbols, and language. In the love duet of the novella there are words and phrases that have been taken directly from Wagner's libretto.5 Mann employs the Wagnerian myth in his setting of night, but inverts the season. Spinell and Gabriele do not meet in the warmth of a summer evening; rather, they come together in a twilight that deepens into a cold and snowy winter night. The cold of winter contrasts with the luxuriant 2.Sophia Schnitman, "Musical Motives in Thomas Mann's Tristan," Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 399-414. 3.Robert Henry Riemann, in his dissertation The Role ofMusicin the Novels of Thomas Mann (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1971), also explores music as a structural element for Mann's novels; and Frank Young has done an exhaustive study of the literary allusions that form leitmotifs in Tristan in his dissertation Montage and Motif in Thomas Mann's 'Tristan' (Ph.D., University of Washington, 1972). 4.James Northcote-Bade has done an interesting...

Books

Journal Article Books Get access Wagner's Operas Lawrence Gilman St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, Reprint of the 1937 Edition, 1979 268 pages, $29.00 Martin Kirschen Martin Kirschen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 1, Issue 3, Autumn 1983, Pages 225–226, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/1.3.225 Published: 01 October 1983

Tolstoy and Wagner: The Shared Vision

To me, Wagner is still the greatest man, not only of music, not only of dramatic art, but also of humanity…He is dangerous. But this does not prevent him from being the divine, the true, God of Art.—Remain Rolland, Cahiers IV (1890) It was at Bayreuth more than anywhere else that the abyss between the old Germany and Imperial Germany could be gauged. Wagner, who believed that he spoke for the art of the future, was the fulfillment of classical music and of the sentiment peculiar to Christian philosophy. The new Germany took no account of what he put above all else: it valued him, it worshiped him in the least part of his genius, the national odor, the settled prejudice of self-love, the cult of oneself, which degrade art and thought in all countries.—Andre Saur`s, “Wagner,” La Revue Muscale (1923) For the strong, the intelligent, the successful…Wagner's operas are a constant source of delight. They must listen to him. But who should never be allowed to listen to Wagner? The unhappy, the disappointed, the politically ambitious, the self-pitying, those who imagine themselves misunderstood, the Wagnerians.—W.H.Auden, Notes to New ϒear Letter (1941)

Books

Journal Article Books Get access The Wagner Operas Ernest NewmanNew York: Alfred A. Knopf, Eighth Printing, 1981 729 pages, $20.00 Robert C. Cumbow Robert C. Cumbow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 1, Issue 3, Autumn 1983, Pages 221–223, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/1.3.221 Published: 01 October 1983

Penetrating Wagner's Ring: An Anthology

Wagner's cycle - of the Niebelung - has been described as one of the most enduring of operatic spectacles. This collection has brought together writings on the and includes articles by George Bernard Shaw, Georg Solti and Andrew Porter, excerpts from Wagner's own letters and works and discourses by over 30 other writers. Covered is the tetralogy of the - Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, Siegfried and Goetterdaemmerung - in essays on Wagner's intention, the theory behind it, its interpretation, artistic backgrounds, historical influences, literary sources, musical architecture, modern stagings, the Ring in English and various styles of performance. The book is designed to serve as an introduction to the Ring as well as a companion to fans and performers of Wagner's operas.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access Handel. By Stanley Sadie. pp. 192. Tchaikousky. By Michel Hoffman Translated by Angus Heriot. pp. 192. Wagner Opera. By Audrey Williamson. pp. 192.( Calder, London, 1962, paper backs, IIs. 6d., boards, 21s. each.) J. A. W. J. A. W. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 1962, Pages 351–352, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/43.4.351 Published: 01 October 1962

The Wagner Operas

In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose. This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way.--Robert Bailey, New York University

Wagner's Other Comic Opera

Wagner's Other Comic Opera