Wagner's Work Research Articles

On being Chinese and being complexified: Chinese IR as a transcultural project

AbstractWhile proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.

Can the stimulus processing assumptions of the sometimes-opponent-process (SOP) model explain instances of contextual learning?

One of the most persisting assertions in Allan Wagner's view of conditioning is that the environment or context in which significant events occur can develop an association with these events, more or less in the same way as conditioned and unconditioned stimuli become associated with each other. He was drawn to this idea by evidence of contextual fear conditioning, contingency effects, some instances of context-specificity of long-term habituation, and latent inhibition. From a theoretical point of view, however, homologizing contexts to conditioned stimuli is not as simple as it seems, especially when quantitative theories are involved, as is the case of Wagner's work. It might be, for instance, that contexts cannot be represented merely as long-duration conditioned stimuli, in which case, no net contextual learning can occur due to the context being less correlated with reinforcement than with nonreinforcement. In this article, we use Wagner's sometimes-opponent-process model of conditioning to comment on the quantitative nature of this challenge. Also, based on an idea sketched by Mazur and Wagner, we describe a set of quantitative strategies that might be usefully considered to solve this dilemma within the general framework of Wagner's theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Ideological twinning: socialist aesthetics and political meetings in Maputo, Mozambique

Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution. While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid‐1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revolutionary socialism which the governing Frelimo party was forced to sacrifice in order to remain in power. In the essay, it is thus examined how the enactment of a revolutionary aesthetics successfully exposes what Frelimo was incapable of realizing and thus momentarily captures the party's ideological legitimacy. Taking my inspiration from Roy Wagner's recent work on holography and invention, I explore the relationship between sacrifice and revolution as an articulation of a symmetrical ‘twinning’ of seemingly contrastive political principles that are held together by a singular political aesthetics that is actualized only at political meetings.

Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner by Marcel Hébert

Reviewed by: Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner by Marcel Hébert Richard Bell Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner. By Marcel Hébert. Edited by C.J.T. Talar. Translated by C.J.T. Talar and Elizabeth Emery. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2015. Pp. xlvii, 128. $65.00. ISBN 9 8-0-813-227412.) Although the Jesuit philosopher Abbé Marcel Hébert (1851-1916) left seminary "a convinced Thomist" (p. xxi), his philosophical outlook was to change considerably after studying Kant and Schopenhauer. This, together with the growing interest in Wagner in France (see especially the Revue wagneriénne) and the symbolist movement which looked to Wagner for its inspiration, meant that it was natural for this priest to turn to the composer for new inspiration in what was later to be termed "Modernism." Hébert taught at the École Fénelon in Paris, becoming its director in 1895. However, when his unorthodox views become known to the Church hierarchy, he resigned his position and in 1903 "quietly left the church" (p. xxiv n. 10). Although his book Le sentiment religieux dans l'œuvre Richard Wagner (1895) sparked interest, its impact being enhanced by the review of the Wagnerian Abbé Arthur Mugnier, "the confessor of all Paris," it has fallen into obscurity, unjustly in my view. Therefore I welcome this translation with its foreword by Stephen Schloesser and introduction by the translators C.J.T. Talar and Elizabeth Emery (who have also included a translation of Mugnier's review). Their rendition reads well and Hébert's original footnotes are supplemented by references to English [End Page 599] translations of Wagner's prose work by William Ashton Ellis, to modern translations of the Ring, and to English translations of secondary literature. The purpose of Hébert's book is to trace the evolution of Wagner's view of "religious experience" ("sentiment religieux") in key stage works and theoretical writings, starting with the sketches Jesus of Nazareth (1849) and finishing with Parsifal (1882). The book is full of insightful remarks showing, for example, a close study of Arthur Schopenhauer with nuanced comments on the relation of Wagner to the philosopher (pp. 52–56). I wonder though whether he does full justice to Christian theology in the Jesus of Nazareth sketches, where he claims that the composer had replaced the ancient beliefs of Christianity with "an entirely naturalistic and humanitarian faith" (p. 36) and that he "interpret[s] the doctrine of Jesus through his own anarchist doctrine" (p. 31). I may add that although Houston Stewart Chamberlain was impressed on meeting Hébert (letter to Cosima Wagner of December 16, 1893) he made a similar criticism of the Abbé in this book Richard Wagner. Hébert closes his work by reflecting on the then current situation in France "in which the renewal of philosophical, scientific, and historical ideas has rendered Christian theology a dead letter for the intellectual elite" (p. 97). Wagner appears to come to the rescue in that he breaks us free from 'dogma' since, as he puts it in his essay Religion and Art (1880), music alone has the capacity to "reveal in incomparable accuracy the very essence of the Christian religion" (p. 95 n. 11). The composer certainly suited Hebert's Symbolist agenda. Generally speaking, Hébert knows his Wagner although it is striking that the actual music is not discussed. Wagnerians may wonder why he dates Georg Herwegh's introduction of Wagner to the philosophy of Schopenhauer as early as 1852 (rather than 1854); but there is some justification for this view and the editors' Introduction (p. xxxii) refers to Edouard Sans' 1969 book on Wagner and Schopenhauer and qualify Hébert's claim. Note that Hébert quotes from "The Work and Mission of My Life" and "Letter on Music" to provide "an accurate summary" of his thought in the ten-volume selected works. However, the former was actually written by Hans von Wolzogen, and although Wagner did sign the original English manuscript he later distanced himself from it. The latter work is better known as "Music of the Future" and is a rough French equivalent...

Strange Bedfellows at the Revue Wagnérienne: Wagnerism at the Fin de Siècle

This article reexamines the legacy of Wagnerism in France through the lens of cultural and intellectual history. Taking the Revue wagnérienne (1885–88) as its central subject of analysis, it demonstrates that contributors to the Revue developed from Richard Wagner's work several strategies for transcending the Franco-German nationalist conflicts so trenchant in the 1880s. Falling beyond the confines of any one academic discipline or aesthetic category, the Wagnerism presented on the pages of the Revue wagnérienne borrowed from scientific thought, aesthetics, religion, and politics in equal measure. This comingling of approaches expressed by the authors suggests that Wagnerism in the 1880s created an intellectual space for seemingly contradictory perspectives to coexist. Grappling with Wagner's works and ideas, then, provided French intellectuals with an opportunity to imagine alternatives to many of the political, cultural, and ideological polarizations of the early Third Republic.

'Worse than Irritated - Namely, Insecure': E. M. Forster at Bayreuth

This article examines E. M. Forster's ‘Revolution at Bayreuth’ (1954). It proposes that this deceptively apolitical broadcast talk reflected and commented on the aesthetics and politics of staging Wagner's work specifically, and on democracy, culture and postwar Anglo-German relations more broadly. The article highlights the talk's original transmission on the radio, exploring the implications and significance of Forster sharing his experience at the New Bayreuth through this particular medium. It considers Forster's critiques of the Wagner grandsons' stage innovations, teasing out the nuances of Forster's doubt about experimentalism and preoccupation with ‘tradition’. Arguing that the broadcast talk is more than just a personal account, the article looks into the details of Forster's belated trip to Bayreuth and uncovers the social, cultural and political underpinnings of his postwar Wagnerism.

Performing Wagner for the Twenty-First Century

Richard Wagner's works have repeatedly been the focus of questions concerning the possibilities, limits, and nature of the director's role in opera productions, especially in Germany, and prominently at the Bayreuther Festspiele. In this article Clemens Risi discusses some recent developments in staging Wagner's operas at the Festspiele, including Katharina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2007), Hans Neuenfels's production of Lohengrin (2010), and Sebastian Baumgarten's production of Tannhäuser (2011). While all these productions could be categorized as ‘director's theatre’, they also marked new steps in the staging practice of Wagner's work, going beyond questions of the interpretation of a single piece and taking it as material for exposure in a setting of experimentation. Here Risi considers how a well-known work emerges under the conditions of a newly established situation, as in a laboratory. Currently acting as interim Chair for Theatre and Media Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Clemens Risi was previously Assistant Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Auf dem Weg zu einem italienischen Musikdrama (Tutzing, 2004), and is currently completing a book on opera in performance and preparing another monograph for the 2005 Parma Verdi Prize on performance practice in mid-nineteenth-century Italian opera.

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.

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World

An Alternative Post-War Jewish Art World Andrew Wasserman Annie Cohen-Solal . Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Pp. xxv, 540. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 1400044278. Vanessa Corby . Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging, and Displacement. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. Pp. xvii, 250. Hardcover $29.95. ISBN 9 781845115449. David Kaufmann . Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. 118. Paper $24.95. ISBN 9780520265769. In his April 8, 1965 New York Times article "The Jewish Museum: What is It, Why is it, and What Next?" art critic Sam Hunter identified the uptown Manhattan museum as pulled in two directions: one, it served as a repository of historic ceremonial Judaica, defined by continued ties to the Jewish Theological Seminary; two, it functioned as an exhibition space for contemporary art appearing to "have no immediate bearing on Jewish affairs." This division was first announced in 1957 with the exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation and exacerbated by the show 1970 Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. One can still find it in this year's Kehinde Wiley exhibition, World Stage: Israel. Such exhibitions reveal a complex institutional definition of what constitutes Jewish art within greater contemporary art practice. In remarks in a1966 lecture at the museum, later published in Commentary as "Is There Jewish Art?" art critic Harold Rosenberg's declared, "First, they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art?" He proposed several possible criteria for establishing "Jewish art" as a specific category: art produced by Jews, art concerned with identifiable Jewish subjects, Jewish ceremonial objects, Jewish folk art and ephemera, and "metaphysical Judaica." With each category deemed unsatisfying, Rosenberg determined, "There is no Jewish art" if one attends exclusively to stylistic choices and practical function. Instead, he echoed Hunter's criterion of an "intellectual sympathy" that evolved from a Jewish Enlightenment culture and that accommodates challenging and novel art production. This attempt to align post-war American art with Jewish intellectual tradition simply on the basis of an under-analyzed, culturally specific appreciation for advanced culture is troubling to say the least. Rather than tackle the topic of a "Jewish art" from the standpoint of stylistics and utility (too limited) or [End Page 71] intellectual rigor (too broad), it is perhaps better to query the practitioners at this subject's center. Recent attempts at canon formation have generated lists including standard mid-century figures of Jewish-American heritage, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, and Leonard Baskin. However, as the exhibition records of the Jewish Museum demonstrate, these lists demand amending. Three recent books—Vanessa Corby's Eva Hesse: Longing, Belonging and Displacement, David Kaufmann's Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works, and Annie Cohen-Solal's Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli—offer the possibility of such an alternative lens. Each considers the career of a major figure of post-war American art whose work is informed by a rejection of, embrace of, or ambivalence toward Jewish identity. Additionally, the texts analyze how negotiating a multi-hyphenate identity in personal and professional realms under intense assimilationist pressures affected the reception of both the art and the artist within their historical age as well as today. Although not always successful as individual scholarly exercises, these texts collectively propose substituting a "Jewish art" world defined by aesthetic-based typologies for a Jewish "art world," to borrow Howard Becker's term. Beyond just artists, an art world expands to include the collectors, curators, dealers, critics, and historians who contribute to the creation, presentation and reception of artwork. This world runs alongside and intersects with a greater post-war Jewish American culture. As such, it offers an opportunity to consider this art world's relevance to shifting definitions governing what constitutes contemporary Jewish art. Corby provides an ambitious study of the connections between gender, ethnic, and religious heritage, and personal trauma, that shaped not only Eva Hesse's work, but also scholarship about Hesse over the past four decades. The text merges Ann Wagner's important historically-grounded work on...

The Gnostic Imprint on Parsifal, An Illumination of Ruins

Kunstwerke sind asketisch und schamlos. (1) --Theodor W. Adorno I begin by addressing the presence of Gnosticism in Parsifal in order to confront a more general theoretical problem about how the past is staged, both its impossibility and necessity. Richard Wagner's extraordinary originality in the creation of the character of his final drama and the combination of the typical with an extraordinary originality, make this work an appropriate ground from which to analyze an essentially theoretical position through the phantasmagoric evocation of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages: the representation of, obsession with, and recurrence of history in works of art. In Parsifal, a great work that belongs to the of history, Wagner's evocation of the Middle Ages establishes a very particular relationship with the past, one worth exploring from the theoretical stance that I have chosen. Furthermore, the work exemplifies another phenomenon of great interest: Gnosticism's recurrence in European culture as a marginal trend that is suppressed time and time again, but that always resurfaces, in many cases, as the important leaven in crucial works of the Western Tradition. The underlying hints of Gnosticism within Parsifal provide yet another example of the nineteenth century's obsession with medieval society, although our interest in its presence is not simply attributed to a widespread fad. Rather, it is motivated by a deeper commentary. Parsifal is one of the key works of a century that casts a hallucinated glance back to the past at the very moment when Europe begins its hallucinating voyage into the future. Parsifal precisely exemplifies some fundamental tendencies evolving within European culture at the time: it touches on the sacralization of art and the celebration of an imaginary past, conceived of as a model for the future. At the same time, it exemplifies the key to identity in the present, the transfiguration of eroticism, the fascination with the Orient, and the desire to regress from capitalism's all-measuring linear time to the circular time of myth. Within the Buhnenweihfestspiel there are also tendencies that reveal trends of the future: a rejection of theater as mere bourgeois entertainment alongside an attempt to revive its sacred character, an artistic asceticism that renounces brilliance in its search for authenticity, and a new language that will dominate the twentieth century's most remarkable music. My exploration is not limited to an analysis of the correspondences that can be found between Parsifal and the diffuse image of medieval heresy present in the drama. Instead, I turn my focus to a second constellation that tends to be forgotten. Wagner's work does not constitute a stable and fixed moment in July 1882. On the contrary, over time, the Buhnenweihfestspiel has been distorted because of its multiple interpretations and analysis. Both those who have been fascinated by Parsifal as well as those who have felt the horror within its music have irrevocably attached themselves in distinct ways to the work. Thus we can trace a second constellation to our present: Parsifal has become a ruin. It is an object that can be analyzed as Walter Benjamin analyzed decadent landscapes in his decisive work on ruins, a work itself in ruins, The Arcades Project. A Fascination with Gnosticism Gnosticism (2) has been associated with Christianity from the beginning, like an intermittent shadow deforming its image, but also, as if involved in a game of mirrors, like a sign revealing that perhaps the deformity occurs within the Christian Church itself. Gnosticism has been defeated time and time again and persecuted nearly to extinction, yet it has unyieldingly reappeared, in various incarnations. (3) First, during the Middle Ages, it appeared as heresy; later, when the church had lost much of its power to transform any departure from orthodoxy into heresy, it emerged in its inspiration of other movements such as Rosicrucianism, freemasonry, theosophy, and ritual magic. …

A relevância de Klein hoje

Para se aproximar do trabalho de Yves Klein, o autor reproduz alguns argumentos de Theodor Adorno sobre a música de Wagner, formulados em dois momentos - em 1937-1938, sob a experiência do fascismo, e em 1963, com 30 anos de "distância". No primeiro texto, Adorno mostrava, na obra de Wagner, os aspectos que traíam a gestação do fascismo. No segundo reconhecia que, com o novo momento histórico, outras camadas vinham à baila naquela obra; ela havia mudado, e a posição de Adorno em relação a ela tornava-se "ambivalente". Partindo do paralelismo com Wagner, Bois revisita o trabalho de Klein buscando revelar, em seus ardis e encenações, para além da simples adesão aos expedientes da indústria cultural, uma espetacularização do próprio espetáculo, que acaba por esvaziá-lo.

Parsifal's Aura

Abstract “Aura”—configured as an interplay of preservation and loss or—to quote the first version of Walter Benjamin's famous artwork essay—as an “interweaving of space and time”—is central not only to sound recording, but also to the musical dramaturgy of Wagner's final work. This article examines ways in which this unusual alignment affected early (pre-1948) recordings of Parsifal. The potential contradictions implicit in the concept of aura are nowhere more strikingly revealed than in these early recordings. On one hand, they foreground the problems of reducing complex and lengthy works to easily recorded excerpts or arrangements. In this quasi-Adornian reading, early sound recordings of Parsifal manifest the inexorable power of the culture industry to undermine the authentic work of art. And yet sound recording can also be seen as the fruit of a different impulse, the impulse toward a fully transcendent work of art, the realization of the “invisible theater” for which Wagner himself supposedly yearned. Indeed, Parsifal (even more than Wagner's other works) was recorded primarily as a symphonic work, divested of what Adorno so tellingly called the “phony hoopla” of operatic production. Early sound recording of Parsifal thus amplifies the conflict between materialism and transcendence that forms the ideological substratum of the plot. This conflict manifests itself in the “resistance” that Parsifal offers up to the process of recording, a resistance that is ironically most audible precisely during the age in which the recordings themselves are most “imperfect.” It is in these traces of resistance, I will argue, that we may imagine the aura of Wagner's final work.

Conhecimento científico, música e arte trágica

The article deals with the presuppositions and the implications of the death of the Greek tragedy, the way it is developed in the work The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche. Exploring the counterposition between scientific knowledge and tragic art it is intended to show how the nietzschean interpretation of Greece is marked by problem that link it to the German aesthetic-philosophical tradition of the end of the 18 th century and the 19 th century. Wagner's work will act as the bridge between both worlds (Greece and Germany), for it is through Wagnerian music in which the spirit of tragedy is present, that the boundary of the scientific view of the world will be seen more clearly and intensely and that it will be possible to conjecture the return of the tragic.

American Valkyries: Richard Wagner, D. W. Griffith, and the Birth of Classical Cinema

Focusing on the period from 1910 to 1915, this article argues that Richard Wagner's work was crucial to the development of American cinema. Critics and artists not only advocated Wagner's composition techniques for film accompaniment, but also turned Wagner into an emblem for far broader reforms. These reforms included a greater integration of music and film, a conception of film as a high art, and a conception of film as a medium for national purification and bourgeoisification. These reforms, and their connection to Wagner, helped set the stage for the use of "The Ride of the Valkyries" in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult (review)

Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult. By Hannu Salmi. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006. [x, 310 p. ISBN 1-58046-207-3. $65.] Maps, illustrations. Hannu Salmi's work on Wagnerism in Baltic region documents phenomenon with extraordinary detail. This book not only enlarges understanding of Wagnerism in general in nineteenth century, it also supplements music histories of Baltic countries with wealth of information and copiously detailed references. The text is delightfully illustrated with historical postcards, drawn primarily from author's own collection. Salmi claims that Wagner's relationship to Baltic Europe was not limited to his years as conductor in Konigsberg and Riga at start of his career. Neither were these places insignificant in larger Wagner phenomenon that engulfed Europe in later nineteenth century, with Riga perpetually emerging as leading center of interest in Wagner. In his Prelude, Salmi notes potential problems in researching Wagner reception in this region. Countries on Baltic coastline differ culturally, linguistically, and aesthetically, making this book collection of several reception histories rather than single, monolithic documentary. The choice of countries may seem somewhat arbitrary at first. Including Sweden but omitting Norway and Denmark, for example, focuses on Baltic coast region as geo-cultural unit at expense of real discussion of pan-Scandinavian Wagnerism. Why focus on Baltic coast countries, then? In first of eight chapters, Salmi maintains that musical links between coastal towns of Baltic Sea remained close up until middle of nineteenth century (p. 13), and that emergence of Wagnerism as phenomenon coincided almost exactly with critical shift in cultural relationships between these countries, facilitated by telegraph, steamboat, and railway. When Wagner was in Konigsberg and Riga, he was already becoming aware of local folk culture, but even more importantly was recognizing the dramatic possibility of myth (p. 18). Salmi argues, with considerable evidence to back him up, that Wagner's Baltic years should not be considered as a kind of prehistory (p. 30) to Paris and Dresden Wagner. Many of features of Wagner's later music have their roots in these early experiences. The second chapter discusses commoditization and distribution of Wagner's music in region, through publication of scores, arrangements, and extracts from operas. These low-brow arrangements introduced Baltic audiences to Wagner's music before they heard any of his operas performed, with Tannhauser becoming particular favorite through excerpts. The next chapter opens with an account of Riga's centrality in Baltic Wagnerism. It was, for example, first city after Dresden to stage performance (in 1843) of Der fliegende Hollander. Salmi claims (p. 60) that tremendous success of this opera in Riga may even have convinced Wagner to follow more Germanic style of Dutchman rather than French style of his earlier opera, Rienzi. A summary of Wagner's 1863 tour to Russia is not really part of this story, but is smuggled in as separate chapter under author's claim that this tour influenced Wagner reception in neighboring Finland. He also examines in some detail rumor (now almost certainly debunked) that Wagner visited famous Imatra rapids in Finland during his Russian tour. Wagnerism in Sweden followed very different path than in other Baltic countries. In chapter 5, Salmi tracks Sweden's relatively unenthusiastic response to Wagner, which he notes was partly due to Rienzi (rather than one of later operas) being first Wagner opera performed in Sweden. Influential Swedish critics like Wilhelm Bauck were also repeatedly critical of Wagner's work. …

The complexity of membership problems for circuits over sets of integers

We investigate the complexity of membership problems for { ∪ , ∩ , - , + , × } -circuits computing sets of integers. These problems are a natural modification of the membership problems for circuits computing sets of natural numbers studied by McKenzie and Wagner [The complexity of membership problems for circuits over sets of natural numbers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2607, 2003, pp. 571–582]. We show that there are several membership problems for which the complexity in the case of integers differs significantly from the case of the natural numbers: testing membership in the subset of integers produced at the output of a { ∪ , + , × } -circuit is NEXPTIME-complete, whereas it is PSPACE-complete for the natural numbers. As another result, evaluating { - , + } -circuits is shown to be P-complete for the integers and PSPACE-complete for the natural numbers. The latter result extends McKenzie and Wagner's work in nontrivial ways. Furthermore, evaluating { × } -circuits is shown to be NL ∧ ⊕ L -complete, and several other cases are resolved.

<b>Wagner's Edition of Palestrina's <i>Stabat mater</i> </b>

Richard Wagner's edition of the Stabat mater by Palestrina calls for a special attention among the 19th century transcriptions and practice editions of the work, since Franz Liszt declared it to be a masterpiece to be followed by others throughout his life, albeit he knew and appreciated editions with historical aspect, too. Wagner prepared his version of Palestrina's composition in 1848 for his historical concert in Dresden, and it was published on the recommendation of Liszt in 1878 by Christian Friedrich Kahnt. The study summarizes the documents of the genesis of Wagner's work with the background of Palestrina's Stabat mater editions before 1878, and tries to preveal Wagner's concept and musical decisions in the light of the performing practice of the Cappella Sistina of the time, as well as following the main aspects in the review by Franz Xaver Witt published in 1878.

Thomas Coram, Gent, 1668–1751

Thomas Coram, Gent, 1668–1751, by Gillian Wagner (Woodbridge: Boydell P., 2004; pp. 218. £25). Gillian Wagner's biography of Thomas Coram, published to coincide with the opening of a museum of the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, offers a rich insight into the culture and mental world of Hanoverian England. Handel and Hogarth are among the luminaries who flit across its pages, personalities are given life in engaging pen-portraits, and the evocation of London is by turns charmingly vivid and unsparing in its more harrowing detail. All this is encased in the life story of a man whose tireless spirit moved him from West County shipyards, through innumerable clashes with those who failed to share his vision, to implant humanitarian sensibilities in an age long thought to have turned its eyes away from pity. The Foundling Hospital, opened in March 1741, was his own magnum opus. It showed how dextrously Coram had exposed a social injustice—the horrific number of babies left abandoned in the streets to die—and generated a consciousness within polite society, with petitioning on a professional scale, and the courtship of aristocratic ladies, as the most effective source of patronage. Wagner's key point is that Britain was nearly deprived of the fruits of Coram's labours: throughout the greater part of his life his ambitions were channelled towards America, where he had ventured as a young man to work in the shipyards. He took a Bostonian wife, immersed himself in the schemes for colonial settlement, and, on successive occasions, came close to emigrating. His image is captured in glass in the Episcopalian church at Taunton, Massachusetts. Unearthing previously overlooked correspondence, Wagner shows how her subject's hopes became harnessed to a personal manifesto for the colonies, seeking to inject Anglicanism and civil government, provide a refuge for persecuted Protestants, and secure the education of native Indians. America, in all its inchoate potential, would become the laboratory for ideas that Coram wished to see introduced in the mother country; it colluded with his incurable streak of adventure. The Foundling Hospital took the place of these thwarted designs: not a distraction, but the new vehicle to promote his muscular worldview, building upon the entrée into government and society that his colonial projects had bequeathed. Coram wished to make his country the greatest force for the advancement of humanity, an example in splendour, enterprise and piety. As he was appalled by French incursions into America, so he felt affronted by superior provision for the vulnerable in Catholic countries. By turning what he called ‘my darling project’ into a monument to Britain's benevolent power, he wove the culture of philanthropy into a wider sense of imperial, Protestant virtu. The Hospital's concerts, with music composed by Handel, its collection of art on patriotic themes, and its aptitude for publicity, left him a fine tribute. A number of elements within this book demand greater investigation. The exporting of loyalist, Anglican rhetoric into America by English mercantilists, and the influence of Coram's allies in the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge would benefit from scrutiny; likewise the genesis of his interest in female education. It is in the colourful vignettes that this biography excels, taking the reader through some spine-tingling descriptions of children brought in on the first night of the Hospital's opening, to the cruel lotteries through which babies were accepted or discarded, to the tortuous path through which the Hospital established itself, against the clumsy hand of government, the asperity of moralists and satirists, and its own internal scandals. At its heart is an arresting sense of the tenacity that guided Coram, childless himself, towards the rescue and redemption of society's most wretched. Wagner's work might be read in conjunction with the broader studies of Georgian imperial culture by Linda Colley and Kathleen Wilson, but it provides a satisfying and moving narrative in itself. Close to death, living off the subscription of friends, and neglected by the glittering characters who had brought substance to his dream, Coram would still be seen standing in the grounds of his Hospital, beset by compassionate tears as he gave gingerbread to its young inhabitants. Uncomfortable in the court environment, anxious at betraying his lack of education, he surmounted these constraints to leave a remarkable legacy. It was partly through his labours that charitable endeavour became formidably organised, endowed with formal status, and made, above all, fashionable, as an extension of politics and the arts. Few reading this biography will doubt that America's loss was England's gain.

Influences of ancient Greek spirit on music romanticism as exemplifies in Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk

The romantics' ideal of the arts' collaboration (Mischgedichte) finds its most substantial equivalent in Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk). This theory for the restoration of the 'lost' unity of arts was elaborated in many theoretical essays of Wagner and 'applied' in his music dramas. Unity of arts, as well as unity of arts with nature existed according to Wagner in Ancient Greece while drama was the epitome of all expressive elements of nature. This "new art of the future", which Wagner envisaged, would restore the 'wholeness' of ancient Greek drama. It is the purpose, therefore, of this study to analyze mainly from an aesthetic point of view the influences of ancient Greek spirit on romantic thought, by focusing on Wagner's work.