Want a true balm for the soul? My Travels with Wagner tells the story of how author Chris McQuaid’s journey took him from young Irish soldier suffering from PTSD, to the finest opera houses in Europe and a passion for the music of Richard Wagner. The 19th-century composer produced dramatic operas and musical works that greatly influenced the course of Western music. “I was a lover of Wagner’s music long before I came to Ireland and listened for hours on the floor of my brother’s flat in Putney, in the early 1950s. Soon afterwards I went to Bayreuth – and went on going. When I came to Ireland, I joined the Wagner Society and met Ireland's supreme Wagnerian, Chris McQuaid. I left the society when he did, in deep sympathy, and sharing his unparalleled love and knowledge. It is reflected, over again, in this book, rich in passionate concern for Richard Wagner and his unique place in Music.” – Bruce Arnold, author and journalist

"Why produce another biography of Wagner? There are a number of answers to this question. In the first place, the archives are being opened and new documents are appearing all the time. Dr von Westernhagen, a scholar who has devoted his life to Wagner, has produced the only general biography on this scale which is truly up-to-date in making use of this fresh archive material. In the second place, there is a need for a biography which focuses on Wagner's artistic achievements. In recent years Wagner has become a 'problematic' figure, largely because recent biographies have concentrated on his anti-Semitism, his egoism and his sexual life, and have presented the picture of an implausible scoundrel who by chance also wrote some music dramas. Westernhagen's approach is much more positive: his starting point is the importance and the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry. This is therefore a positive biography, which combines an appropriate largeness of scale with factual accuracy and familiarity with the source documents. Dr von Westernhagen quotes extensively from letters and diaries to throw light, for example, on Wagner's relationship with Cosima, his idea of emigrating to America, his estrangement from Nietzsche (and the way this was later wilfully misrepresented by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth), and the later years as they are reflected in the so-called Brown Book, a notebook for the years 1865-82 which Wagner kept for Cosima and which was first published only in 1975. The author has also consulted the composition exercises which Wagner wrote in his teens for his teacher Theodor Weinlig, and the contents of the composer's Dresden library help to establish what were the early intellectual influences upon him. This biography concentrates on the nature of Wagner's art, its development, its achievement: the way, for instance, that Wagner was able to keep many projects in mind simultaneously, all of them dovetailing into one another with an inexorable logic. Particularly useful features of this study are the appendices which include a chronological summary of Wagner's life, a complete list of his musical and literary compositions and an up-to-date bibliography. This is a definitive biography which will stand beside Newman's classic work as an indispensable reference book for all future studies of Wagner, and a judicious account for those approaching this fascinating life story for the first time." --Dust jacket.

How did the tumult caused by German composer Richard Wagner result in the first modernist painting? In the first full-length book dedicated to the study of Edouard Manet and music, art historian Therese Dolan demonstrates that the 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries represents the progressive musical culture of his time, heretofore read by scholars predominantly through the words of Charles Baudelaire. Dolan sees in this painting's radical style the conceptual shift to modernism in both painting and music, a transition that, she convincingly argues, received a strong impetus from Manet's Music in the Tuileries and Wagner's controversial Tannh?er, which premiered the previous year. Supplemental to analysis of the painting, Dolan incorporates discussion of texts by Theophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Baudelaire who are represented in the painting. This book incorporates studies of the major artistic, literary, and musical figures of nineteenth-century France. It represents an important contribution to an understanding of French culture in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of intense literary, artistic, and musical activity that formed the crucible for modernism.

In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann. During 1845–46 the compositional styles of Schumann and Wagner changed in a common direction, toward a style that was more contrapuntal, more densely motivic, and engaged in processes of thematic transformation. Reynolds shows that the stylistic advances that both composers made in Dresden in 1845–46 stemmed from a deepened understanding of Beethoven’s techniques and strategies in the Ninth Symphony. The evidence provided by their compositions from this pivotal year and the surrounding years suggests that they discussed Beethoven’s Ninth with each other in the months leading up to the performance of this work, which Wagner conducted on Palm Sunday in 1846. Two primary aspects that appear to have interested them both are Beethoven’s use of counterpoint involving contrary motion and his gradual development of the "Ode to Joy" melody through the preceding movements. Combining a novel examination of the historical record with careful readings of the music, Reynolds adds further layers to this argument, speculating that Wagner and Schumann may not have come to these discoveries entirely independently of each other. The trail of influences that Reynolds explores extends back to the music of Bach and ahead to Tristan and Isolde, as well as to Brahms’s First Symphony.

As never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique. The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman. Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Parsifal was Richard Wagner's last opera, and many consider it his most beautiful and moving work. Peter Bassett, author of the highly successful A RING FOR THE MILLENNIUM, has made a special study of Parsifal, looking particularly at the relationship between Wagner's sources and his text and identifying important thematic connections with other works, notably DER RING DES NIBELUNG. This guide - which includes a translation of the libretto - will be invaluable to those new to Parsifal, but will also provide fresh insights for readers who are already familiar with Wagner's final work. This new edition is illustrated with historical photographs and a new format.

'Idiosyncratic, humorous, enlightening and written by one of the finest conductors alive ... This is the book to buy if you are going to see Wagner or listen to him at home' LITERARY REVIEW Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. MY LIFE WITH WAGNER chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood. Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner - from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. Next he takes each opera in turn, his appraisal illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure. The result is a richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.

Richard Wagner has fascinated every generation of opera-lovers for over a century, and a mass of literature has interpreted and reinterpreted not only his character, but also the components of the great music dramas that are still some of the most captivating and complex operas in the international repertory today. In this excellent study, Garten examines the cultural and historical sources of these operas: the myths and legends that Wagner employed, in which much of his works' interest, other than the purely musical, can be found. Garten's study also shows how legends of the old Nordic gods, the troubadours and Minnesingers, the quest for the grail, as well as stories taken from folklore and history, were transformed into the theatrical mythology of Wagner's music dramas.

In this 1914 work, Newman attempts 'a complete and impartial psychological estimate' of a complex and frequently misinterpreted genius.

This major new biography of Richard Wagner is iconoclastic, astringent and bold. It explores the philosophical roots of Wagner's work, which the composer himself deliberately obfuscated. It re-evaluates Wagner's relationships with his mother, step-father and - most revealingly - his wife, Cosima, standing received opinion on its head. And he meets head on, and confirms, the controversy over Wagner's anti-semitism. At the same time, and notwithstanding, Kohler profoundly acknowledges Wagner's genius.