A work intended to explain & interpret Wagner & his music. Extremely valuable for the French point of view which it presents. Illus. & Charts.

The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner and His Festival Theatre in Bayreuth is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1898. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

In contrast to most books on Richard Wagner, this biography focuses primarily on Wagner as an important figure in the development of the theatre. While his contribution to music history has been exhaustively documented and analyzed, his theatrical ventures, in particular the founding of the Bayreuth Festival, have not been the object of much research by English-speaking theatre historians. Nevertheless, the Festival was a crucial event in the development of the European theatre: while Bayreuth established the paradigm for all modern theatre and music festivals, the Festival Theatre itself has provided the most widely imitated architectural configuration in twentieth-century theatre building.

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Richard Wagner is remembered as one of the most influential figures in music and theatre, but his place in history has been marked by a considerable amount of controversy. His attitudes towards the Jews and the appropriation of his operas by the Nazis, for example, have helped to construct a historical persona that sits uncomfortably with modern sensibilities. Yet Wagner's absolutely central position in the operatic canon continues. This volume serves as a timely reminder of his ongoing musical, cultural, and political impact. Contributions by specialists from such varied fields as musical history, German literature and cultural studies, opera production, and political science consider a range of topics, from trends and problems in the history of stage production to the representations of gender and sexuality. With the inclusion of invaluable and reliably up-to-date biographical data, this collection will be of great interest to scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

Richard Wagner: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer.

Although the bibliography of literature about personalities in the conducting world is extensive, a comprehensive, scholarly study of the history of conducting has been sorely lacking. Georg Schünemann's respected study, published in 1913, was brief and restricted to the procedures of time-beating. No work has attempted to examine the role of the orchestral conductor and to document the evolution of his art from historical, technical, and aesthetic perspectives. Dr. Elliott W. Galkin, musicologist, conductor, and critic-twice winner of the Deems Taylor award for distinguished writing about music-has produced such a work in A History of Orchestral Conducting. The central historical section of the book, which examines chronologically the theories and functions of time-beating and interpretative concepts of performance, is preceded by discussions of rhythm, development of the orchestral medium, and the evolving characteristics of orchestration. Conductors of unusual pivotal influence are examined in depth, as is the increasingly complex psychology of the podium. Critical writings since the time of Monteverdi and the birth of the orchestra are surveyed and compared. Analyses of conducting as an art and craft by musicians from Berlioz to Bernstein and commentators from Mattheson, Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Mann to Jacques Barzun, are described and discussed. A fascinating collection of engravings, wood cuts, photographs and caricatures contributes to the richness of this work.