Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama (includes 2 CDs)

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In the voluminous Wagner bibliography, Thomas May's book occupies a special place. Concise but remarkably information-packed and accompanied by two CDs of excerpts, it is addressed to those who seek a deeper understanding of Wagner's operas. The controversies--artistic, human and moral--generated by Wagner's innovative ideas and reprehensible behavior frequently obscure the greatness of his achievements. May performs an extraordinary feat: although unflinchingly aware of Wagner's arrogance, self-aggrandizement, duplicity, faithlessness, hedonism, greed, political opportunism, chauvinism, and anti-Semitism, he communicates boundless admiration for the composer and passionate love for his works. Suggesting that the very schism between Wagner's flawed character and idealistic aspirations inspired "monumentally stirring meditations on the contradictory range of human experience," he correlates and reconciles his "monstrous ego" with his sublime genius. The evolution of Wagner's operas, from his early and incomplete attempts to the late, often extensively revised masterpieces, culminated in a lofty artistic vision: the "total artwork" which, combining all the arts, would result in heightened experience and spiritual elevation. Wagner wrote his own texts, considering poetry and music inseparable and himself equally master of both, an assessment not universally shared. May takes the librettos very seriously, following them from their historical or mythological origin to their final form with formidable but unobtrusive erudition. Among his references are the Buddha, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, and T.S. Eliot, and he must have read everything about Wagner as well as Wagner's own often repellent autobiographical, theoretical, and political writings (which make one wish he had written nothing but music). May's musical analyses are equally riveting and absorbing. He traces the operas' ever-increasing depth, breadth, and grandeur, the growing importance and masterful use of the unifying leitmotif and the "Wagnerian" orchestra, and the often hidden strands that connect them despite their individual uniqueness. Opera lovers spurred by May's book to hear these works performed could not wish for a more knowledgeable, illuminating, and inspiring guide. --Edith Eisler

Book Description

This guide aims to unlock the world of Richard Wagner and his works, his monumental achievements, and, ultimately, the great emotional power inherent in his art. Decoding Wagner presents a straightforward, fresh overview of what Wagner attempted to achieve with his "artwork of the future." Two accompanying full-length CDs illustrate and trace his growth as a composer.

Customer Reviews:

interesting book with cds.......2005-08-21

This well writen book has an analysis of all Wagner operas. I found it helpful, used together with the Metropolitan Opera site.

An opera celebration.......2005-02-09

I used to be an opera singer and I have to say this is a fabulous book for any fan of Wagner. Tom May has done a terrific job of making this difficult material accessible, and the accompanying CDs help considerably. Even if you feel you have read everything there is to read about the maestro, you will find this book absorbing and very illuminating. Plus you'll probably want to buy a new recording of Tristan und Isolde as well [maybe the most beautiful music ever written, in my humble opinion]. I think Amazon may sell that too. LOL

Very solid overview of Wagner's operas - 2 Good Music CDs .......2005-01-24

I found this to be an excellent overview of Wagner and his operas in a book of only 200 pages or so. This book is for someone who is fairly familiar with the plots of Wagner's operas -- no plot summaries are presented -- and gives a good sense of how Wagner developed as both a composer and dramatist. The book is written mostly around the ten major operas wrote -- a chapter for each with an extra chapter to introduce the Ring. Although the book is relatively short, the reader learns a lot about Wagner's sources, his use of these sources, and key features of the individual operas. A portion of the discussion of the operas is tied to the CDs - one for the Ring and the other for the non-Ring operas. The CDs are primarily "greatest hits" - from the operas, with text making reference to different points on the CD in terms of timing.

This book is probably not the first book you read on Wagner -- I would recommend "Wagner Without Fear" by William Berger as an introduction to Wagner and his work. For other readers, this book really provides quite a bit of diverse information in a small space. The book is well-written and meets the needs of many readers in that it written around individual operas. A reader can go right to the opera of interest, but I think may will also want to read through the entire book to better understand the context of individual operas and their place in Wagner's development.

The book has a good bibliography (though it would have been nice to have some annotation).

The book is a good value as is, but with the 2 CDs (primarily BMG recordings), it becomes an excellent value. Any reader interested in Wagner should consider owning this book. 5 stars.

Accessible, lively and well-written.......2005-01-19

This is a terrific read: entertaining and briskly paced. May considers historical and social factors in Wagner's work without bogging down the reader with theory or dull historicism. In fact, this work brings me a greater appreciation for Wagner than I thought possible (I'm not, my apologies, an opera fan). I would recommend it to the casual theater goer, the fine arts critic, opera fans, and anyone interested in music or 19th century theater.

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Wagner and the Art of the Theatre
Patrick Carnegy
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

The production of Wagner’s operas is fiercely debated. In this groundbreaking stage history Patrick Carnegy vividly evokes the—often scandalous—great productions that have left their mark not only on our understanding of Wagner but on modern theatre as a whole. He examines the way in which Wagner himself staged his works, showing that the composer remained dissatisfied with even the best of his productions.
After Wagner’s death the scenic challenge was taken up by the Swiss visionary Adolphe Appia, by Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller in Vienna, and by Otto Klemperer and Ewald Dülberg in Berlin. In Russia the Bolsheviks reinvented Wagner as a social revolutionary, while cinema left its indelible imprint on the Wagnerian stage with Eisenstein’s Die Walküre in Moscow in 1940.
Hitler famously appropriated Wagner for his own ends. Patrick Carnegy unscrambles the interaction of politics and stage production, describing how post-war German directors sought a way to bury the uncomfortable past. The book concludes with a critique of the iconoclastic interpretations by Patrice Chéreau, Ruth Berghaus, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

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Examining the origin of great music with scholarly depth

Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks
M. Owen Lee
Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne

ASIN: 0802087957

Book Description

Richard Wagner's knowledge of and passion for Greek drama was so profound that for Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner was Aeschylus come alive again. Surprisingly little has been written about the pervasive influence of classical Greece on the quintessentially German master. In this elegant and masterfully argued book, renowned opera critic Father Owen Lee describes for the contemporary reader what it might have been like to witness a dramatic performance of Aeschylus in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens in the fifth century B.C. - something that Wagner himself undertook to do on several occasions, imagining a performance of The Oresteia in his mind, reading it aloud to his friends, providing his own commentary, and relating the Greek classic drama to his own romantic view.

Father Lee also uses Wagner's writings on Greece and entries from his wife's diaries to cast new light on Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and especially the mighty Ring cycle, where Wagner made extensive use of Greek elements to give structural unity and dramatic credibility to his Nordic and Germanic myths. No opera fan, argues Father Lee, can really understand Wagner saving Brünhilde without knowing the Athena who, in Greek drama, first brought justice to Athens.

Written with a clarity and depth of knowledge that have characterized all Father Lee's books on the classics of Greece and Rome and made his six other volumes of opera bestsellers, Athena Sings traces the profound influence - an influence few music lovers are aware of - that Greek theatre and culture had on the most German of composers and his revolutionary musical dramas.

Customer Reviews:

Examining the origin of great music with scholarly depth.......2004-01-14

Athena Sings Wagner And The Greeks by academician and musicologist M. Owen Lee is an informed and deftly written introduction to how ancient Hellenic culture and art influenced the compositions of work of Richard Wagner. Examining the origin and soul of great music with scholarly depth, Athena Sings Wagner And The Greeks is a refreshing study and dissection of the melding and interplay between narrative and fluid ideals which is enthusiastically recommended for students and scholars of European classical music in general, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in Wagnerian productions in particular.

Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner's Prose Works (A Da Capo Paperback)

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WAGNER IN HIS OWN WORDS

Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner's Prose Works (A Da Capo Paperback)
Richard Wagner
Manufacturer: Da Capo
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0306803194

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WAGNER IN HIS OWN WORDS.......2001-01-03

A prolific writer of both opera and prose, Wagner has always been engulfed in controversy. Over the past century and a half, a great deal has been written about him; the book stores are full of such works. After a while, one gets tired of constantly reading what other people think of Wagner. In this book, you can read his own words.

His collected prose extends to 8 volumes of densely packed type. Wading through them is a daunting task. This book is a carefully chosen selection of those writings where Wagner specifically talks about music, opera, or drama. If you are more interested in Wagner the musician than Wagner the political polemicist, this book is for you.

This is a reprint of the 1964 edition by Dutton. It contains the following sections: Cultural Decadence of the Nineteenth Century; The Greek Ideal; The Origins of Modern Opera, Drama, and Music; The Artwork of the Future; Wagner's Development; Bayreuth; Politics. You will find gems such as the original plot for The Ring, and an interesting essay where Wagner describes how he "fixed" some of Beethoven's symphonies.

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Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) is the second of the four operas in Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and the first of the early curtain, late-bedtime-length operas that inspired the term "Wagnerian" as a synonym for "extremely long." In it we meet a large quantity of the known offspring of the philandering head god, Wotan, including the nine Valkyries--warlike maidens who haul dead heroes to feast forever with the gods at Valhalla--and Wotan's twin children by a mortal woman, Siegmund and Sieglinde. The opera opens with Siegmund, defeated in battle, rushing into the first shelter he finds. It turns out to be the unhappy home of Hunding and Sieglinde. Sieglinde is Siegmund's twin sister, but that doesn't stop them from declaring their love and running off together, right after Siegmund pulls out the sword that their father left stuck in the tree that grows in the middle of the great hall. Brunnhilde, the chief Valkyrie, is first ordered by their father to help Siegmund, but he has to change his mind when Fricka, the goddess of marriage, points out the irregularity of the relationship. Brunnhilde admires Siegmund and tries to save him, but has to settle for saving the pregnant Sieglinde; as a reward for Sieglinde's audacity, Wotan puts her to sleep on a rock surrounded by fire that only a man who has never known fear can penetrate.

Rudolph Sabor's version of the libretto does a wonderful job of capturing Wagner's rhythms and idiom and bringing the whole into accessible English. This translation--which also includes suggestions for further study and comments on the action--would be a useful companion to listening to a recording of the Ring, because it points out when the leitmotifs occur.

Book Description

Die Walk++re (The Valkyrie) is the second of the four operas in Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and the first of the early curtain, late-bedtime-length operas that inspired the term "Wagnerian" as a synonym for "extremely long." In it we meet a large quantity of the known offspring of the philandering head god, Wotan, including the nine Valkyries--warlike maidens who haul dead heroes to feast forever with the gods at Valhalla--and Wotan's twin children by a mortal woman, Siegmund and Sieglinde. The opera opens with Siegmund, defeated in battle, rushing into the first shelter he finds. It turns out to be the unhappy home of Hunding and Sieglinde. Sieglinde is Siegmund's twin sister, but that doesn't stop them from declaring their love and running off together, right after Siegmund pulls out the sword that their father left stuck in the tree that grows in the middle of the great hall. Brunnhilde, the chief Valkyrie, is first ordered by their father to help Siegmund, but he has to change his mind when Fricka, the goddess of marriage, points out the irregularity of the relationship. Brunnhilde admires Siegmund and tries to save him, but has to settle for saving the pregnant Sieglinde; as a reward for Sieglinde's audacity, Wotan puts her to sleep on a rock surrounded by fire that only a man who has never known fear can penetrate. Rudolph Sabor's version of the libretto does a wonderful job of capturing Wagner's rhythms and idiom and bringing the whole into accessible English. This translation--which also includes suggestions for further study and comments on the action--would be a useful companion to listening to a recording of the Ring, because it points out when the leitmotifs occur.

Customer Reviews:

Concern as to the accuracy of the German translation.......2003-09-23

I have been using the Sabor translation of 'The Ring' libretto and,for me,as a German speaker,I have found lots of examples where the English transalation does not appear to reflect the German text and I find that the William Mann and Lionel Salter translations,for me,provide a closer word for word translation of the text.I am surprised that Mr Sabor includes 'accuracy' as one key to his translation - I have found examples where questions become statements with an exclamation mark,different tenses ... the list goes on.This translation is a disappointment.The helpful aspect of the text is the inclusion of 'leitmotiv' by the text and the inclusion of sundry notes,though at times these appear to be fatuous.

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Das Rheingold (Ring Cycle)
Rudolph Sabor
Manufacturer: Phaidon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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In this translation, Rudolph Sabor does for Wagner's epic libretto what John Ciardi did for Dante's visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven: he turns it into readable, understandable English while maintaining most of the original's meter and alliterations. Sabor's version would be admirable for this alone, but he has done his readers the additional favor of noting where leitmotifs occur and offering sidebars on the music and action.

Book Description

Das Rheingold is the shortest opera Richard Wagner wrote. It comprises just one act, and it's technically just the curtain raiser for the main event: the sordid family history of Wotan's children, the Walsungs, as it coincides with the end of the world by fire and flood. Das Rheingold sets things in motion, as the dwarf Alberich steals the Rhine gold from its watery home, renounces love, and forges the gold into a ring of power. The chief god, Wotan, covets the ring and schemes to get it, but the Nibelung puts a curse on it; it is quickly covered with the blood of the giant Fasolt, coldly slain by his brother Fafner, who prefers gold to love. The gods move into Valhalla, the home built for them by the giants and paid for with the Nibelung's gold, but their doom is now ordained.In this translation, Rudolph Sabor does for Wagner's epic libretto what John Ciardi did for Dante's visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven: he turns it into readable, understandable English while maintaining most of the original's meter and alliterations. Sabor's version would be admirable for this alone, but he has done his readers the additional favor of noting where leitmotifs occur and offering sidebars on the music and action.

Parsifal;: Music drama in three acts, (G. Schirmer's collection of opera librettos)

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Parsifal;: Music drama in three acts, (G. Schirmer's collection of opera librettos)
Richard Wagner
Manufacturer: G. Schirmer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty

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Mildly interesting family reminiscences and Wagner thoughts
The Wagners:The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty
Wagner Smargner

The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty
Nike Wagner
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 069108811X

Book Description

In this virtuoso piece of cultural history, the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner narrates the Wagner family's turbulent history. In the process, she shares her considerable insights into the operas and gives an inside account of the internecine struggles that have surrounded the Wagner family jewel: the Bayreuth Festival.

Nike Wagner draws on history, biography, and psychoanalysis to interpret both her family's history and her great-grandfather's operas. She focuses on Bayreuth, revealing how this showcase for Wagner's sublime art so readily served the Third Reich. With clear, often ironic eyes, she examines her family's extraordinary role in German culture--and its connections to right-wing ideology.

Particularly fascinating is the tug-of-war between Nike's visionary but enigmatic father, Wieland, and her astute but aesthetically stodgy uncle, Wolfgang. It was Wieland Wagner who inaugurated a daring new style of Wagner production--characterized by absence of scenery, spare acting, and dramatic lighting--that led to a wider revolution in how operas are produced. But Wolfgang Wagner, now entering his eighties, has controlled the Festival and quarreled with family members since Wieland's premature death in 1966. The author concludes with a look at the current contenders for this family throne, herself among them, and presents her vision for the Festival's future.

Wagnerites will need this book on their shelves. As an example of cultural journalism at its finest, it will also appeal to readers interested in German cultural history or those simply drawn to the melodrama that is the Wagner family story.

Customer Reviews:

Mildly interesting family reminiscences and Wagner thoughts.......2004-12-23

Some of Richard Wagner's genius descended to his son Siegfried Wagner, whose vastly under-rated music I am currently, delightedly, discovering. I wish Siegfried had composed more.

But the only aspect of Richard Wagner's talent that reached as far as his grandchildren and great-grandchildren is that for writing self-serving autobiographies. In fact a minor literary genre has been established: memoirs by people who are famous only for being a descendent of Richard Wagner. Thus we have _Shadow over Bayreuth_ by Friedelind Wagner, _Acts_ by her brother Wolfgang ["it may be called _Acts_, but it sure aint Gospel"], the book by Gottfried Wagner that has so far been published under three different titles, and counting, and Nike's _The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty_.

The only Wagner descendent with an interesting story to tell, and a ghost writer who told it well, was Friedelind. But then she appears to have been a genuinely likeable, if extremely difficult, human being, who inherited some of her grandfather's courage and directed it against the Nazis, in the certainty (I think utterly justified) that he would have approved.

The remainder of the Wagner memoirs are marked principally by petulance, the tone tending to waver between the whiny and the snarky. Of these, Nike's book is the least bad. So what can we say about Nike's book, beyond that it is better than Gottfried's or Wolfgang's books?

The most interesting section is the family history, which from my point of view contains a few, all too few, anecdotes or glimpses of the last Wagner descendants to be at all interesting in their own right: that is, Siegfried Wagner and his daughter Friedelind.

Nike thinks that her father, Wieland Wagner, was also a major creative person, like his father and grandfather. I don't think that, though it depends on what you mean by "creative"; certainly he was a moderately innovative theatre director. Anyway, she gives us a partial portrait of Wieland. I feel her account is slightly bowdlerised, perhaps because she is making her claim to the Bayreuth Festival through her descent from Wieland, and therefore she would not wish to bring into question his fitness to have been involved in the post-War Bayreuth. So awkward matters like Wieland's involvement with the Flossenberg Concentration Camp remain glossed over.

On the evidence of this book, it seems that if Nike's claim on the festival were to be successful, it would not result in greater openness in relation to the Bayreuth archives for the period 1920-1945.

The rest of Nike's more recent family gossip is of less interest to me, since none of the living Wagners are especially interesting people. They belong in the society pages, and not in cultural coverage. Except perhaps Wolfgang, who could look back on and reveal much about a fascinating historical period; but his "autobiography" makes it clear he has no intention of doing so.

The other part of the book reveals Nike's thoughts about the works, and ideas for revitalising the festival. The thoughts are mostly moderately interesting, if not blindingly insightful. The only oddity is bringing the early 20th century nutcase Otto Weininger into her discussion of _Parsifal_. The trouble is that Weininger was a tormented homosexual Jewish man who hated homosexuals and Jews in general, and himself in particular, also hating women, while he was about it, and committed suicide.

I suspect Nike bought into the 1960s/1970s idea that insane people are somehow more insightful and interesting than the rest of us. In fact the opposite is true. Weininger's thoughts on _Parsifal_ are as relevant to an understanding of that work as Charlie Manson's thoughts on the _White Album_ are relevant to the exegesis of that Beatles' classic.

As for Nike's thoughts on the Festival, I think they have merit. It would be useful to perform Wagner's earlier operas at Bayreuth as part of the Festival, perhaps not in the main theatre, and also to perform operas that influenced him (Beethoven, Cherubini, Marschner, Weber, and others), and were influenced by him. And Bayreuth should commission and perform new operas, which surely is what Wagner meant by "Children, do something new."

So Nike's thoughts about the festival make a worthwhile contribution. Still, as for the succession, with some sentimental regret I think that it should go to the best candidate, and I think it astronomically unlikely that the best candidate will be called Wagner.

Summary: a mildly interesting book. Very far from essential, but at least readable. And I'd rather spend time in her company (I mean as a reader) than either Gottfried or Wolfgang. What a terrible shame, by the way, that Siegfried Wagner didn't write an autobiography.

Cheers!

Laon

The Wagners:The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty.......2001-11-14

Although the Wagner grand-daughter exhibits brilliant gifts that seem handed down from the great composer himself,it has become tiresome and tedious to keep harping on his so-called "anti-Semitism". After all,when all is said and done,and if she were aware of Wagner's essay Art and Revolution,he made it clear that his secular humanism despised Christentum most as the cause of debasement of Man and stifling of artistic creativity.Even the essay Judentums in der Musik is most lucid when it allows for the likeliest conclusion:that it is really Christentums that has proven most detrimental to music. It is Nietszche who truly echoes the truest Wagnerian lucidity by terming traditional Christentum as the "The Ultimate Corruption" [Letzte Koruption]. Ironically,she has too gullibly yielded to current faddishness,as if a mere product of her own society,the condition of which was Wagner's greatest weakness and partly the source of his decadent side. His gratest music is a triumph of anti-christianitic,humanistic visionaryism. Let us cease this masochistic catering to viciously inferior,decadent fashion.

Wagner Smargner.......2001-03-18

Oh the poor girl, to be an off-spring of such a family. I started to skip some of her essays of the operas, as she may be Wagner's great-grand-daughter, but, dear God, she's a boring writer, and I, for one, don't need, in 2001, the message of Tristan und Isolde etc., rammed down my throat.

When I looked at this book at Frankfurt flughafen in 1999 the German edition had some of the text blacked out, and I've heard since that Anja Silja objected to the text concerning her after the book was printed. Silja doesn't come out as very likeable in the English version, but then, does anyone ever like their father's mistress? [For Frau Wagner's information, her father and Frau Silja never made a production together in Milan, and the Stuttgart Lulu was 1966, not 1960.]

I get very tired when it's page after page of bad behaviour by irredeemably dreadful people to their nice relations. I also get a bit irritated when young people are brought up well beyond their means and talents just because they are the great grandchildren of a famous composer. It's pretentious. One longs to shout at them: "Break free, go away, make your own life for yourself away from Bayreuth."

Amazon.com

Rudolph Sabor is a master translator. He does a superb job of recasting Wagner's words into readable English while still retaining all the tricks of meter and alliteration that are so important to Goetterdaemmerung; this could well be used as a singing translation. The book has other help for students, including side comments on the action, drama, and background, and it tells readers where each of the leitmotifs occurs. The bibliography, discography, and other references make this an extremely useful package for anyone who wants to know more about this ne plus ultra of the operatic world.

Book Description

Goetterdaemmerung (The Twilight of the Gods) is the fourth and last of Wagner's mighty cycle of operas based on ancient Germanic sagas and myths of gods and heroes. The undauntable and mighty Siegfried awakens the sleeping Valkyrie Brunnhilde, and finally learns the meaning of fear when he falls in love with her. But he soon feels the need to go adventuring, and makes the mistake of landing at the Gibichung hall, where Gunther seeks to gain fame with the aid of his half-brother Hagen (son of the vindictive dwarf Alberich) and their sister Gutrune. Hagen drugs Siegfried, causing him to forget his former life with Brunnhilde and to fall in love with Gutrune. Siegfried, disguised, then brings Brunnhilde to wed Gunther. But Brunnhilde, who is furious, schemes with Hagen to kill the hero. When his bier is brought to the hall after a fatal hunting party, she sets it alight and then rides onto it herself; with this fire, Valhalla itself is turned to flames, and the end of the gods is at hand. Hagen is drowned by the Rhinemaidens, who reclaim the magic gold whose power set this complex saga into motion. The world is reborn, to be inherited by mere men and women.Rudolph Sabor is a master translator. He does a superb job of recasting Wagner's words into readable English while still retaining all the tricks of meter and alliteration that are so important to Goetterdaemmerung; this could well be used as a singing translation. The book has other help for students, including side comments on the action, drama, and background, and it tells readers where each of the leitmotifs occurs. The bibliography, discography, and other references make this an extremely useful package for anyone who wants to know more about this ne plus ultra of the operatic world.

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Lohengrin (Opera Guide)
Richard Wagner , and Amanda Holden
Manufacturer: Calder Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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