Richard Wagner and His World
Researched Bibliographic Dossier
Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.
- Title
- Richard Wagner and His World
- Editor
- Thomas S. Grey
- Series
- The Bard Music Festival
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Place
- Princeton and Oxford
- Year
- 2009
- Extent
- xv + 542 pages
- ISBN
- 9780691143668
- eISBN
- 9781400831784
- Language
- English
- Type
- Edited scholarly collection / documents / reception studies
SCOPE & CONTENT
This Bard Music Festival volume places Wagner within the dense cultural networks that surrounded his works rather than presenting another continuous biography. Modern essays are combined with translated and annotated primary documents so that stage practice, literary culture, political controversy, reception and personal relationships can be studied alongside the music dramas. Subjects include Wagner as stage director, his relationship with Liszt, the evolution from opera to music drama, Tristan, leitmotif reception, nationalism and the fraught history of Wagner and German Jewish culture.
RESEARCH VALUE
Its strongest feature is the juxtaposition of interpretation and evidence. Readers can move from a scholar’s argument to contemporary criticism, memoir, programmatic writing or press documents and see how Wagner’s public meaning was constructed. This makes the book particularly useful for reception history and for resisting a simplified picture in which Wagner’s artistic, political and ideological roles are treated separately.
ESSAYS AND PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
The volume is deliberately plural. Its scholarly essays address theatre, aesthetics, politics and reception, while documentary sections recover voices from Wagner’s own century. The arrangement encourages comparison between later musicological explanation and the unstable, often polemical reactions of contemporaries.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Because Wagner studies are inseparable from questions of nationalism, anti-Semitism, cultural memory and performance tradition, an edited collection of this kind is valuable precisely because no single author controls the narrative. It provides multiple approaches rather than a single totalizing interpretation.
- Format
- File size
- 5.6 MB
- Subjects / people
- Books & Essays · Composers · Historical Documents · Works & Analysis · Richard Wagner · Critical Analysis & Technique · Critical Studies · Historical Criticism · Works & Repertoire Studies
- Catalogue completeness
- 8 / 10 core bibliographic fields