Category: Classical Music
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Richard Wagner – Der fliegende Holländer (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1971)
Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer was recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival in 1971 under Karl Böhm and released by Deutsche Grammophon in the familiar multi-LP configuration. Sung in German, it documents Bayreuth’s festival forces at full intensity in one of Wagner’s most tightly coiled and elemental works, a “sea opera” in which storm, oath, and…
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Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1966)
This post presents Tristan und Isolde as captured live at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1966 and issued on Deutsche Grammophon in the classic multi-LP configuration. The present edition is sourced from the original vinyl plates and has undergone a restrained digital remastering by Simon Gros, undertaken not to modernize the sound but…
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‘The Wagner Operas’ by Ernest Newman
The distinctive contribution of Ernest Newman’s The Wagner Operas lies in the rigor with which it fuses dramaturgical analysis, source-criticism, and close listening into a single explanatory instrument that can carry the weight of Wagner’s most demanding works. Newman’s stake is precise: to make audible, in disciplined prose, the nexus through which text, mythic source,…
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‘Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno’s Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music advances a project as exacting as it is audacious: to reconstruct Beethoven’s music as a determinate mode of thought whose inner formal tensions both register and adjudicate the historical experience of a society moving toward rationalized totality. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it treats musical material…
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The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas
Žižek’s The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas stakes a precise claim: that opera’s most persistent scenes of longing, blockage, and impossible union are not melodramatic ornaments but analytic diagrams of desire’s economy, and that music—the privileged bearer of an inner “truth”—stages the objectless insistence of drive more rigorously than narrative ever can.…
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Schubert’s Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation
Schubert’s Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation by René Rusch offers a deeply engaging and thought-provoking analysis of the multifaceted dimensions of Franz Schubert’s instrumental music through the lens of contemporary scholarship. It presents the reader with the evolving interpretations of Schubert’s work by situating them within a rich tapestry of aesthetic values, historiographical revisions,…
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Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer
Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer by Lorraine Byrne Bodley is a monumental achievement in the realm of music biography, a work that redefines our understanding of Franz Schubert, not only as one of history’s most gifted composers but as a man whose life was as complex and poignant as the music he created. Bodley’s biography is…
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The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert
Joe Davies’s The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert offers an unprecedented and comprehensive examination of the deep and often unsettling ways in which the gothic permeates the music of one of the most beloved composers of the Romantic era. This work is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship, shedding light on…
Simon Gros 