Category: musicology
-
‘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,…
-
Stories from Wagner
The distinctive contribution of Stories from Wagner lies in its careful construction of a narrative hinge between mythic material and the nineteenth-century project of the music drama. It composes a lucid, story-forward surface that remains legible to new readers while quietly staging a set of methodical choices about origin, authority, and transmission—how oral legends, medieval…
-
‘Five Lessons on Wagner’ by Alain Badiou
Five Lessons on Wagner presents a philosopher’s rigorous attempt to re-situate Wagner within the field where aesthetics, ideology, and method intersect. Badiou’s wager is that Wagner is less a historical composer to be judged by posterior moral verdicts than a recurrent operator that allows philosophy to test its own concepts—identity, myth, totalization, continuity, and subject—under…
-
‘Richard Wagner’ by Francis Hueffer
Hueffer’s Richard Wagner occupies the precise historical interval in which the composer’s career was still a moving target and yet sufficiently formed to admit a synoptic judgment. The book’s distinctive contribution is twofold: it articulates a continuous line from the biographical restlessness of a “man of action” to the evolving grammar of the modern music-drama,…
Simon Gros 