by Simon Callow
89 opera The Victors (1856; 1878)
90 drama Tristan and Isolde (1857–59)
91 lieder Wesendonck Lieder (1857–58)
91B orchestral Dreams from Wesendonck Lieder (1857)
92 lieder It is Surely God’s Will (c.1858; draft)
93 orchestral Romeo and Julie (1868; sketches)
94 piano In Princess M’s Album
95 piano Arrival at the Black Swan
96 opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1845–67)
97 orchestral Homage March. Arrangement for military music (1864 Cuvilliés Theatre)
98 orchestral ? So-called Themes
99 opera Luther’s Wedding (1868; prose sketches)
100 comedy A Comedy in One Act (1868)
101 choral A Slogan for the German Fire Brigade (1869)
102 comedy in the old style A Capitulation (1870)
103 orchestral Siegfried Idyll (1870)
104 orchestral Emperor March (1871)
105 lieder Minor Songs (1871)
106 lieder ? Child’s Catechism for Kosel’s Birthday (1873)
107 lieder ? So-called Themes (1874–83)
108 piano Album Leaf for Frau Betty Schott (1875)
109 arrangement Arrangement of the Waltz Wine, Women and Song by Johann Strauss II (1875)
110 orchestral Grand Festive March for the Opening of the Centennial Celebration of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (1876)
111 Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage Parsifal (1877–82)
112 lieder Minor Songs (1877)
113 lieder Minor Songs (1880)
Reproduced by permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz, Germany
BIBLIOGRAPHY
These are prominent among the many, many books I have consulted, but they represent a tiny fraction of what has been and is being written on the subject:
Amerongen, Martin Van, Wagner: A Casebook Study, Dent, 1983
Borchmeyer, Dieter, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, Princeton University Press, 2003
Carnegy, Patrick, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, Yale University Press, 2006
Deathridge, John, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil, University of California Press, 2008
—and Dahlhaus, Carl, The New Grove Wagner, Macmillan, 1984
DiGaetani, John Louis, Wagner and the Modern British Novel, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978
Goldman, Albert, and Sprinchorn, Evert, Wagner on Music and Drama, Gollancz, 1964
Hurn, Phillip Dutton, and Root, Waverley Lewis, The Truth about Wagner, Cassell, 1930
Köhler, Joachim, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation, Yale University Press, 1998
—Richard Wagner, The Last of the Titans, trans. Stewart Spencer, Yale University Press, 2004
Lippert, Woldemar, Wagner in Exile, trans. Paul England, Harrap, 1930
McIntosh, Christopher, The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, Tauris, 2003
Magee, Bryan, Aspects of Wagner, Alan Ross, 1968
—Wagner and Philosophy, Allen Lane, 2000
Millington, Barry, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, His Work and His World, Oxford University Press, 2012
Neumann, Angelo, Personal Recollections of Wagner, trans. Edith Livermore, Constable, 1909
Newman, Ernest, A Study of Wagner, Dobell, 1899
—Wagner as Man and Artist, Dent, 1914
—The Life of Richard Wagner, Cassell, 1945
Praeger, Ferdinand, Wagner as I Knew Him, Longman, Green, 1892
Rose, Paul Lawrence, Wagner: Race and Revolution, Faber, 1992
Sabor, Rudolph, The Real Wagner, André Deutsch, 1989
—Wagner Celebration, International Press, 2004
Skelton, Geoffrey, Richard and Cosima Wagner: Biography of a Marriage, Gollancz, 1982
Spencer, Stewart, Wagner Remembered, Faber and Faber, 2000
Spotts, Frederic, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, Yale University Press, 1994
Tanner, Michael, Nietzsche, Oxford Paperbacks, 1994
—Wagner, HarperCollins, 1996
Williams, Simon, Wagner and the Romantic Hero, Cambridge University Press, 2004
Some of the best and most stimulating recent writing on Wagner is to be found in essay collections, among which Penetrating Wagner’s Ring, edited by John Louis DiGaetani (Da Capo), is, despite its hilarious title, one of the best. Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey (Princeton) and The Wagner Handbook, edited by Müller and Wapnewski (Harvard), are both full of excellent and provocative contributions, while Paul Dawson-Bowling’s two-volume The Wagner Experience and Its Meaning to Us (Old Street) is a unique production, the work of a passionate and curious Wagnerite who has devoted himself to a lifelong quest for the ultimate truths of the composer’s life and work.
Wagner’s own writings are readily available, in a variety of editions and translations. The bulk of them can still only be found in the ponderous and cumbersome versions of Wagner’s first translator, William Ashton Ellis, to whom non-German speakers must nonetheless be grateful; Dodo Press has also done us all a great service by bringing them out in cheap, attractive paperback editions. All Wagner’s major and many of the minor writings are to be found in the Dodo catalogue. Very few of these pieces, pamphlets and books are available in modern or even relatively modern versions. In 1970, Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn brought out a very useful digest of Wagner’s prose writings, with highly illuminating commentaries, under the title Wagner on Music and Drama (Gollancz); the texts themselves, alas, are drawn from the Ashton Ellis translations. A scintillating compilation of the young Wagner’s stories, essays and articles, edited and translated by Robert Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton under the title Wagner Writes from Paris (Allen and Unwin), gives a sense of how engaging a writer he could be. Skelton was also responsible for the indispensable abridged translation of Cosima Wagner’s Diaries. The most vivid sense of Wagner’s personality is to be discovered in his letters, of which a vast quantity is now available, largely, alas, rendered into dreary English by the indefatigable, if verbally tone-deaf Ashton Ellis. They appear scattered across countless collections – Family Letters; Letters to Theodor Uhlig; Letters to August Röckel; Letters to Minna; Letters to Liszt (both of these last two bursting with life) – many of them available from Dodo Press, or Print on Demand. Fortunately, in their Selected Letters (Dent), Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington made a deeply stimulating choice which gives a sense not only of what was going on inside Wagner’s head, but also of his day-to-day experience. Finally, and perhaps most usefully of all, in 1983 Cambridge University Press published a sparkling and vivid new translation of My Life by Andrew Gray, edited by Mary Whittall, an edition which, with its invaluable notes and comprehensive afterword describing the background of the book, its errors and prevarications, is a crucial item in any reading of Wagner, and should be as widely and easily available as possible if this extraordinary man is to be understood.
As a kind of pendant to Wagner studies, Nietzsche’s writings about Wagner are evidence of a reaction to the man and his music that many listeners have experienced on a less titanic scale. The books in which he writes about Wagner, all readily available in excellent translations, are:
The Birth of Tragedy
Untimely Meditations: Richard Wagner at Bayreut
h
The Case of Wagner
Nietzsche contra Wagner
The following works have been quoted in translation:
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust: Parts 1 and 2, trans. Robert David MacDonald, Oberon, 1988
Hoffmann, E. T. A., ‘Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, in David Charlton (ed.), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, trans. Martyn Clarke, Cambridge University Press, 1989
— The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea Bell, Penguin, 1999
Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Presentation Vol. 2, trans. Richard Aquila and David Carus, Prentice Hall, 2011
ILLUSTRATIONS
All illustrations, except the portrait of Wagner by Joukowsky (this page), are taken from Kreowski and Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur, B. Behr’s Verlag, Berlin, 1907.
1 The Concert Sculptor, by Adolf Oberländer, Fliegende Blätter, 1883
2 Richard Wagner, by André Gill, L’Eclipse, 1869
3 Siegfried-Wagner Lifts the Treasure of the Nibelungs, by C. von Grimm, Schalk, Leipzig, 1879
4 Boom! Boom! The Bombardment of Bayreuth gets underway, Wiener Humoristische Blätter, 1882
5 Wagner, a wandering minstrel, points his telescope at Paris, by J. Blass, Paris, 1891
6 Richard Wagner subjects John Bull’s nerves to the Music of the Future, Entr’acte, London, 1877
7 Performance of an Opera in the Presence of the Master, by Adolf Oberländer, Fliegende Blätter, 1880
8 Swiss caricature of the Music of the Future (no date)
9 Frontispiece of a French anti-Wagner pamphlet, by André Gill, 1876
10 Richard Wagner in the act of composition, Berliner Karikatur, 1858
11 Richard Wagner in ‘The Ring of the Nibelungen’, 1876
12 Paris, 1891
13 The Trojan Swan, Berliner Wespen, 1882
14 Over Land and Sea, by H. König, 1873
15 Wagner in Venice, by Paul Joukowsky, 1883
16 A Battle for Wagner, Kladderadatsch, Berlin, 1907
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First to thank is Kasper Holten, without whom none of this would have happened. Then Simon Stokes and Robin Don, my collaborators on Inside Wagner’s Head, who waited with infinite patience till I found what it was I wanted to say about Wagner. Then Professor Bryan Magee, in addition to writing two of the very best books on the subject – the pithy and provocative Aspects of Wagner, and then, thirty years later, the magisterial Wagner and Philosophy – spent some priceless time with me, helping me to clarify my understanding of the way Wagner’s mind worked. Any lucidity the book may have in the territory of philosophy is due to these conversations.
Next to thank is the late George Weidenfeld, who had the idea for a book, but who, perhaps more importantly, by offering a pair of his tickets for Bayreuth to my friend Andrew Paulson, who in turn invited me to see Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, opened my eyes to the whole idea of Wagner as a phenomenon, rather than simply a musician. Then I must thank Martin Redfern for so eagerly and swiftly responding to my proposal for a book, and Arabella Pike for taking it forward with such enthusiasm, then Kate Johnson and Lottie Fyfe who combed the manuscript for solecisms, orthographic, grammatical, factual, and stylistic and patiently put up with my spirited defences of some deeply ingrained idiosyncrasies. Then, as ever, I must thank Maggie Hanbury, my agent, for her endless informed encouragement and for making it all happen smoothly and to the book’s best advantage. Renaissance man and supreme maestro of the keyboard Stephen Hough read the book in a slightly earlier form, and made shrewd and penetrating comments on it, all of which have been absorbed into the present version. Composer, musicologist, educator, writer, Gerard McBurney and I have discussed Wagner over many years, and his kaleidoscopically brilliant mind has thrown shaft of light after shaft of light onto aspects of the composer’s approach which were otherwise opaque to me; these illuminations too have found their way into the text.
Finally, my husband Sebastian has endured nearly four years of exposure to my astonished discoveries and barely formed ideas about a composer with whom we have lived in the sort of intellectual ménage-à-trois of which I suspect der Meister would have fully approved.
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