Oxford Bibliographies Online: Wagner, Richard (1813-1883) by: Thomas S.

Grey (Stanford University) TOC Introduction General overviews Primary sources Writings Autobiographical texts Correspondence Musical and Dramatic works Contemporary memoirs Reference works Journals Biographies Philosophical and aesthetic studies Literary studies Iconography and visual arts Cinema Political, social and cultural themes Nationalism, politics, religion Wagnerism and reception issues Cultural criticism Anti-Semitism Gender, Sexuality and Psychological Themes Criticism and interpretation (general) to 1900 Criticism and interpretation (general) 1900-1945 Criticism and interpretation (general) since 1945 Dramatic texts: sources and influences Musical language and compositional method Musical analysis (general) Production and performance studies Bayreuth Festival Studies of individual works Early operas Romantic operas Der Ring des Nibelungen Tristan und Isolde Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg Parsifal Instrumental works

INTRODUCTION Not only one of the most significant composers of the nineteenth century or of any era, Richard Wagner (b. 1813 d. 1883) was, as he would have been the first to point out, much more than that. The Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork, one of his most famous coinages, referred initially to the model of ancient Greek drama he wished to emulate in reforming opera as a fully integrated union of the arts. His own claim to such creative totality rested initially with the fact that he produced the librettos for his own operas (Germany lacked a professionalized tradition of libretto writing as existed in Italy or France). Like other composers, Wagner trained himself as a conductor, but he also went on to establish and largely design his own theater for the premiere of his magnum opus, the four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) in 1876. This festival theater in Bayreuth, Germany was carried on by his wife, Cosima, and his son, Siegfried, whose own British-born wife Winifred notoriously allied the festival with Hitler and the Nazi party. The freely structured, dramatically inflected, harmonically adventurous, and brilliantly orchestrated idiom Wagner pioneered in the Ring cycle and in later works such as Tristan und Isolde (1857-59; premiered 1865) undeniably changed the face of composition in the nineteenth century. The emphatic claims for art s role in shaping the society and the nation embodied in the Bayreuth festival and developed in volumes of prose essays contributed equally to Wagner s cultural celebrity. In Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg (1868) he integrated contemporary debates over tradition and the individual talent, so to speak, within a timely monument to German national identity. Christian mysticism, Buddhist-Schopenhauerian ideas of compassion and recurring cycles of life, modern psychology, and a life-long obsession with the redeeming powers of art all merge in his final work, Parsifal (1882), contributing to the cult-like phenomenon of Wagnerism that flourished at the end of the century.

GENERAL OVERVIEWS While many biographies also include commentaries on the major operas, the items listed here focus on the oeuvre (music, librettos, writings), its broader significance and historical legacy. Newman 1914 is the closest in conception to a life-and-works study, but offers a surprisingly good introduction to the composer s theoretical writings, while Newman 1949 is still the most substantial overview of the operas themselves. Dahlhaus 1979 avoids synopses or review of dramatic sources by working outwards from small, representative details, while remaining accessible to non-scholars possessing some familiarity with the works. Burbidge and Sutton 1979, Mller and Wapnewski 1992, and Grey 2009 are all somewhat more scholarly in conception, while Millington 1992 offers something closer to a reference guide for the general reader. Grey 2008 features essays synthesizing recent scholarship also

for a general audience or students, and Tanner 1996 offers a personal appreciation of Wagner s achievement with an emphasis on the intellectual and psychological dimension of the dramas. Burbidge, Peter and Richard Sutton. The Wagner Companion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. A collection of essays, sometimes quite lengthy, by English, American, and German authors treating Wagner as a figure in modern intellectual history and introducing some concerns of post-war musicology (the semiotics of Wagner s musical language, the analysis of compositional methods based on sketches and drafts), but largely bypassing biography, reception, or political issues. Dahlhaus, Carl. Richard Wagner s Music Dramas. Translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pithy, essayistic treatment of the Wagner canon highlighting interesting details and interpretive cruxes in the genesis, literary and dramatic conception, compositional idiom, mythic motifs, and dramatic characters of the operas in individual chapters. Original German text published in 1971. Grey, Thomas ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wagner. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Short chapters on biography, politics, individual operas, the Ring cycle (dramatic and musical conception), the writings, staging, Wagnerism, anti-Semitism, and a review of modern scholarship. Includes detailed biographical chronology. Grey, Thomas, ed. Wagner and his World. Princeton University Press, 2009. Essays on aspects of the works and milieu together with source documents relating to biography, early performances, and critical reception. Millington, Barry, ed. The Wagner Compendium. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Brief but relatively detailed entries on many facets of the biography, historical background, intellectual and musical context, Wagner s writings and ideas, compositional style and method, and performance issues, plus reference-style listings of names, terms, and compositions. Newman, Ernest. Wagner as Man and Artist. London: Dent 1914. Revised in 1924, this insightful monograph was begun in the wake of the first official publication of the composer s autobiography, Mein Leben, in 1911. Three sections contain essay-like chapters on biographical issues, musical-aesthetic themes in the writings, and critical assessment of the works as such. Remains a remarkably substantial and accessible introduction to Wagner s life, thought, and artistic achievements. Newman Ernest. Wagner Nights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

Like Newman s biography (*Newman 1933-47*; see Biographies), this series of ample introductions to the Wagner canon remains an essential standard. The literary sources of each work are carefully sorted through, followed by a detailed synopsis of Wagner s dramatic treatment with glosses on the musical setting based primarily on the role of leitmotifs. Reprinted in two volumes as The Wagner Operas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Mller, Ulrich and Peter Wapnewski, eds. Wagner Handbook, translation ed. J. Deathridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992. First published in German (Stuttgart: Krner, 1986). Translation includes new material on Wagner singing, Wagner and psychoanalysis, and Wagner scholarship. Essays rather than reference-style entries. No discussion of individual works per se, but does include a useful annotated inventory of Wagner s main writings. Tanner, Michael. Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. A short appreciation of the Wagner oeuvre from aesthetic, psychological, and literary perspectives, resistant to the rising politicization of Wagner criticism since the 1980s.

PRIMARY SOURCES The Wagner canon is in its way compact, consisting of ten major operas or music dramas (starting from Der fliegende Hollnder and counting the Ring cycle as four works), plus three early operas not admitted into the repertory of the Bayreuth festival. However, the total scope of primary source material relating to the composers life and works vast, including his many published writings and a veritably oceanic correspondence. Modern critical editions exist for the musical works (nearly complete) and the correspondence (a little more than half-way complete), but not for the writings, apart from the autobiography *Mein Leben* (see Autobiographical texts). Writings Wagner began issuing his own collected writings in 1871 (Wagner 1871-83), and this edition was eventually supplemented by six more volumes (Wagner 1911-16) containing his autobiography, numerous dramatic sketches or uncomposed texts, unpublished essays, fragments, or items not re-published in Wagner s own collected edition. The first and only collected edition in English translation, Wagner 1892-99, was the work of the composer s tireless British advocate, William Ashton Ellis, containing all of the prose works from the original Gesammelte Schriften and many only added in the later Smtliche Schriften, but not translations of the libretti themselves, which had already appeared in many other formats. Wagner s prose style has always been notorious for its tendency to bombast and syntactic convolution; Ellis s approach to a nearly impossible task was to render the prose in

a near-literal translation, with the result that more complicated passages can barely be understood without reference to the original. The thematically arranged anthology of excerpts offered in Goldman and Sprinchorn 1964 draws entirely on Ellis s translations. Jacobs and Skelton 1973 anthologizes nearly all of the early writings in successful new translations, aided by the simpler journalistic or novelistic idiom characterizing the originals. The more abstruse theoretical writings begin with the era of Wagner s political exile from Germany in 1849. Kropfinger 1984 is the only modern scholarly edition of any of these, the composer s most ambitious single prose publication Oper und Drama. Jacobs 1979 succeeds in presenting three later texts in readable translations (two of them more pragmatic in conception, to begin with), though with minimal annotations. Borchmeyer 1983 is a small-format reprinting of most of the librettos and prose works in modern type, with short introductions collected in the final volume but no annotations or critical apparatus. A comprehensive anthology of all writings, in German, was issued in digital format by Sven Friedrich (Wagner 2004). Wagner s occasional program notes to excerpts from his own works and to works by Beethoven he conducted are collected in new translations in *Grey 2009* (see General overviews). Goldman, Albert and Evert Sprinchorn, eds. Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner s Prose Works. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964. Thematically organized anthology of excerpts in translation from *Wagner 189299*. Reprinted New York: Da Capo, 1981. Jacobs, Robert L. and Geoffrey Skelton, eds. and trans. Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories and Essays by the Young Composer, ed. and trans. London: Allen and Unwin, 1973. Anthology of Wagner s early journalistic pieces for the Parisian Revue et gazette musicale and some German papers from 1839 to 1842, including some items not found in the standard 10-volume edition of the writings (*Wagner 1871-83*) Jacobs, Robert L., ed. and trans. Three Wagner Essays. London: Eulenburg Books, 1979. Lucid modern translations of Music of the Future (1861), On Conducting (1869), and On Performing Beethoven s Ninth Symphony (1873), with newly printed and expanded musical examples illustrating the latter two. Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10 vols. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871-83. The original, authorized collection of writings. Vols. 1-9 published 1871-73; vol.. 10 added in 1883. Four printings to 1907, the second (1887-88) with pagination now commonly cited, and also taken over into vols. 1-10 of *Wagner 1911-16*. Wagner, Richard. Smtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols. Edited by Hans von Wolzogen and Richard Sternfeld. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1911-16.

Reproduces the second edition of *Wagner 1871-83* and supplements that with posthumously published or re-printed material, including Mein Leben, the autobiography first issued in 1911. The most complete edition of the writings available. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner s Prose Works, 8 volumes, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co., 1893-99). Reprinted by Broude Brothers (New York, 1966) and in paperback by University of Nebraska Press (1994-6), the latter issued under the collective titles: The ArtWork of the Future, Opera and Drama, Judaism and Music, Art and Politics, Actors and Singers, Religion and Art, Pilgrimage to Beethoven, Jesus of Nazareth. Wagner, Richard. Dichtungen und Schriften, 10 vols., ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1983. A small-format nearly complete edition of the dramatic texts and principal writings published in commemoration of the centenary of the composer s death. Introductions to the individual volumes are collected in the final volume (10); otherwise no annotations or index. The edition has been criticized for the systematic omission of Wagner s anti-Semitic writings, Judaism in Music as well as the late regeneration essays of 1878-82. The only collected German edition in modern (Roman) typeface. Wagner, Richard. Oper und Drama. Edited by Klaus Kropfinger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. The only modern critical edition of any of the major prose writings. The text is based on Wagner s autograph manuscript, thus differing in some details from the original published text of 1852, partly orthographic. Variants are indicated in the annotations, along with some other commentaries on the text. Issues of genesis and reception discussed in the afterword. Wagner, Richard. Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Sven Friedrich (CD-ROM). Berlin: Directmedia, 2004. A digital compilation of the sixteen-volume Smtliche Schriften (Wagner 191116), fourteen volumes of the Smtliche Briefe (*Wagner 1967- *; see Primary sources: correspondence), the autobiography (Wagner , Cosima Wagner s diaries (*Wagner, Cosima 1978, 1980*; see autobiographical texts, and biographies two major German-language biographies (*Glasenapp 1910-23* and *Gregor-Dellin 1980*; see Biographies).

Autobiographical texts From nearly the beginning of his career Wagner nurtured a strong conviction in the lasting interest of his life for posterity. He began keeping a kind of shorthand account of his professional activities as early as the 1830s (the surviving fragment of this transcribed in vol. 1 of *Wagner 1967- *; see Correspondence). Shortly after

his first major breakthrough with the grand opera Rienzi in his hometown of Dresden, he published a narrative resum of his early career (translation, Wagner 2008). When his life began to resume a more stable course again under the patronage of Ludwig II of Bavaria and the domestic care of his future second wife, Cosima, Wagner resumed an informal account if his thoughts, deeds, and plans, reproduced in translation in Wagner 1980, which eventually contributed to the formal autobiography dictated to Cosima over fifteen years and published posthumously as Mein Leben (English edition Wagner 1983). The first published edition of 1911 was slightly expurgated, but more controversial remains the tendency of the whole to embroider facts or situations in a manner conducive to a flattering image of artistic genius. The autobiography breaks off at the point of Ludwig s patronage in 1864, but is supplemented by the diaries kept by Cosima Wagner (Cosima Wagner 1978, 80) beginning in 1869, and offering a remarkably detailed and candid portrait Wagner s daily activities and working routine to the end of his life. Wagner, Cosima. The Diaries of Cosima Wager, 2 vols. Edited by Martin GregorDellin and Dietrich Mack, translated Geoffrey Skelton. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1978, 1980. English translation of the diaries of Wagner s second wife, Cosima, originally published as Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebcher, 2 vols. (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1976, 1977). Nearly uninterrupted daily entries recording Wagner s personal and professional life, from 1 January 1869 to the day before his death. Wagner, Richard. The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882: The Brown Book. Edited by Joachim Bergfeld and translated by George Bird. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980. German edition Das braune Buch: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1865-1882 (Zurich and Freiburg, 1975). Less a diary than a notebook for occasional thoughts, literary sketches, and assorted plans begun at Cosima von Blow s suggestion in 1865 and largely supplanted, as a record of daily life and thoughts, by her diaries after 1869 (*Wagner, Cosima 1978, 1980*) Wagner, Richard. My Life. Translated by Andrew Gray. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. English translation of Wagner s official autobiography, Mein Leben, dictated to Cosima Wagner between 1865 and 1880 at the behest of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The text was printed privately in 4 installments between 1870 and 1880, and first published in 1911, with some passages suppressed. The 1983 translation is based on the modern scholarly edition of the complete text by Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich: List, 1963; 2nd edn 1976). It has no index, but does include descriptive page headers. Wagner, Richard. Autobiographical Sketch (to 1843), translated by Thomas S. Grey. The Wagner Journal 2:1 (March 2008): 42-58.

Annotated translation of Wagner s first autobiographical text, commissioned by his early literary acquaintance and influence, Heinrich Laube, for his Zeitung fr die elegante Welt in early 1843 following the composer s return to Germany and the success of Rienzi in Dresden.

Correspondence Much of Wagner s voluminous correspondence has been preserved, mostly just from his own side. With the ambitious edition of the complete correspondence, (Smtliche Briefe, Wagner 1967- ) still far from completion, the early descriptive catalogue assembled in Altmann 1905 remains a valuable reference tool. Much of the intimate, diary-like correspondence with his famous muse, Mathilde Wesedonck, has been taken up into the Smtlich Briefe edition, but it is still worth viewing it as a single entity in Wagner 1904, as is also true of the correspondence with Franz Liszt, reissued in a modern edition as Kesting 1988. Wagner s earlier career is well documented in Burk 1972, including as it does many letters to his first wife, Minna. The correspondence with Friedrich Nietzsche (Frster-Nietzsche 1921) and with Ludwig II (Strobel 1936-9) is mostly not yet available in the complete edition, and the latter, despite much stylized flattery of his patron, often provides a rich documentation of Wagner s creative and intellectual life. The most useful general anthology of correspondence, fluently translated and copiously annotated, is certainly Spencer and Millington 1987-88. Altmann, Wilhelm, ed. Richard Wagners Briefe nach Zeitfolge und Inhalt: ein Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte des Meisters. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hrtel, 1905. An early attempt to catalogue Wagner s correspondence. The content of most catalogued items (a total of 3143) is summarized, and some original text is quoted directly, in excerpted form. Information about dating, recipients and publication history still useful for items not yet published in the collected correspondence (*Wagner 1967- *). Burk, J. N., ed. Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection. New York: Vienna House, 1972. Extensively annotated and biographically contextualized translation of correspondence (840 items) amassed by the British collector Mary Burrell towards the end of the nineteenth century, above all correspondence with the first wife, Minna, and other earlier friends and associates up to the early 1860s. First published in 1950 (New York: Macmillan). Frster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, ed. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence. Translated by Caroline V. Kerr, introduction by H. L. Mencken. New York, 1921 Somewhat tendentiously edited and annotated by the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, but the only English-language translation of the correspondence (both sides) from 1869 to the time of the first Bayreuth festival.

Kesting, Hanjo, ed. Franz Liszt Richard Wagner: Briefwechsel. Frankfurt: InselVerlag, 1988. The most complete and accurate edition of this correspondence (both sides), mainly from the 1850s. A German edition and translation were also published in the 1890s. Spencer, Stewart and Barry Millington, eds. and trans. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1987; New York, W.W. Norton, 1988. The most representative, fully annotated and contextualized collection of letters available in translation in translation, or otherwise (over 500 items included). Strobel, Otto, ed. Knig Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner: Briefwechsel 1864-1882. 5 vols. Karlsruhe: G. Braun Verlag, 1936 9. The sometimes revealing though often hyperbolic correspondence of Wagner with his most important patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria, including telegrams and other short messages. Over 700 items from the first year of the patronage (1864) to the end of Wagner s life. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonk: Tagebuchbltter und Briefe 1853 1871. Edited by Wolfgang Golther. Berlin: Alexander Duncker, 1904. Letters, jottings, and a kind of artistic diary in epistolary form addressed to Wagner s famous Swiss muse, covering above all the period of Tristan und Isolde, as well as the Paris Tannhuser production and the beginning of Die Meistersinger. The collection was re-printed no fewer than 29 times by 1906, when Golther issued a slightly revised edition. English translation by William Ashton Ellis published 1905. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner: Smtliche Briefe. 18 vols. (to 2010). Edited by Gertrud Strobel, Werner Breig and others. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fr Musik, 1967-2000; Wiesbaden, Leipzig and Paris: 1999- . Ongoing scholarly edition of the complete correspondence, extensively annotated. Published to date (2010) are 18 volumes covering the correspondence up through 1866.

Musical and Dramatic works. Wagner s later works, the so-called music dramas (the four parts of the Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg, and Parsifal), were among the first operatic scores to enjoy relatively meticulous care from publishers from the very first. Textual problems increase as one moves backwards through the operas of the Dresden period (in reverse order: Lohengrin, Tannhuser, Der fliegende Hollnder), and the earlier operas were either not published at all in Wagner s lifetime (Die Feen, Las Liebesverbot) or in nothing like a complete, accurate full score (Rienzi). At present, full scores of the first two operas exist only in the Balling 191229 edition, while all the rest have been taken up in the modern critical edition of

Dahlhaus and Voss 1970- , which includes variants of the Hollnder and above all Tannhuser scores (the extensively revised Paris version of the latter). Parts of the Rienzi music (the long pantomime-ballet in Act 2 and numerous other passages cut at the premiere) still do not exist in a published full score. The many piano-vocal scores of the operas cannot be itemized here at all. While the dramatic texts (librettos) have long been available in many forms, including translations, the facing-page singing translations provided in the English National Opera guidebook series (John 1981-93) are a convenient study resource, as is the more literal but still fluent translation the Ring of the Nibelung text in Spencer and Millington 1993. Though no longer in print, Wagner 1971 provides a convenient modern edition of all the dramatic texts in one volume, with useful documentation of genesis and some samples of critical reception. Balling, Michael, ed. Richard Wagners Werke. 9 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1912-29 (incomplete). Only nine out of twenty projected volumes were published of this first attempt at a complete edition of the musical works; of these vols. 12 and 13 remain important as the only full printed scores of Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, the first two complete operas. Dahlhaus, Carl, with Egon Voss and others. Richard Wagner: Smtliche Werke. Mainz: Schott, 1970- . Ongoing critical edition of the complete musical and dramatic works. Published to date are vols. 3-20, 23-7, 29-31. Vols. 23 30 are documentation volumes pertaining to the published opera scores (vols. 3 14); vol. 31 contains texts of uncompleted stage works and documentation. John, Nicholas, series ed. English National Opera, Opera Guide Series. London: J. Calder and New York: Riverrun Press, 1981 93 These small-format guides include short essays, tables of musical motives, production photos, and full libretto texts with facing modern singing translations. Guides exist for all the canonic operas: The Flying Dutchman (vol. 12, 1982), Tannhuser (vol. 39), 1988, Lohengrin (vol. 47, 1993), The Rheingold (vol. 35, 1985) The Valkyrie (vol. 21, 1983), Siegfried (vol. 28, 1984), Twilight of the Gods (vol. 31, 1985), Tristan and Isolde (vol. 6, 1981), The Mastersingers (vol. 21, 1983), and Parsifal (vol. 34, 1986). Spencer, Stewart and Barry Millington, eds. Richard Wagner s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. The best presentation of the complete text of the Ring cycle, with facing translations; an effective compromise between literal and literate. Short essays on aspects of the Ring cycle and a numbered list of leitmotifs (only selectively labeled) are also included. Wagner, Richard. Die Musikdramen, Foreword by Joachim Kaiser. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1971.

Complete German text of all the operas and music dramas, with information on genesis, sketches and drafts. Reprinted Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978.

Contemporary memoirs Thanks to his enormous celebrity by the end of his life, Wagner is well represented in all manner of memoirs, particular his later years. Dorn 1877 is an exception in recalling, at least in passing, of one of Wagner s earliest professional posts (in Riga, 1838-39). Naturally most memoirs feature only momentary windows onto the life, but often, as with Weissheimer 1898 or Gautier 1910-11, they provide unique glimpses into both personal and professional affairs of a given period, or, like Schur 1900 and Neumann 1908, a first-hand view of productions supervised by Wagner. Hartford 1980 is a well-chosen and thoughtfully presented anthology of eye-witness accounts of the first Bayreuth festivals, and Wolzogen 1883, though typically encomiastic, comes from one of the composer s closest associates during the Bayreuth years. Spencer 2000 offers a wide sampling of the whole genre, covering much of Wagner s lifetime, and including a few previously unpublished or untranslated sources. Dorn, Heinrich. Ergebnisse aus Erlebnissen. Berlin, Liebelsche Buchhandlung, 1877 The second volume in a series of memoirs (collectively entitled Aus meinem Leben), this includes recollections of Wagner s time as Kapellmeister in Riga, where Dorn was a colleague. Gautier, Judith. Wagner at Home. Translated by Effie Dunreith Massie London: Mills and Boon, 1910; New York: John Lane Company, 1911. Translation of Auprs de Richard Wagner: Souvenirs (1861-1882). The original French text was not published until 1943 when it was serialized in the Mercure de France. Gautier was the daughter of Thophile Gautier, briefly the wife of Catulle Mends, and well-connected with the whole world of French Wagnerism, as well as an intimate and correspondent of Wagner s in his later years. Hartford, Robert, ed. Bayreuth: The Early Years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Remains the best anthology of original accounts of the Bayreuth festival during the decades from its foundation up to the First World War. Selections are taken from writings or correspondence by prominent singers, conductors, composers, critics, and other writers, including Tchaikovsky, Saint-Sans, Eduard Hanslick, G.B. Shaw, Mark Twain, Felix Weingartner, Thomas Beecham, Virginia Woolf, and Bela Bartk. Neumann, Angelo. Personal Recollections of Richard Wagner, trans. Edith Livermore. New York, Henry Holt, 1908.

First published in German as Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner (Leipzig: L. Staakman, 1907). Available electronically through *archive.org*. Neumann was a Viennese-born singer, Intendant, and impresario who negotiated with Wagner to take a version of the original Bayreuth production of the Ring cycle on tour throughout major European centers for several years beginning in 1882. Schur, Edouard. Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner: la premire de Tristan et Iseult Paris: Perrin & Cie., 1900. Recollection of a French writer and musical scholar, among the earliest of the composer s French advocates, detailing experiences in Munich during and after the first production of Tristan und Isolde there in 1865. Spencer, Stewart, ed. Wagner Remembered. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. A fine selection of mostly short selections, ranging from one to ten pages, from a wide variety of contemporary sources, grouped into six biographical periods. The list of sources and the short introductions to each excerpted text provide a good introduction to the bibliography of relevant contemporary memoirs as a whole. Weissheimer, Wendelin. Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt und vielen anderen Zeitgenossen. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1898. Recollections of a musician from the Rhineland who became a friend and sometime financial supporter of Wagner during the economically troubled time in the early 1860s as he began working on Die Meistersinger. Wolzogen, Hans von. Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner. Vienna: Konegen, 1883. 2nd edn Leipzig: Reclam, 1891. Lengthy transcript of a memorial talk presented to the Scientific Club of Vienna on the two-month anniversary of Wagner s death (April 1883). Wolzogen had been the leading literary figure among the acolytes who settled in Bayreuth in the period leading up to the first festival of 1876. He edited the *Bayreuther Bltter* (see Journals) until his death. NOTE: *format* only needed for cross references to citations OUTSIDE of a given section. Remove those from cross-references within sections [but for now keep my bold-face indications of sections for cross references]

REFERENCE WORKS Among bibliographies, Saffle 2010 is the most comprehensive and up-to-date in English, and among encyclopedia-style formats, Picard 2010 likewise (although in French). Dahlhaus and Deathridge 1984 and Millington Grove Music Online represent the two most recent editions of the Wagner entry for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, although the former was published only independently, as a revised supplement to the original 1980 New Grove entry. The

work catalogue, Deathridge and Voss 1986, produced in conjunction with *Dahlhaus and Voss 1970- * (see Primary sources: dramatic and musical texts), is invaluable also as a compilation of data on manuscript sources and editions. Oesterlein 1882-95 and Glasenapp 1891 are of primarily historical interest, though still not without reference value. Though both in German only, both Breig 1998 and Strobel 1952 may still be consulted productively by researchers with little to no German. Breig, Werner, with Martin Drrer and Andreas Mielke, eds. Chronologisches Verzeichnis der Briefe von Richard Wagner. Wiesbaden, Leipzig, and Paris: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1998. Catalogues nearly 10,000 letters and miscellaneous autograph documents by Wager according to date or other circumstantial information, recipient, and first lines of text. Includes location information on original documents, where known, and published texts, where relevant. Latter is useful for letters not yet published in the Smtliche Briefe series (*Wagner 1967- *; Primary sources: correspondence). Dahlhaus, Carl and John Deathridge. The New Grove Wagner. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Deathridge synthesizes and updates major biographical sources up through *Gregor-Dellin 1980* (Biographies) and Dahlhaus offers synoptic views of critical, aesthetic, and historiographical issues. Amplified biography and bibliographic references are available in Barry Millington s updated entry for the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000), available under Wagner, Richard in *Oxford Music Online* [LINK HERE?] Deathridge, John, with Martin Geck, Egon Voss and Isolde Vetter, eds. Wagner WerkVerzeichnis. Mainz: Schott, 1986. Scholarly catalogue of the musical and dramatic works of Wagner, with detailed information on sources and editions. Developed in tandem with the critical edition of the works (*Dahlhaus and Voss 1970- *; Primary sources: musical and dramatic works). Glasenapp, Carl Friedrich. Wagner-Enzyklopdie: Haupterscheinungen der Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte im Lichte der Anschauung Richard Wagners. Leipzig, 1891 and rpt.) Of interest both as a reference tool and as a document of the high tide of European Wagnerism at the end of the nineteenth century, and more specifically within the Bayreuth circle around the composer s widow, Cosima. Glasenapp also published with Heinrich von Stein an anthology of excerpts from Wagner s writings (Wagner-Lexikon, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1883) similar in concept and organization to anthology of excerpts in *Goldmann and Sprinchorn 1964* (Primary sources: writings). Picard, Timothe, general ed. Dictionnaire encyclopdique Wagner. Paris: Actes Sud / Cit de la musique, 2010.

The most extensive reference work on Wagner currently in print. Strengths are entries on literary and cultural figures, singers, directors, and conceptual themes in Wagner s work and its reception, the latter group often constituting moderate-length essays in scope. The length (2496 pp.) is augmented by some biographical entries of seemingly limited relevance. Back-matter includes genealogical tables for Wagner family members, work list, and a series of thematically organized bibliographies. Millington, Barry. Wagner. In Grove Music Online. [LINK HERE] Text from the composer entry in revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2000). The most complete and authoritative online presentation of the life and works, with work list and sizeable bibliography (through 1990s). Oesterlein, Nikolaus. Katalog einer Richard Wagner-Bibliothek. 4 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1882-95. Conceived as a complete bibliographical portrait of Richard Wagner as a cultural-historical phenomenon from the beginning of his career to the day of his death on 13 February 1883. Reprinted Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1970. An earlier bibliographic catalogue was published in 1878 by Emerich Kastner (Wagner-Catalog: chronologisches Verzeichniss der von und ber Richard Wagner erschienenen Schriften, Musikwerke etc. Offenbach a. M.: Johann Andr; reprinted Hilversum: Frits Knuf, 1966). Saffle, Michael. Richard Wagner: A Research and Information Guide. 2nd edn, New York and Abingdon, Oxon, UK: 2010. First published 1992 as Richard Wagner: A Guide to Research. This revised and expanded edition brings this largely up to date (though few items after 2006), with complete bibliographic information on 1290 items under 17 main headings and 72 subheadings, including individual annotations. New edition corrects some errors in the first, though others persist. Strobel, Otto. Richard Wagner Leben und Schaffen: Eine Zeittafel. Bayreuth: Verlag der Festspielleitung, 1952. A detailed timeline of Wagner s creative output with individual columns for biographical events, artistic activity, and other writings. Some matters of source material and dating have been revised in the meantime, but even so, remains a useful as the most detailed tabular chronology available.

JOURNALS Wagner, his operas, and his writings were a constant topic of cultural journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even though he was critical of the specialized musical press of his time, Wagner condoned the founding of the Bayreuther Bltter in 1878 as an official house or party organ by his industrious

disciple Hans von Wolzogen. The French Revue wagnrienne and the British The Meister were similarly redolent of partisan propaganda; they remain valuable documents of the distinctive tone and cultural agendas of French and English Wagnerism, respectively, illustrating how much more closely allied the French brand was to major cultural developments in the arts there. Several attempts were made to found a yearbook (Wagner Jahrbuch) in 1886, 1906 and 1912, but none of these lasted for more than two years. Numerous journals and newsletters are sponsored by modern day Wagner Societies in Europe and America, of which the British serial Wagner was for a time the most substantial. More recently the bilingual (but predominantly German language) Wagner Spectrum and the British Wagner Journal have been offering a mixed fare of articles and reviews (of performances, recordings, video material, and books) addressed to both specialist scholars and the opera-going public. Bayreuther Bltter, vols. 1-61 (1878-1938) Founded shortly after the first Bayreuth festival to disseminate authoritative views on the Wagnerian music drama and the Wagnerian Weltanschauung in general. Edited during its entire run by Wagner s literary disciple Hans von Wolzogen. Revue wagnrienne, vols. 1-3 (1885-8) A principal document of French Wagnerism and its interaction with Symbolism in French poetry and the arts. Contributors included Mallarm, Verlaine, J. K. Huysmans, and the co-editors Teodor de Wyzewa and douard Dujardin. The Meister, vols. 1-8 (1885-95) A quarterly journal of the London Wagner Society, similar in its proselytizing spirit to the Bayreuther Bltter. A brainchild of the preeminent English Wagnerian of the turn-of-the-century, William Ashton Ellis, whose translated edition of the Wager writings was an offshoot of this journal. Wagner, vols. 1- (1980- [2005?]) Journal of the Wagner Society of Great Britain, featuring biographical essays, critical studies of the operas, historical documents relating to Wagner s career and reception, and some book reviews. Performance reviews appear in the partner journal of the Society, Wagner News (ongoing publication). WagnerSpectrum, vols. 1- (2005- ) Contents primarily in German, some in English. Published biannually, featuring scholarly articles and reviews of books, CD and DVD recordings. Issues are thematically based according to individual operas or themes such as Director s theater, Bayreuth theology, Wagner in film and popular culture, Wagner and Italy, etc. Wagner Journal, vols. 1- (2007- )

Scholarly articles, reviews of productions (with high quality photo illustrations), CD and DVD reviews, translations of Wagner s writings and related historical documents.

BIOGRAPHIES Still the best biography by far is Newman 1933-47, situated midway between the hagiographic portraits of early biographers, such as Ellis 1900-08 and the related Glasenapp 1905-12 (both valuable in their detail and relative proximity to the subject and primary sources) and modern scholarly biographies attempting to distill the life into a manageable scope and to correct earlier tendencies toward whitewashing the master s profile, as in Gutman 1968, Gregor-Dellin 1983, and Millington 1984. Khler 2004 is the closest approach to the kinds of psychobiography attempted in recent decades for the likes of Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, or Charles Ives, but the result feels unbalanced and is, like the author s other work, lacking in scholarly rigor. Walton 2007 is just one recent example of regionalized biographical studies, though one covering one of the most crucial periods in the composer s life. Finally, Nike Wagner 1998 is one of several attempts to chronicle the whole Wagner dynasty, including some by other family members; this one best combines insider and general intellectual credentials. Ellis, William Ashton. Life of Richard Wagner. 6 vols, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner, 1900-08. Initially a translation of *Glasenapp 1905-12* (based on 2nd and 3rd edns); volumes 4-6 by Ellis alone. The last volume goes only up to the completion of Tristan und Isolde in 1859. Glasenapp, Carl Friedrich. Das Leben Richard Wagners. 6 vols. 5th edn, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1905-12. First published during the composer s lifetime, in 1877-7, as Richard Wagners Leben und Wirken. Glasenapp (1847-1915) grew up in Riga, where Wagner had conducted as a young man, and introduced himself to the composer at the time of the first Bayreuth festival. His biography became the complete authorized version until *Newman 1933-47*. Gregor-Dellin, Martin. Richard Wagner: His Life, his Work, his Century, translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. First published in German as Richard Wagner: sein Leben, sein Werk, sein Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Piper, 1980; revised edn Munich: Goldmann Verlag, 1983). English translation entails significant abridgement. Gregor-Dellin s work on editions of Wagner s autobiography, Mein Leben and especially the diaries of Cosima Wagner (see Primary sources: autobiographical texts) provide significant new perspectives, and his experience as a writer and journalist contribute to a highly readable panorama of the composer s life and times.

Gutman, Robert. Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind, and his Music. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Second edition 1990. Gutman s lively and literate biography heralds the trend toward cultural and psychological critique evident in many studies since then; his attention to the role of anti-Semitism in the composer s thought and, speculatively, his works, anticipated by some decades the widespread attention to this theme in more recent literature. Like *Khler 2004*, however, the tone of general opprobrium can sometimes feel unremitting. Khler, Joachim. Richard Wagner: Last of the Titans, translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Originally published in German as Der letzte der Titanen Richard Wagners Leben und Werk (Munich: Claassen Verlag, 2001). Khler s biography is driven by psychoanalytic impulses that can at times obscure the facts, especially since documentation is not always thorough. His easy familiarity with philosophical and cultural currents of Wagner s milieu is a plus. Millington, Barry. Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. First edn London: J.M. Dent, 1984. A concise, up-to-date biography and critical overview of the musical and dramatic oeuvre. Millington s entry for the New Grove Dictionary (revised edition, 2000; *Oxford Music Online*) summarizes and updates this text. Newman, Ernest. The Life of Richard Wagner. 4 vols., London: Cassel, 1933-47 and New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 1933-46. Remains the most detailed and generally satisfying biography of the composer. Literate and engaging in style, it corrects the adulatory biases (and occasional suppressions) of Glasenapp and Ellis without being polemical. Newman had the advantage of access to the published autobiography (Mein Leben; see Primary sources, autobiographical texts) and much published correspondence, memoirs, etc., although not Cosima Wagner s diaries, which represent the principal new source informing biographies since 1980. Walton, Chris. Richard Wagner s Zurich: The Muse of Place. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer (Camden House), 2007. Biographical study of Wagner s creatively fertile period of Swiss exile in the 1850s highlighting the role of the locale and its inhabitants, including some notable expatriate writers, artists, and other intellectual figures. Wagner, Nike. The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty. Translated by Ewald Osers and Michael Downes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Chapters on the cultural and political legacy of the composer by his greatgranddaughter (the daughter of Wieland Wagner), along with biographical essays on the family and its history through the later twentieth century. At the center of the story is, naturally, the liaison of Adolf Hitler with the Bayreuth

festival and the Wagner family through the author s grandmother, Winifred Wagner.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND AESTHETIC STUDIES Wagner best epitomizes the widespread sense that music, in the era of German Romanticism, had important affinities with literature, philosophy, and the whole sphere of ideas. Wagner s own ability to engage with contemporary philosophical discourse is immediately apparent in his writings, though so are the decided limits of that ability. Nietzsche, whether oriented pro or contra Wagner (Nietzsche 1999 and Nietzsche 2005, respectively) offers primary evidence of Wagner s relevance to contemporary thinkers. Arthur Schopenhauer was unquestionably the philosophical figure with whom Wagner most closely identified, as argued at length in Magee 2001, although the direct influences on his own major writings were Feuerbach, left-Hegelians, and French social theorists discussed by Magee and at more length in Franke 1983. Frank 2008 addresses some of the same influences, as well as the German literary climate from Weimar classicism to Heine and young German liberals. Kunze 1983 is more concerned with the specifically aesthetic discourses in which Wagner operated, of which Hostinsky 1877 provides a concrete historical example. Glass 1983 elucidates, by contrast, the terms of Wagner s own invented musical-dramatic poetics in conjunction with his compositional practices in the music dramas. Bloch 1985 makes an interesting comparison to *Adorno 2005* (see Cultural criticism) as another Marxist-based aesthetic critique (both first published in the 1950s) but one that accentuates a positive, liberating potential in the work that, for Bloch, transcended the personal and social contingencies Adorno was intent on exposing. Bloch, Ernst. Paradoxes and the pastoral in Wagner s music. In Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Translated by Peter Palmer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. First published in Merkur (German Democratic Republic) in 1959. Frank, Manfred. Mythendmmerung: Richard Wagner im frhromantischen Kontext. Munich: Fink, 2008 Essay collection, previously published material, by a leading scholar of German Romantic literature, idealist philosophy, and the intersection of these. Franke, Rainer. Richard Wagners Zrcher Kunstscrhiften. Hamburg: Dieter Wagner, 1983. Useful on Wagner s assimilation of idea from Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach and other major intellectual figures in the Romantic era in assembling the prolix array of essays known as the Zurich writings between 1849 and 1852. Glass, Frank W. The Fertilizing Seed: Wagner s Concept of the Poetic Intent. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983.

Examines the concept of a poetic intent at the core of Wagner s poetics of the musical drama in Opera and Drama developed in anticipation of the composer s magnum opus, The Ring of the Nibelung cycle. Hostinsky, Ottokar. Das Musikalisch-Schne und das Gesammtkunstwerk vom Standpunkt der formalen Aesthetik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1877. An attempt to mediate between the claims of Eduard Hanslick s formalist aesthetics of the musically beautiful and the content-based aesthetics of Wagner and the New German School, with their orientation toward ideals of literary or dramatic models of meaning and the sublime, at a time when this dichotomy seemed to be growing insuperable. Kunze, Stefan. Der Kunstbegriff Richard Wagners: Voraussetzungen und Folgen. Regensburg: Bosse, 1983. Elucidates the position of Wagner s theories of music drama as the paradigmatic genre of modern art in the context of Romantic aesthetics and Wagner s influence on early aesthetic modernism. Magee, Bryan. The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. First published in UK as Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin Press, 2000). An extremely lucid, accessible account of the philosophical as well as literarycultural influences on Wagner at various stages of his career, including largely persuasive discussions of how these ideas inform the individual music dramas. Magee is interested above all in Wagner s deep commitment to the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, but writes illuminatingly on Hegel, Feuerbach, the Young Germans, the French socialist theorists, Bakunin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Includes a useful introduction by Raymond Geuss to Nietzsche s often refractory text. The later sections (15-25) of Nietzsche s first major publication attempt to read Wagner s theories and music dramas in light of Nietzsche s ideas on ancient Greek tragedy and its significance for modern culture. The earlier standard translation by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) remains viable, too (see entry on Kaufmann s Nietzsche translations in *OBO Philosophy: Nietzsche*). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner. In The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Includes in one volume both of Nietzsche s celebrated later attacks on his onetime intellectual idol (in Walter Kaufmann translations of these are given only in separate volumes; see *OBO Philosophy: Nietzsche*). Cross references to other subject area entries OK?

LITERARY STUDIES Much, if not most, writing on Wagner treats his works as a primarily literary phenomenon, testifying to his ability to understand and re-work his mythiclegendary materials in ways anticipating psychoanalytic theory, structuralist anthropology, or even deconstruction. The items listed here are more directly concerned with Wagner s literary precedents and legacies, and less with Wagner s own use of his literary sources. Borchmeyer 1991 and 2003 involve some of each approach, while Furness 1982, Hartman 1988, Miner 1995, and Koppen 1973 are concerned primarily with Wagnerian themes and symbols infusing literature of the first half-century of modernism. Inwood 1999 surveys the ubiquitous presence of one figure, Shakespeare, in Wagner s thought about art and the theater (rivaled probably only by Goethe), and Williams 2004 looks more generally at how Wagner absorbed literary-dramatic constructions of heroism from Shakespeare s time through the Romantics. Borchmeyer, Dieter Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre. Translated by Stewart Spencer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Originally published in German (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), translation abridged but also revised. The first part consists of essays on themes in Wagner s theoretical writings, above all sources of his aesthetic thought in German idealist philosophy, Weimar classicism, and Romantic literary culture; the second looks at literary background and context of the individual operas and their texts. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Drama and the World of Richard Wagner. Translated by Daphne Ellis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Originally published in German as Richard Wager: Ahasvers Wandlungen (Frankfurt a.M: Insel Verlag, 2002), including essays on Wagner and Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and Grillparzer not included in the translated edition. Furness, Raymond. Wagner and Literature. Manchester UK: University of Manchester Press; New York: St. Martin s Press, 1982. Concise, frequently entertaining survey of Wagner s presence in European literature from the time of Baudelaire s essay Richard Wagner and Tannhuser in Paris through symbolist and decadent movements to early 20th-century modernist writers such as Pound, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. Hartman, Edward. French Literary Wagnerism. New York: Garland, 1988. A straightforward chronological survey of French writers who responded to Wagner and/or shared in some way his views about music and the other arts in modern culture, from Grard de Nerval and other Romantic authors through the Symbolist poets and up to the early twentieth century. Appendices include a checklist of contributors to the Revue wagnrienne and the texts of nine sonnets published there (besides the well-known poem of Mallarm) in homage to Wagner.

Inwood, Margaret. The Influence of Shakespeare on Richard Wagner. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Traces the composer s lifelong interest in Shakespeare as the paradigmatic dramatist of the modern era and the impact of Shakespearean poetry and dramaturgy from Wagner s earliest literary apprenticeship through his one Shakespearean opera (Das Liebesverbot, after Measure for Measure) into aspects of the mature music dramas, as well as Shakespeare s role in Opera and Drama and later essays. Koppen, Erwin. Dekadenter Wagnerismus: Studien zur europischen Literatur des Fin de sicle. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973. A more detailed study (cf. *Furness 1982*) of Wagner s role as minence grise of European literary decadence from the 1880s to W.W.I. See also Koppen s survey of literary Wagnerism ( Wagnerism as Concept and Phenomenon ) in *Mller and Wapnewski 1992* (General overviews) Miner, Margaret. Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A close study of Baudelaire s famous essay on Wagner s new art at the time of the Parisian Tannhuser affair, focusing on the relation of figurative language to musical expression, and the subsequent Symbolist concern with poetry s tendency to aspire to musical character beyond concrete verbal signification. Williams, Simon. Wagner and the Romantic Hero. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. A lively character study of the leading figures of the music dramas, emphasizing (but not limited to) those drawing on Romantic literary and dramatic conventions. The role of stage productions in defining or re-defining such characters is discussed in a final chapter.

ICONOGRAPHY AND VISUAL ARTS In comparison to the written record, the visual record of Wagner, his domiciles, family, or professional activity is not especially extensive, despite the great publicity surrounding his Bayreuth enterprise. While neither one is totally comprehensive, Geck 1970 and Weber 1993 contain, between them, most of the transmitted authentic images of the composer, the latter item considering furthermore the strategies at work in conveying a public image or creative persona in line with Wagner s aspirations. Barth 1975 includes a fair sampling of the authentic iconographic record, along with other contemporary images relating to the life and times, and images of manuscript and printed documents, along with transcriptions of these. Wagner s outsized persona (and his undersized person) inspired a wealth of caricature, above all during the last two decades of his life. Kreowski and Fuchs 1907 is still the best single anthology of these (mostly lithograph or pen-and-ink, so the black and white reproductions are sufficient); well annotated. The best recent

collections of Wagnerian subjects in visual art as distinct from stage designs per se from the 1850s to the present are Mota and Infiesta 1995 (originating from a Spanish exhibit of Wagnerian painting) and the catalogue of a similar exhibition held in Geneva in 2008 [ADD Geneva catalogue] Barth, Herbert, with Dietrich Mack and Egon Voss. Wagner: A Documentary Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. An anthology of contemporary images as well as a selection of source texts (letters, reviews, memoirs, etc.). A revised and expanded German edition published as Richard Wagner: Leben und Werk in zeitgenssischen Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz: Schott and Munich: Piper, 1982). Geck, Martin. Die Bildnisse Richard Wagners. Munich: Prestel, 1970. Catalogues images of the composer executed in various media during his lifetime. A more wide-ranging cultural and interpretive approach is represented by *Weber 1993* Kreowski, Ernst and Eduard Fuchs. Richard Wagner in der Karikatur. Berlin: 1907. Chronologically and geographically arranged anthology of caricatures of the composer, friends and colleagues, and characters and scenes from the opera published in newspapers and periodicals throughout Wagner s lifetime (above all around the turn of the century). Images are mostly small format, but readily legible, and accompanied by substantial textual documentation and commentary. Mota, Jordi and Mara Infiesta, eds. Das Werk Richard Wagners im Spiegel der Kunst. Tbingen: Grabert, 1995. Generously illustrated anthology of visual artworks (painting, sculpture, decorative arts) on Wagnerian themes, from the mid-nineteenth century to the later twentieth (e.g., Anselm Kiefer) exclusive of stage designs or composer portraits. Most plates in color. Weber, Solveig. Das Bild Richard Wagners: Ikonographische Bestandaufnahme eines Knstlerkults. 2 vols., Mainz: Schott, 1993. Images of the composer and related cultural phenomena contributing to the construction of his image beyond the immediate legacy of authentic portraiture. A volume of images is preceded by one devoted to identification and commentary. ADD Geneva 2008 catalogue WAGNER AND CINEMA Thanks to the ever-suggestive concept of the total artwork and the influential technique of leitmotif as expressive-narrative signifier, Wagner has been closely

identified with the origins of cinema and above all the role of musical accompaniment in silent film and orchestral soundtrack in sound film. Perhaps surprisingly, then, Joe and Gilman 2010 is the first single volume dedicated to Wagner s figure in the history and criticism of film, complemented by several essays in the second 2008 issue of Wagner Spectrum surveying the role of Wagner s own music in twentieth-century film. Drawing on theorists from Adorno and Krackauer to the present, Paulin 2000 looks at Wagner s role in the early critical discourse of film from the silent to the early sound eras. Sonntag 2010 is in some ways more a contribution to biography and iconography, as a genre study of films about or involving the figure of Wagner, in which, of course, Wagner s music is routinely deployed as accompaniment. Levin 1998 is primarily a critical reading of Wagner s music dramas and Lang s films as independent multi-media texts, but with implications for cultural politics of visual spectacle and narration (though not particularly music). Joe, Jeongwon and Sander Gilman, eds. Wagner and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Unversity Press, 2010. Essays grouped around the topics of Wagner and Silent Film, Wagnerian Resonance in Film Scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, Wagner in German Cinema, Wagner beyond the Soundtrack, with an epilogue by Sander Gilman and an interview with video-artist Bill Viola (co-creator with Peter Sellars of a multi-media concert version of Tristan und Isolde, The Tristan Project, performed in Los Angeles, Paris, and New York form 2004 through 2007). Levin David J. Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Reads Wagner s Ring in parallel with Lang s 1924 silent film Siegfried as modern, national, and fundamentally anti-Semitic renditions of the medieval Niblungenlied. While Lang circumvented Wagner s music drama in drawing directly on the original epic, Levin argues that they share a critical attitude toward (or disavowal of) musical and visual narration, respectively, both of which are aligned with flaws associated with a Judaized modern culture (first Meyerbeer, later Hollywood). Paulin, Scott D. Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity: The Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the History and Theory of Film Music. In Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000, 58-84. Analyzes the ideal of a total work of art in the early critical discourse of cinema, underlining the desire of filmmakers to capitalize on the aesthetic prestige of the music drama apart from any technical affinities such as a continuous interpretive, leitmotivically grounded musical score. Sonntag, Sabine. Richard Wagner im Kino: Studien zur Geschichte, Dramaturgie und Rezeption filmmusikalischer Knstlerbiographien. Cologne: Dohr, 2010.

Lengthy study of films about or including elements of Wagner s life, spanning the entire twentieth century. Wagner Spectrum 4:2 (2008), Schwerpunkt Wagner und Fantasy/Hollywood. Includes essays by Susanne Vill on Wagnerian motifs in contemporary fantasy films and critical surveys of Wagner s music deployed in film scores up to 1945 by Tobias Plebuch and since 1945 by Claudius Reinke.

POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL THEMES Responses to Wagner s operas, even apart from the prose writings, have always tended to exceed the specific domains of musical, operatic, or dramatic criticism and analysis, a situation thoroughly congruent with Wagner s own intentions. Literature cited in the following categories draws equally on the imaginative and symbolic dimensions of the dramas, on one hand, and on Wagner s diverse concerns in his published writings, on the other (while tending to be only peripherally concerned with Wagner the composer). Politics, Religion, Nationalism Wagner famously involved himself in the political turmoil enveloping much of Europe in 1848-49, and his role as an icon of German national identity and as an outspoken anti-Semite created enduring links between his name and Hitler s National Socialist regime fifty years after his death. Much of the literature on Wagner and politics is oriented toward one or the other of these poles. Bermbach 2004 and Berry 2006 concern mainly Wagner the liberal revolutionary and socialist, both centrally concerned with how the political and philosophical discourses of the 1848 era formed his conception of the Ring cycle, as well his evolving relationship to politics through the era of Bismarck and German unification. Salmi 1999 is the best introduction to the composer s central role in the evolution of nationalist ideologies throughout his lifetime, while Zelinsky 1976 and 1990 are concerned specifically with his legacy in the emergence of National Socialism in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of the Wilhelminian empire. The essays in Friedlnder and Rsen 2000 follow suit, and like Zelinsky consider the legacy of Wagner s antiSemitism in a larger political-historical context. While many individual studies of Parsifal address Wagner s uses of religious symbolism and his shifting attitude toward Christianity, Kienzele 2005 offers the broadest approach to his understanding of religion (see also her contribution, in English, to *Kinderman and Syer 2005*; Individual operas: Parsifal). Aberbach 2003 is one of the few attempts to survey the totality of Wagner s wide-ranging prose oeuvre. Aberbach, Alan David. The Ideas of Richard Wagner: An Examination and Analysis of his Major Aesthetic, Political, Economic, Social, and Religious Thoughts. 2nd edn, Lanham, MD and New York: University Press of America, 1988.

Surveys the broad array of artistic, political, social, and religious themes explored throughout Wagner s collected writings. Originally published in 1984; revised edition includes a new chapter on interpretations of the Ring cycle. The same author has also published a study specifically of Wagner s religious thought (1996). Bermbach, Udo. Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerks: Richard Wagners politischsthetische Utopie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004. First edition Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994. Wagner in intellectual-historical context. Second edition omits chapters on socio-political thought in the Ring and Parsifal (revised and reprinted elsewhere) and adds a new material on antiSemitism, which the author argues did not inform Wagner s aesthetic thought or practice significantly. Berry, Mark. Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner s Ring. Aldershot, Hants., UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. A thoughtful reading of the Ring dramas and their characters in dialogue with the lively debates on politics, society, economics, theology, and religious institutions in which Wagner was immersed at the time he conceived the cycle around 1848 and afterwards. Philosophers and political theorists such as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Max Stirner figure prominently among Wagner s contemporaries cited; Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse among modern writers. Friedlnder, Saul and Jrn Rsen, eds. Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Proceedings of a conference held at Schloss Elmau from 21 to 24 July 1999. Historians and political scientists in dialogue with musical scholars pursuing the ever-vexed question of Wagner s legacy in Nazi Germany. Kienzle, Ulrike. Da wissend wrde die Welt! : Religion und Philosophie in Richard Wagners Musikdramen. Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2005. Looks not only at the dramatic texts and Wagner s writings but also at the musical materials and dramaturgy of the operas from Tannhuser onwards in analyzing Wagner s shifting ideological positions with regard to Christianity (whose medieval mythology was central to his creative world) and Eastern religion, as filtered through Schopenhauer and Romantic orientalist scholars. The status of Christian theology in Parsifal is a central concern as well as the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche not only on Wagner but also on reception of his oeuvre. Salmi, Hannu. Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner s National Utopia. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Takes Benedict Anderson s familiar idea of nations as collectively imagined communities as a starting point for the analysis of nationalist ideologies in Wagner s thought and works.

Zelinsky, Hartmut. Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema. Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 1976. 3rd edition published in 1983. A source book on the political reception of Wagner s ideas, especially his nationalist and anti-Semitic thought, during the century between the founding of the Bayreuth festival and the centennial celebrations of 1976. Useful as a scrap book of suggestive historical documents (many in facsimile) more than as a study in its own right. Zelinsky, Hartmut. Sieg oder Untergang: Sieg und Untergang. Kaiser Wilhelm II, die Werk-Idee Richard Wagners und die Weltkampf . Munich: Keyser, 1990. Zelinsky was among the first scholars to emphasize Wagner s legacy in Nazi Germany and call for renewed critical attention to it. His sense of embattlement vis--vis the German academic status quo of the 1970s and 80s led to some polemical exaggerations, but the call was clearly timely.

Wagnerism and reception issues The widespread fascination with the broadest claims of Wagner s aesthetic theorizing, the implications of a revolutionary total artwork, and the whole network of themes and symbols treated in the dramas produced the phenomenon known as Wagnerism in the later nineteenth century. Large and Weber 1984 and Sessa 1979 are good introductions to the phenomenon and its diverse geo-cultural manifestations. In some ways Wagnerism was most distinctly perceptible outside of Germany, above all in France. Leblanc 2005 focuses on the high-tide of the movement there, whose origins are often traced back to Baudelaire 1964 (an influential essay from 1861), while Huebner 1999 fills out the picture with more attention to composers and the musical impact of Wagner in French opera, as well as the debates and resistance it aroused. Among studies of regional reception, Bartlett 1995 on Russia, Horowitz 1994 on the United States, and Jung 1974 (German edition only) on Italy are among the most thorough, mostly also focusing on the era of international Wagnerism from the 1870s to W.W.I. Thorau 2003 looks at a more concretely musical dimension of Wagner reception, the leitmotif idea, as well as its impact on theory and analysis. Bartlett, Rosamund. Wagner and Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Surveys the vicissitudes of Wagner s reception among Russian musicians and writers from the end of the nineteenth century through the Soviet era, as well as Wagner s role in certain influential moments in the development of Russian and Soviet theater history. Baudelaire, Charles. Richard Wagner and Tannhuser in Paris. In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne, 111-46. New York: Phaidon, 1964.

Baudelaire s 1861 essay, written in response to the concerts of Wagner s music prior to the ill-fated Parisian premiere of Tannhuser, is famous as a founding text of the Symbolist movement in poetry (citing Baudelaire s own reflection of synaesthesia, Corrspondances ) and elicits the sense of euphoric transport Baudelaire believed the greatest art should provide. Horowitz, Joseph. Wagner Nights: An American History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Argues that the enthusiastic reception of Wagner s music and dramas in latenineteenth-century America took distinctively American form in stressing messages of community, spirituality, and moral uplift ( meliorism ), while downplaying national or racist agendas or decadent and modernist aesthetics. German-born conductor Anton Seidl figures centrally as a purveyor of Germanic musical-cultural values in the gilded age, similar to Theodor Thomas in the orchestral realm. Huebner, Steven. French Opera at the fin de sicle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999. Includes much information on Wagner s musical and musical-dramatic resonance in French opera from 1870 to the First World War (mainly in works by Massenet, Chabrier, Chausson, and D Indy), beyond the more often discussed topic of French literary Wagnerism. Also reviews the politically contested efforts to stage Wagner s works after 1870. Jung, Ute. Die Rezpetion der Kunst Richard Wagners in Italien. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1974. An exhaustive documentary study of Wagner performances and reception in major Italian centers (Bologna, Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples, Venice, Florence) from 1871 through the early twentieth century, debates over Wagner s influence on Italian opera composers from Verdi to Mascagni and in other arts (e.g., Gabriele D Annunzio). Italian sources are translated or paraphrase in German. Heavily annotated, but layout tends to be confusing. An Italian study covering some of the same material is Manera, Giorgio and Giuseppe Pugliese, eds. Wagner in Italia (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1982), and the first 2010 issue of Wagner Spectrum (see Journals) is devoted to this theme. Leblanc, Ccile. Wagnrisme et creation en France 1883-89. Paris: Honor Champion, 2005. Wagner in French music, letters, and aesthetics in the age of symbolism and late Romanticism. Large, David C. and William Weber. Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Still the best single text on the international phenomenon of Wagnerism (the mixture of aesthetic, political, and social theorizing in response to Wagner s

music, dramas, writings and Bayreuth project during the later nineteenth century); individual chapters devoted to particular geo-political domains. Sessa, Anne Dzamba. Richard Wagner and the English. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979. Detailed account of Wagner s reception in England especially in the era of G. B. Shaw, W. A. Ellis, and the later expatriate Houston Stewart Chamberlain during the high tide of international Wagnerism around 1900. Thorau, Christian. Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zur Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003. A cultural history of the phenomenon of the Wagnerian leitmotif concept, together with reflections on the relation of that concept to semiotic and structural analysis. Much information about early guidebooks to the motives and their implications for pre-analytical modes of listening and interpretation. An English-language summary can be found in *Grey 2009* (General overviews). Kirchmeyer series on early reception (documentary)? Cultural criticism Starting from the influential example of Adorno 2005 (first German edition 1952), much modern writing on Wagner as cultural phenomenon circulates between and beyond disciplinary rubrics such as literature, philosophy, politics, etc. Bauer 2005 offers a helpful introduction to Adorno s writing on Wagner, not only the Versuch, while Goehr 1998 and Kramer 2004 represent approaches informed by Adorno s concern with social and political dimensions though without extensive reference to his text. Magee 1968 might rather be viewed as a British antipode to Adorno, ideologically, even though the range of concerns is not dissimilar. Koss 2010 moves from a consideration of Bayreuth as Gesamtkunstwerk to a cultural history of theater and spectatorship in modern Germany from the perspectives of art history and visual culture. Vazsonyi 2010 looks at Wagner s own role in marketing himself, his works, and his ideas in ways that echo Adorno s critique cultural commodification. Barzun 1958 (first edn 1941) remains an interesting early reading of Wagner within the history of ideas, although his three case studies are more juxtaposed than comparatively analyzed. Zizek 1996 revisits themes of power, desire, redemption, and the synthesis of artistic media through the lens of Lacanian concepts such as symbolic obligations and the symbolic order. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London and New York, Verso, 2005. Adorno s influential critique of Wagner and his oeuvre as cultural phenomenon was written as a series of essays in the later 1930s, when Adorno was living in London in exile from the Nazi regime (before his further emigration to America)

and published only after the war as Versuch ber Wagner (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1952). Adorno is concerned with understanding the cultural and ideological roots of National Socialism in Germany, but not with its practical appropriation of the composer. Livingstone s translation was first published in 1981. Bauer, Karin. Adorno s Wagner: History and Potential of the Artwork. In Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 68-91. Provides an accessible point of entry to Adorno s much cited though characteristically recalcitrant critique of Wagner (*Adorno 2005*), and notes the changing attitudes to be found in some later writings by Adorno. Barzun, Jacques. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. 2nd revised edn. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. Barzun s attempt to broach issues of nationalism, social Darwinism, and Wagner s contested political legacy assumes an added dimension of historical interest in the context of its original publication in 1941, although he alludes only glancingly to Hitler s Germany, the Soviet Union, or the war. A Symposium on Barzun s study held in 1959 was published in 1962 (ed. Henry L. Plaine, Ohio University Press) including essays by Joseph Kerman and Richard Hofstadter. Goehr, Lydia. The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. The Wagnerian music drama figures as a central, recurring test case in investigating the doubleness of modern art works as they aspire to aesthetic autonomy, on one hand, while remaining thoroughly (even increasingly) embedded in social, political, and historical contingencies, on the other. Koss, Juliet. Modernism after Wager. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Examines the concept and ideological legacy of the Wagnerian total work of art and the Bayreuth festival from Wagner s lifetime through early cinema, Weimar Germany and the Third Reich, focusing on a few representative artists and institutions. Kramer, Lawrence. Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Includes some of the author s previously published essays on both composers, reflecting a variety of late-twentieth-century cultural and critical concerns with issues of intertextual reception, metaphor, politics, psychology, and sexuality in and out of opera. Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera are viewed as symptomatic of what the genre stands for and its methods of cultural work in the era of late modernity. Magee, Brian. Aspects of Wagner. London: Ross, 1968 A revised and enlarged edition published by Oxford University Press, 1988. One of the most widely read critical studies of the composer in English after those of

Shaw or Newman, consisting of five (later six) short essays on Wagner as theorist and thinker, cultural influence, and some necessarily dated thoughts on performance and recording. The essay on Wagner and the Jews sought, controversially, to sort out rational argument and historical observation or analysis from paranoia and prejudice in Wagner s anti-Jewish polemic. Vazsonyi, Nicholas. Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Interprets Wagner as the original architect of the Wagner industry, in terms of a carefully designed public-artistic persona; management of public relations; development of a recognizable niche and corresponding brand ; works that may be understood to participate in their own marketing, and above all the role of the Bayreuth festival as a keystone in the effort to brand and market a unique cultural product. Zizek, Slavoj. There is no sexual relationship : Wagner as Lacanian. New German Critique 69 (Autumn 1996), 7-35. Argues, among other things, that Wagner s works simultaneously realize and undermine his ideological agendas, thus presenting one solution to the problem of performing and enjoying the works in the face of their tainted political history.

Anti-Semitism Only very gradually after the Second World War did scholars and critics begin to confront the glaring question of what role Wagner s vocal anti-Semitism might have played in the development of Adolf Hitler s personal anti-Semitic mania and its murderous deployment in the subsequent context of Nazi Germany. The early discussion of Wagner s racial thinking in Stein 1950 remained largely without effect at a time when most efforts went into de-Nazifying Wagner s reputation. Zelinsky 1978 and Katz 1986 represent the first wave of renewed attention to the subject in German scholarship, followed above all by Millington 1991 and Rose 1992 in English-language studies. Like Millington, Weiner 1995 sought to follow the lead suggested in *Adorno 2005* (Cultural Criticism) in interpreting traces of antiSemitic stereotypes or allegorical encodings in the operas, music as well as words. Borchmeyer and Maayani 2000 and Fischer 2000 contextualize these issues in light of twentieth-century history and the status of Jews and anti-Jewish rhetoric and politics in Wagner s day, respectively. Grey 2008 reviews the documentary record in Wagner s biography and scholarly debates of the last half-century. Borchmeyer, Dieter, with Ami Maayani and Susanne Vill, eds. Richard Wagner und die Juden. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2000. Proceedings of an international symposium held at Bayreuth in 1998 addressing biographical issues, reception and interpretation of Wagnerian ideology among Jews, Wagner and the Third Reich, Wagner in Israel, and the question of coded anti-Semitism in the music dramas. *Friedlnder and Rsen 2000* (see Politics,

religion, nationalism) is based on papers given at a similar symposium held at Schloss Elmau a year later. Fischer, Jens Malte, ed. Richard Wagner s Das Judentum in der Musik : Eine kritische Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 2000. In addition to reprinting both the original (1850) and the expanded (1869) versions of the notorious Judaism in Music, Fischer provides a valuable introduction placing Wagner s essay in the context of nineteenth-century German anti-Jewish discourse and provides a generous sampling of early reviews of or responses to the essay. An alternative translation to that in *Ellis 1892-99* is included in Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays, ed. Charles Osborn (London: Owen and New York: Library Press, 1973), 23-39. Grey, Thomas. The Jewish Question. In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner. Edited by Thomas S. Grey, 203-18. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Surveys the biographical record of Wagner s anti-Semitism and contemporary debates over its presence in the music dramas, suggesting the probability that Wagner intended to make such readings available even without having articulated them explicitly in public or private. Katz, Jacob. The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner s Anti-Semitism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986. Originally published in German as Richard Wagner: Vorbote des Antisemitismus (Knigstein: Jdischer Verlag/Athenum, 1985). The first extended scholarly study of the subject, limited to the evidence of the biography and writings (and their historical impact). Millington, Barry. Nuremberg Trial: Is there Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger? Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 247-60. The first essay to argue for traces of Wagnerian anti-Semitism as being systematically integrated into the music and libretto of the music dramas (following the influential suggestion of the possibility in *Adorno 2005* (orig. 1952; see Cultural criticism) Rose, Paul Lawrence. Wagner: Race and Revolution. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Surveying Wagner s life, writings, and creative oeuvre, Rose argues for the continuity of anti-Semitic thought throughout all of these, initially grounded in nationalist and anti-capitalist discourses around the European revolutionary movements of 1848. Stein, Leon. The Racial Thinking of Richard Wagner. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950.

Remains of historical interest as the first post-Holocaust attempt to come to terms with Wagner s anti-Semitism. Weiner, Marc. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 Drawing studies of Jewish stereotypes in modern European anti-Semitism by Sander Gilman, Weiner offers a detailed investigation of how these might be identified in the textual, musical, gestural, and discursive embodiment of characters in the Ring cycle, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. Zelinsky, Hartmut. Die Feuerkur des Richard Wagner oder die neue Religion der Erlsung durch Vernichtung . In Richard Wagner: Wie antisemitisch darf ein Knstler sein? Edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, 79-112. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1978 (Musikkonzepte series, vol. 5). Among the first scholars to insist on Wagner s demonstrable impact on Nazi ideologies, Zelinsky argues that Wagner anticipated a policy of eliminationist anti-Semitism. Gender, Sexuality, and Psychological Themes Representations of gender roles and sexuality in Wagner s operas (or his theoretical writings) present an odd mixture of normative bourgeois ideology and radical transgression of those norms. Early audiences were occasionally shocked by the treatment of adultery and incest, which gradually attracted the attention of professional psychologists (notably Otto Rank), as elucidated in Vetter 1992. Freud himself largely steered clear of Wagner, despite obvious affinities in their psychological readings of myth, as pointed out in Jacobs 1965. The self-sacrificial role in which Wagner heroines are repeatedly cast has been repeatedly noted since Wagner s day; in the twentieth century discussions range from Schwabe 1902 to Bauer 1994 and Rieger 2009, the latter moving further into questions of musical representation and dramaturgy, as well as feminist critical perspectives. Some critics continue to indulge what Max Nordau decried as the composer s erotomania more appreciatively, such as Emslie 2010 and McGlathery 1998. Dreyfus 2010 looks at musical as well as dramatic representations of erotic desire as a key to Wagner s lasting appeal, though one habitually veiled by tendencies toward critical euphemism, even today. Like Dreyfus, Morris 2008 also draws attention to a distinct homosexual subset of Wagnerians in the era of Wilde, Beardsley, aestheticism, and dcadence. Bauer, Jeffrey Peter. Women and the Changing Concept of Salvation in the Operas of Richard Wagner. Anif-Salzburg: U. Mller-Speiser, 1994. Wagner s female characters interpreted through their essential role in Wagner s ide fixe of psychological and spiritual redemption. Dreyfus, Laurence. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Written by a musicologist but from a broadly humanistic cultural perspective, this study proposes that the representation of erotic desire in Wagner s operas, preeminently in the music, was essential to their revolutionary impact in his day, and that Wagner s sophisticated negotiation of sexuality and psychology (including the transgression of normative gender roles and orientations) remains surprisingly modern even now. Emslie, Barry. Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love. Woodbridge, Suffolk UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2010. Takes a more charitable, and more serious, view of what George Bernard Shaw dismissed impatiently as the love panacea at the root of the dramas (above all the Ring) and much of the composer s social theorizing. Jacobs, Robert. A Freudian View of the Ring. In The Music Review 26 (1965): 20119. A Freudian analogue to the Jungian interpretation offered at greater length in *Donington 1969* (see Individual works: Der Ring des Nibelungen), and one of surprisingly few attempts to analyze the clear anticipations of Freud s theories in Wagner s dramas. McGlathery, James M. Wagner s Operas and Desire. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Views themes of sexuality and erotic desire in Wagner through the prism of dramatic conventions and character types (going back to the commedia dell arte); unlike *Dreyfus 2010*, the role of music in such representations is not considered. Morris, Mitchell. Tristan s Wounds: On Homosexual Wagnerians at the Fin de Sicle. In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, 271-92. Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Examines the appeal of Wagnerian music, drama, aesthetics, and character to an emergent demographic of self-identified homosexuals who identified with aspects of transgressive sexuality, erotic desire, and other markers of aesthetic modernism in the oeuvre. Rieger, Eva. Leuchtende Liebe, lachende Tod : Richard Wagners Bild der Frau im Spiegel seiner Musik. Dsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2009. Grounds feminist perspectives on Wagner s drama and characters in discussion of his musical language and techniques. Schwabe, Frieda. Die Frauengestalten Wagners as Typen des Ewig Weiblichen. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1902. Perhaps the earliest critical discussion of female figures in Wagner. Like more recent studies such as *Bauer 1994* and *Rieger 2009*, Schwabe saw the fixation on female redemption of the male protagonists as a defining feature of his creative vision.

Vetter, Isolde. Wagner in the History of Psychology. In Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Mller, Peter Wapnewski, and John Deathridge, 118-55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 118-55. Reviews an impressive array of literature connecting Wagner as a biographical subject and as an artist, as well as the characters, situations, and psychological preoccupations of his dramas to themes in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis. CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION (GENERAL) TO 1900 Even by the time of Wagner s death in 1883, the critical literature he had inspired was legendary. Representative of the partisan debates over his music of the future are the writings of his outspoken opponent Eduard Hanslick (whose major reviews and essays on the composer appear in Hanslick 1885), on one hand, and those of devoted advocates such as Liszt 1851, Hueffer 1874, and Pohl 1883, on the other. French writers from Champfleury 1860 to Schur 1874 and Mends 1883 tend to qualify their enthusiasm with some sense of distance from a German metaphysics, mysticism, and medievalism they regard as fundamentally foreign. Raff 1854 offers the perspective of a young musician first encountering debates over the new music at the moment of their inception, while Nietzsche 1997 (first published 1876) represents the burgeoning misgivings of this philosopher who began his career as a devoted Wagnerian. Champfleury. Richard Wagner. Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1860. An aphoristic appreciation of Wagner upon his first appearance in Paris in 1860, setting the stage for the era of French Wagnerism launched more emphatically by *Baudelaire 1964* (orig. 1861; see Wagnerism and reception issues) and the *Revue wagnrienne* (see Journals). Champfleury (pseudonym of Jules Franois Felix Fleury-Husson) also re-evaluated in a positive light Ftis s remark on Wagner as the Courbet of Music, positioning the composer within aesthetic debates over realism. Hanslick, Eduard. Musikalische Stationen. Berlin: Allgemeiner Verlag fr Deutsche Literatur, 1885. Second volume in the series of lightly edited reissues of Hanslick s collected musical journalism, collectively entitled Die moderne Oper. The third part of this volume includes most of his major later Wagner reviews, principally that of the first Bayreuth festival. A translation of the 1876 Bayreuth review is included in the collection of Hanslick criticism translated by Henry Pleasants III (Vienna s Golden Years of Music 1850-1900, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950). Hueffer, Francis. Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. The book collects and expands on material published in the Fortnightly Review, and served to introduce continental debates over Wagner s music and theories to the English. Hueffer was a German-born writer and musician living in

England, and also published a translation of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence in 1888-89. Liszt, Franz. Lohengrin et Tannhaser [sic] de Richard Wagner (Leipzig and Paris: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1851) These lengthy essays prompted by the experience of producing Tannhuser and Lohengrin at Weimar (1849, 1850) were disseminated in many forms, this being the most complete. Translations annotated by David Trippett are included in *Grey 2009* (see General overviews) and The Wagner Journal 4:1 and 4:2 (March, July 2010): 4-21, 28-40. Mends, Catulle. Richard Wagner. Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie., 1886. This monograph by the influential French poet, critic, librettist, and leader of the pre-symbolist Parnassian movement includes reminiscences of encounters with the composer as well as essayistic reflections on Wagner s oeuvre and his theories of art. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, 195-254. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Conceived during the years leading up to the first Bayreuth festival, the essay documents Nietzsche s growing ambivalence toward the once revered Master, juxtaposing quotations or paraphrases of Wagnerian theory with tentative critiques. The collection of four long essays of which it forms part (Unzeitgemsse Betrachungen) also appears under such translated titles as Unmodern Observations and Unfashionable Observations. Pohl, Richard. Richard Wagner: Studien und Kritiken. Leipzig: Bernard Schlicke, 1883. Collected journalistic essays by a central figure in the New German School with some personal ties to both Wagner and Liszt. Includes first-hand accounts of the premieres of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and the Ring cycle (including the Munich pre-premieres of Rheingold and Walkre in 1869-70), and Parsifal. Raff, Joachim. Die Wagnerfrage, kritisch beleuchtet. Braunschwieg: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1854. An early attempt to come to terms with Wagner s operas (up to Lohengrin) in relation to his published writings on operatic reform and in terms of contemporary music theory and aesthetics. The discursive, somewhat erratically structured monograph (styled as a series of letters ) was published in an incomplete form (a lengthy part 1 only). Schur, Edouard. Le drame musical: Richard Wagner, son oeuvre et son ide, 2 vols. Paris: 1874 An early associate of Nietzsche s and afterwards an adept in theosophy and other late-nineteenth-century spiritualist movements, Schur s survey of the

Wagner canon was an important source of information for French Wagnerites before the dramas found there way onto the Paris stage at the end of the century. CRITICISM AN INTERPRETATION (GENERAL) 1900-1945 While World War I occasioned a temporary absence of Wagner from many international stages, publication continued almost without interruption, and without much politicization of the subject (odd though it may seem in retrospect). Thomas Mann s famous 1933 essay on The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner (included in Mann 1985), which played a direct role in his early emigration from Nazi Germany, strikes a modern reader as temperate and essentially apolitical, though its plea for a cosmopolitan Wagner is clearly annunciated. Adler 1904 represents in some sense the beginning of Wagner scholarship in a modern, academic sense, though he writes mainly for the general educated reader of the day. Bekker 1931 outwardly resembles the common life and works genre, but the methods of reading the biography as a key to the creative oeuvre link a longstanding Romantic critical mindset with elements of modern psychobiography, and, like Adler, Bekker attempts to convey a sense of compositional technique to a non-specialist audience. Adler, Guido. Richard Wagner: Vorelsungen gehalten an der Universitt zu Wien. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1904. Originally a series of lectures at the University of Vienna, Adler (a founding figure of the academic discipline of musicology) was interested in viewing the composer in the context of German romantic aesthetics and the history of opera since Mozart. Bekker, Paul. Richard Wagner: His Life in his Work. Translated by M. M. Bozman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1931. Like the somewhat earlier monograph by the Viennese scholar Guido Adler (see Reprinted in 1971 by Greenwood Press (Wesport, CT). Like the earlier monograph by Guido Adler (1904; see Criticism and Intepretation to 1945) this represents a first step away from the hagiographic school of Glasenapp, Ellis, and the Bayreuth circle around Wolzogen. Where Adler focused on cultural and music-historical context, Bekker demonstrates the influence of contemporary psychology and historical aesthetics; both were trained musical scholars, unlike most other major biographers. Mann, Thomas. Pro and contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden. London, UK and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1985. Anthology of Mann s writings on Wagner (complete essays, excerpts, letters, etc.) from the 1890s to after W.W. II. First published in German as Wagner und unsere Zeit, ed. Erika Mann (Frankfurt a.M., 1963). A more recent German language anthology was edited by Hans Rudolf Vaget as Im Schatten Wagners. Thomas Mann ber Richard Wagner: Texte und Zeugnisse 1895-1955 (2nd edn, Frankfurt a.m.: Fischer Verlag, 2005).

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION (GENERAL) SINCE 1945 Aside from a renewed interest in the political legacy of Wagner s nationalism and anti-Semitism (see Politics, nationalism, and religion and Anti-Semitism), modern critical approaches have taken diverse forms. Dahlhaus 1971 represents an important starting-point for much academic reconsideration of Wagner s musichistorical position, and his interest in rehabilitating Wagner s writings as a tool for critical understanding of the works is taken up in Grey 1995 as well as Glass 1983 (though with less reference to Dahlhaus s writings). Stein 1960 is by now methodologically dated, but was influential as the first study in English since *Newman 1914* (see General overviews) to interpret Wagner s compositional development (principally his vocal setting of the text) in light of his prose writings. Abbate 1991, Nattiez 1992, and Cicora 2000 all reflect, in different ways, the impact of modern literary criticism on Wagner studies, while Treadwell 2003 tends toward intellectual biography, in the tradition of *Bekker 1931* or *Adler 1904* (see Criticism and interpretation: 1900-1945). Deathridge 2008 brings insights from modern philological scholarship to critically sophisticated reevaluations of issues in both the life and the works. Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices: Opera and Narrative. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Scenes from Die Walkre and Gtterdmmerung figure as case studies in two chapters of this influential critical essay on notions of narrative voice in opera, analyzing the narratological counterpoint of text, singing voice, and orchestral score. Cicora, Mary. Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner s Music Dramas. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Romantic irony and deconstruction are identified among various modes of literary criticism invited by Wagner s Gesamtkunstwerk in its modern, literarily self-conscious adaptation of traditional myth and legend. Dahlhaus, Carl. Wagners Konzeption des musikalischen Dramas. Regensburg: Bosse, 1971. A more extended exploration of hermeneutic and musicological approaches to the Wagner canon pioneered by this influential scholar as compared to*Dahlhaus 1979* (see General overviews). The first modern scholar to reengage seriously ideas on myth, drama, language, temporality, etc. in the theoretical writings, also in conjunction with close readings of passages from the music dramas, reflecting by analytical approaches influenced by Arnold Schoenberg. The result is in some ways a more complex, sophisticated version of the text-music synthesis discussed by *Stein 1960*.

Deathridge, John. Wagner Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Essays on most of the Wagner canon (though not Tannhuser or the earlier works): issues on biography, sources, and modern criticism. Glass, Frank. The Fertilizing Seed: Wagner s Concept of the Poetic Intent. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. A helpful guide to the diffuse poetics of the music drama as set out in Opera and Drama, with detailed textual-musical examples of how the author sees this key term ( poetic intent ) manifested or adapted in the Ring and other music dramas. Grey, Thomas S. Wagner s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Themes and terms in the prose writings relevant to Wagner s understanding of his and others music (e.g., absolute music, poetic-musical period, endless melody, motives of anticipation and recollection ) are discussed in the context of nineteenth-century aesthetics and criticism, and in conjunction with excerpts from the operas. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Wagner Androgyne, translated by Stewart Spencer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Takes as a starting point and occasional refrain the figure of androgyny (including for Nattiez both the overcoming of sexual dimorphism and the romantic/sexual union of male and female figures) in a wide-ranging essay on Wagner s dramas, theories, and the role of criticism in modern humanistic scholarship. Stein, Jack. Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1960. Reprinted Greenwood Press (Westport CT, 1973). Representative of a longstanding tradition of criticism locating the key to Wagner s innovation in the rhythmic, metrical, and declamatory sensitivity of the vocal lines (and their accompaniments) to the poetic text, as theorized in Opera and Drama and Die Meistersinger. Treadwell, James. Interpreting Wagner. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. A fresh appraisal of Wagner the aesthetic theorist in dialogue with Wagner the music dramatist, organized according to broadly figurative rubrics of Romance, Revolution, Exile, and Religion. A literary scholar by training, the author writes for a general humanist audience, while paying due attention to all dimensions (textual, musical, and performative) of the works.

DRAMATIC TEXTS: SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

Complementing the contributions of Wapnewski, Mller, Mertens, and Branscombe in *Mller and Wapnewski 1992* and the deft review of literary sources for each opera included in *Newman 1949* (General overviews), the following titles provide more detailed examinations of Greek drama, Germanic-Scandinavian myth and saga, and medieval Christian legends as sources of Wagner s dramatic texts and of his conception of a mythically-based modern music drama. Bjrnsson, rni. Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring des Nibelungen. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2003. Aside from some unnecessary biographical and historical material, this volume by an established scholar of Norse and Icelandic languages and literature includes detailed scene-by-scene concordances of the Ring librettos with their various sources; relevant passages cited in the original languages and English translation. Also includes chapters on Norse studies in Wagner s Germany and since. Cooke, Deryck. I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner s Ring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. First printed in 1979. The torso of what was to be Cooke s magnum opus on the Ring cycle, from genesis and sources to close readings of dramatic texts and musical score. The published material includes above all detailed accounts of the Norse and Germanic sources of Das Rheingold and Die Walkre and Wagner s synthesis of them, as well as a lengthy preamble on the status of musical leitmotifs in the conception of the Ring and Cooke s view of their semiotic, dramatic, and compositional functions. Ewans, Michael. Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Proposes that, in addition to his more general invocation of ancient Greek tragedy as the prototype for a new genre of total artwork, Wagner modeled his work in specific ways on the Aeschylus trilogy. Foster, Daniel H. Wagner s Ring Cycle and the Greeks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Uses classical conceptions of genre (epic, lyric, drama) as a lens for interpreting theory, practice, and critical reception of the Ring. Lee, M. Owen. Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks. Toronto, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Wagner s debt to the texts and traditions of Greek tragedy elucidated by a popular commentator on Wagner s dramas. Magee, Elizabeth. Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Scrutinizes the various Norse and Germanic sources of the Ring cycle with special attention to the specific early- to mid-nineteenth-century translations and editions he is known to have consulted, as well as scholars with whom he was personally acquainted. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang. Richard Wagner und die Griechen: Drei Bayreuther Vortrge. In Hellas und Hesperien. Gesammelte Schriften zur Antike und zur neueren Literatur, vol. 2, 341-405. Zurich and Stuttgart: Artemis Verlag, 1970. A series of three lectures delivered at Bayreuth between 1962-64 at the time when Wieland Wagner was attempting to reinvent the image of the Wagnerian music drama in terms of timeless mythic symbols and archetypes, resonating with both ancient tragedy and contemporary psychology. Weston, Jesse L. The Legends of the Wagner Drama: Studies in Mythology and Romance. London: David Nutt, 1896. Remains an accessible and largely reliable introduction to the literary sources and mythic traditions (in the spirit of mythographers Sir James Frazer and Lord Raglan) behind the Ring cycle, Tannhuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, and Parsifal. Little to no bibliographic apparatus, however.

MUSICAL LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITIONAL METHOD Cooke 1979 combines the author s earlier project of establishing a sort of grammar or lexicon of expressive gestures in tonal music with his thorough knowledge of Wagner s scores (and above all the role of leitmotifs ), looking also at the operatic language Wagner inherited as a young composer. Bailey 1968, 1977-78, and 1979 remain, collectively, the best introduction to the evolving process whereby Wagner worked from simple, largely two-part sketches of vocal lines and harmonic bass up to the complex final orchestra scores. Darcy 1993 applies Bailey s methods of source study and their analytical applications to a detailed exegesis of the first Ring opera, the critical move from opera to music drama in Wagner s oeuvre, augmented by other (primarily neo-Schenkerian) analytical approaches. Kropfinger 1991 examines all aspects of Wagner s claim to a Beethoven inheritance, including empirical traces of compositional influence. Bailey, Robert. Wagner s Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod. In Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, edited by Harold Powers, 45994. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. The first and only detailed investigation of the composer s earliest, abortive attempts at writing music for the ambitious tragedy he conceived, initially, as a grand romantic opera based on the medieval Nibelungenlied. Bailey, Robert. The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution. In 19th-Century Music 1 (1977-78): 48-61.

Looks at sketches and drafts of the Ring scores as evidence of approaches to tonal and thematic design, analyzing scenes from Die Walkre (the Annunciation of Death scene from Act 2) and Gtterdmmerung, Act I. Bailey, Robert. The Method of Composition. In The Wagner Companion, edited by Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 269-338. Summing up much work over the preceding decade, offers a detailed inventory of the varied working stages from two-part compositional sketches down to the notation of the full orchestral scores employed by Wagner in his mature music dramas. Cooke, Deryck. Wagner s Musical Language. In The Wagner Companion. Edited by Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton, 225-68. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Extends the author s earlier ideas about expressive and semantic dimensions of melodic interval structures and basic tonal patterns to an understanding of Wagner s evolving methods of musical text setting, with reference to early operatic influences on the composer, as well. Darcy, Warren. Wagner s Das Rheingold. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Starting from a detailed account of the textual and musical genesis of the first Ring drama, applies Schenkerian style voice-leading alternatives to the traditional Formenlehre-based analyses of *Lorenz 1924*. Kropfinger, Klaus. Wagner and Beethoven. Translated by Peter Palmer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Looks equally at the development of a Beethoven myth in the prose writings, empirical evidence of Beethovenian influence in the musical oeuvre (from the instrumental juvenilia to the late music dramas), and Wagner s overarching claim that his total musical-dramatic artwork follows from the revolutionary example of the Ninth Symphony. Originally published in German (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1975); much of the footnote and bibliographic material is pared away in the translated edition.

MUSICAL ANALYSIS (GENERAL) Even during Wagner s lifetime some early theorists of tonal harmony attempted to submit his extended chromatic practices to systematic analysis of one kind of another, efforts that later culminated in the ambitious if less systematic explorations of Kurth 1920. (This and subsequent essays in Wagnerian harmonic analysis are anthologized in *Bailey 1985*; Individual operas: Tristan und Isolde.) An even greater challenge seemed to be posed by categories of melody, tonal structure, and other large-scale ideas of form. In the absence of any tradition of the structural analysis of opera, Wagnerian or otherwise, Lorenz 1924-33 appeared for a long time

authoritative, although the less rigorous methodology of Grunsky 1906 is, in retrospect, more plausible. Much analytical study from Dahlhaus 1971 to Newcomb 1981 and beyond begins as a response to the provocation of Lorenz s attempts to frame the scores in terms of hierarchical symmetries, based on tonal and motivic design (nominally correlated to dramatic structure). The aesthetic and ideological context of Lorenz s work, which led to his eager embrace of the early Nazi party, is emphasized in McClatchie 1998. Kinderman 1996 is one good example, among many, of alternative approaches to the issues provoked by Lorenz, here following from theories of tonal analysis pioneered by Robert Bailey. Abbate 1989a and 1989b both question the claims of Wagner and his analytical advocates regarding the symphonic coherence of the scores, appealing not only to deconstructivist tendencies of the moment, but also to the composer s own theoretical insistence on the primacy of drama in shaping his music. Abbate, Carolyn, Opera as Symphony: A Wagnerian Myth. In Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner. Edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, 92 124. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Proposes how traditional operatic dramaturgy as well as novel conceptions of textually and dramatically motivated music necessarily predominate over any genuinely symphonic or purely musical procedures in the composition of even the later music dramas. The vengeance-trio from the close of Act 2 of Gtterdmmerung is the principal example, contrasting operatic traces of the text s genesis with the advanced musical idiom of the later stages of composition. Abbate, Carolyn. Wagner, On Modulation, and Tristan. In Cambridge Opera Journal 1 (1989): 33-58. Starting from a short textual fragment dating from the time of Tristan und Isolde, pursues the arguments of *Abbate 1989* that Wagner as a composer allowed himself a freer, more direct dialogue with the text of his libretto than a Beethovenian symphonic paradigm would seem to allow. Dahlhaus, Carl. Formprinzipien in Wagners Ring des Nibelungen. In Beitrge zur Geschichte der Oper. Edited by Heinz Becker, 95-129. Regensburg: Bosse, 1969. An early attempt to question to totalizing analytical methodologies of *Lorenz 1924) as well as a reappraisal of the claims of Wagnerian theory vs. the evidence of the works. Grunsky, Karl. Wagner als Symphoniker. Richard Wagner-Jahrbuch 1 (1906): 22744. One of the few attempts prior to *Lorenz 1924* to identify principles of musical form at work in the music dramas (primarily Tristan und Isolde), taking its cue from Wagner s own intimations of a Beethovenian symphonic principle that differentiates his compositional approach from that of conventional opera. Kinderman, William. Dramatic Recapitulation and Tonal Pairing in Wagner s Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. In The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century

Tonality. Edited by William Kinderman and Harald Krebs. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 178-214. Applies Robert Bailey s concept of a double-tonic complex to large-scale dramatic and formal designs in the later music dramas. Kurth, Ernst. Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan. Bern: Haupt, 1920. 2nd-3rd eds. Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922, 1923; reprint of 3rd edn Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1975. Takes the harmonic experimentation of the Tristan style (not only the Prelude but examples from throughout the score) as paradigmatic of how chromatic voice-leading tendencies or potential energy inherent in the diatonic-chromatic tonal system are developed to their ultimate consequences in Wagner s music, which exploits also the psychological-expressive attributes of these tendencies. Substantial excerpts are translated by Lee A. Rothfarb in Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) together with writings on linear counterpoint and formal process in Bruckner s symphonies. Lorenz, Alfred. Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner. 4 vols. Berlin, Max Hesse, 1924 33. Beginning with the entire Ring cycle (vol. 1), Lorenz set about codifying perceived musical-dramatic structures in all of Wagner s mature music dramas, accounting for every single measure of the scores. Nominally grounded in the concept of poetic-musical periods hypothesized in Opera and Drama, Lorenz s analyses refer the design of Wagner s scores at various levels to traditional schemata such as ABA , rondo, refrain, and bar (AAB) forms. The subsequent volumes analyze Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal, respectively. Facsimile reprint issued in 1966 (Tutzing: H. Schneider). See also *McClatchie 1998*. McClatchie, Stephen. Analyzing Wagner s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998. Places Lorenz s influential and subsequently much contested analyses in the aesthetic and cultural-political context of early twentieth-century Germany. Helpful introduction to the analytical methodology as such, as well as to later critiques of it. Newcomb, Anthony. The Birth of Music from the Spirit of Music Drama: An Essay in Wagnerian Analysis. In 19th-Century Music 5 (1981-82): 38-66. Three analytical case studies (Walkre Act 1, Spring Song ; Tristan Act 2, love duet; Siegfried Act 3, Wanderer-Erda scene) illustrate issues in Wagnerian musical analysis from Lorenz to Dahlhaus and subsequent Anglo-American analytical scholarship form the 1960s and 70s, especially the structural role of tonality.

PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES The best single survey of Wagner production (as distinct from performance) is Carnegy 2006, with the caveats that it scarcely reaches the end of the twentieth century, and it is far surpassed in quality and scope of illustrations by Bauer 1982, Olivier 2007, or even Petzet and Petzet 1970 with regard to early productions. Appia 1982 is an important document in the conceptual history of Wagner staging (or opera in general), though he had next to no influence as an active stage designer or director himself. Millington and Spencer 1992 provides a point of entry into the whole field of conducting and singing, which (along with discography) would demand a separate bibliography of its own to do it justice. Appia, Adolphe. Staging Wagnerian Drama. Translated by Peter Loeffler. Basel, Switzerland, and Boston MA: Birkhuser, 1982. Originally published as La mise en scne du drame wagnrien (Paris: L. Chailley, 1895). Celebrated as the godfather of modern Wagner production, the Swiss writer Appia was more a theorist than a practicing director and designer. His ideas for a starkly simplified stage focused on a few psychological and symbolic shapes were further developed in La musique et la mise en scne (first published in German as Die Musik und die Inszenierung, Munich: Bruckmann, 1899). Bauer, Oswald. Richard Wagner: die Bhnenwerke von der Urauffhrung bis heute Frankfurt a.M.: Propylen, 1982. First edition 1965. The most complete single-volume illustrated documentation of Wagner production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (though only to c. 1980). Carnegy, Patrick. Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Discusses the history of Wagner staging in dialogue with evolving modernist and early post-modernist aesthetics of production, up to the 1976 Bayreuth centennial Ring and Hans-Jrgen Syberberg s 1982 Parsifal film. Mack, Dietrich. Der Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1976. Remains the most detailed documentary study of earlier Bayreuth stagings (written to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the festival). Millington, Barry and Stewart Spencer, eds. Wagner in Performance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Essays on the history of conducting, singing, and staging from Wagner s Bayreuth to the 1980s, with and emphasis on the early decades of the Wagner festival and of musical recording. Olivier, Philippe. Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth von den Anfngen bis heute. Mainz: Schott, 2007.

The most comprehensive and best illustrated survey of Bayreuth productions of the cycle for whose performance the festival was founded. Petzet, Dette and Michael Petzet. Die Richard-Wagner-Bhne Knig Ludwigs II. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1970. Extremely detailed and well-illustrated documentation of the model productions of Wagner s earlier operas (as well as the semi-unauthorized premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walkre) sponsored by Ludwig II of Bavaria between 1864 and 1870. [Conducting: Fifield and/or Hinrichsen?] BAYREUTH FESTIVAL Apart from surveys of the productions staged at Bayreuth since the founding of Wagner s festival theater in 1876 (see Production and performance studies), the conception of the festival, Wagner s contribution as its general musical and artistic director, and the institutional and political history if the festival are all the subject of much scholarship. The whole idea of a festival performance that guided Wagner s thinking about his Ring cycle almost from the beginning is the focus of Williams 1994, and valuable documentation of the performances overseen by the composer is included in Bauer 2008, Fricke 1998, and Porges 198. Also primarily documentary in scope, covering journalistic coverage of the festival up through the Nazi era, is Grossmann-Vendrey 1977-83. Between them, Lavignac 1897 and Spotts 1994 provide a comprehensive picture of the festival s history. Bauer, Oswald Georg, ed. Josef Hoffmann: der Bhnenbildner der ersten Bayreuther Festspiele. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008. A profile of the stage designer chosen for the premiere of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth, featuring recently rediscovered color sketches in oils of Hoffmann s designs. Fricke, R. Wagner in Rehearsal: the Diaries of Richard Fricke, trans. George R. Fricke, ed. James Deaville with Evan Baker. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1998. Orignally published as Bayreuth vor dreissig Jahren: Erinnerungen an Wahnfried und aus dem Festspielhaus (Dresden: R. Bertling, 1906). These memoirs by production assistant and choreographer Richard Fricke were first translated in Wagner 11 (1990-91) (see Journals). Groman-Vendrey, Suzanne. Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse. Beitrge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele. 3 vols., Regensburg: Bosse, 1977-83. Volume 1 consists of the main text of original study; vols. 2-4 (listed as Dokumentbnde 1-3) are documentary appendices containing annotated transcriptions of material relating to the founding of the Bayreuth festival, the 1876 performances and the 1882 Parsifal premiere. Two additional volumes

were published in 1987 following the festival through the long tenure of Wagner s widow, Cosima, her son Siegfried, through the advent of World War II. Lavignac, Albert. Le Voyage artistique Bayreuth. Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1897. Part travelogue (illustrated with contemporary photographs and engravings), part biography, and part critical introduction to the music dramas, Lavignac s ample monograph conveys a vivid sense of experiencing Wagner performances in the late nineteenth century. Porges, Heinrich. Wagner Rehearsing the Ring, trans. Robert L. Jacobs. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Original German text published in the Bayreuther Bltter between 1881 and 1896. Eyewitness account of the rehearsals for the first Bayreuth festival in the summer of 1876 by a musician and journalist devoted to the Wagnerian cause, organized according to act and scene of each opera. Spotts, Frederic. Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. The standard English-language history of the festival, chronicling the involvement of the extended Wagner family, the relation of the festival to wartime politics in both World Wars, singers and conductors, and the role of influential stage directors including the Wagner grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang. Designed, unlike *Gromann-Vendrey 1977-83*, for a general readership. Williams, Simon. Richard Wagner and the Festival Theater. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. A study of the Bayreuth festival in both theory and practice, so to speak, by a historian of theater specializing in opera and the works of Wagner.

STUDIES OF INDIVIDUAL WORKS Critical writing, musical analysis, source studies, production studies, etc. have often focused on individual works, naturally. With only a few exceptions (for historically significant texts), the citations here are chosen from more recent scholarship, balancing titles of specialized academic interest with those addressing the general opera-going audience. Early operas The acknowledged canon of Wagner s operas begins with Der fliegende Hollnder (The Flying Dutchman) composed in 1841 and premiered in 1843. The three operas completed before that have received vastly less critical attention, corresponding to their scant presence on stage or in other performances. Deathridge 1977 remains

the only substantial scholarly study of any of them in this case, appropriately, Wagner s breakthrough work, possibly best known in modern times for the epiphanic experience it allegedly provided the young Adolf Hitler in a provincial production around 1905. Soden 1983 compiles a substantial amount of material useful to appreciating Wagner s first opera, consciously aimed to cultivating a German Romantic genre in the spirit of Weber, Marschner, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. More recently Syer 2011 has argued for the lasting influence of the libretto s source, the fantastic, commedia dell arte based dramatic fables of Carlo Gozzi, on Wagner s creative imagination. Williams 1985-86 is an effective introduction to the second opera by way of a comparison with its literary source, Wagner s only direct borrowing from Shakespeare. Soden, Michael von and Andreas Loesch. Richard Wagner: Die Feen. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1983 A sourcebook of sorts on Wagner s first completed opera, its source (Gozzi s dramatic fable, La donna serpente), biographical materials, libretto, and posthumous premiere (1888). Syer, Katherine. Es lie mir keine Ruhe : Richard Wagner and Carlo Gozzi s La donna serpente. In The Musical Quarterly ____ (2011). [add publication information when final] Williams, Simon. Wagner s Das Liebesverbot: From Shakespeare to the Well-Made Play. In The Opera Quartlery 3:4 (Winter 1985-86): 56-69. Brief overview of Wagner s adaptation of Measure for Measure as a grand Romantic comic opera by a Wagner scholar with expertise on Shakespeare in Germany. Deathridge, John. Wagner s Rienzi: A Reappraisal Based on a Study of the Sketches and Drafts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. As per the title, a detailed study of the composer s first major operatic success, grounded in research leading toward two important projects of the time: the new critical edition of the complete works (*Dahlhaus and Voss 1970*) and the annotated catalogue of works, sources, and editions (Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis, *Deathridge and Voss 1986*) (see Primary Sources: Musical and Dramatic Works) Romantic operas Sometimes referred to as the Dresden operas for having been premiered and/or composed there (although by rights that term should include Rienzi), the first three canonic operas Der fliegende Hollnder, Tannhuser, and Lohengrin all share the designation romantic, harking back to the composer s early attempt to work in a consciously German genre. Basic handbooks to these operas include Grey 2000 on Der fliegende Hollnder and Csmapai and Holland 1989 on Lohengrin; Laroche 1993 includes a good deal of interesting contextual and hypertextual material

relating to the former, while the Summer 2005 issue of The Opera Quarterly offers essays from various contemporary critical perspectives. Abbate 1983 and Deathridge 1989 combine analysis of sources and revisions with critical readings of Tannhuser and Lohengrin, respectively, while Cicora 1992 focuses on literary sources in particular, analyzing the motives behind Wagner s adaptation of these. Steinbeck 1964 starts from Wagner s own published directions for staging Tannhuser and surveys a wide spectrum of early productions. Abbate, Carolyn. The Parisian Venus and the Paris Tannhuser. Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 73-123. Summarizes material from the author s 1985 dissertation, underlining ways in which the role of Venus was updated to reflect the experience of Tristan und Isolde and in ways attuned to the emergent modernist aesthetic of Paris in the era of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet. Cicora, Mary. From History to Myth: Wagner s Tannhuser and its Literary Sources. Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Peter Lang, 1992. A detailed study of the literary precedents and sources for Wagner s drama and its conflation of two medieval traditions (the Minnesnger figure of Tannhuser and the contest of song sponsored by the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia at the Wartburg castle). Csampai, Attila and Dietmar Holland, eds. Richard Wagner, Lohengrin: Texte, Materialen, Kommentare. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1989. From a series of useful handbooks including the libretto, notes on sources and genesis, and documents relating to reception and interpretation. Deathridge, John. Through the Looking Glass: Some Remarks on the First Complete Draft of Lohengrin. In Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, 56-91. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989. Critical and analytical insights based on manuscript sources. Cf. the author s reflections on the ambivalent position of Lohengrin in the Wagner canon ( Wagner the Progressive: Another Look at Lohengrin) in *Deathridge 2008* (see Criticism and Interpretation since 1945). Grey, Thomas, ed. Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Hollnder. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Essays on the place of the opera in Wagner s development as composer and theorist of opera, sources of the libretto, issues of genre, and performance history. Appendices include translations of relevant correspondence, drafts, and other primary sources. Laroche, Bernd, ed. Der fliegende Hollnder: Wirkung und Wandlung eines Motivs. Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

A useful anthology of texts relating to The Flying Dutchman, including the libretto set by Pierre-Louis Dietsch as Le vaisseau fantme based on the scenario Wagner sold to the Paris Opra administration before composing his own opera. The Opera Quarterly 21:3 (Summer 2005). Special issue on The Flying Dutchman. Includes essays on characters (Erik, Senta), the discourse of fate, and the relation of Edward Fitzball s melodrama The Flying Dutchman (1827) to British imperial enterprise and South Africa. Steinbeck, Dietrich. Inszenierungsformen der Tannhuser (1845-1904): Untersuchungen zur Systematik des Opernregie. Regensburg: Bosse, 1964. Still one of the few detailed production studies of an individual Wagner opera, especially with regard to early stage history.

Der Ring des Nibelungen The Mount Everest, as it were, of opera, Wagner s four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen has generated countless books and essays. It has proven resistant to unified interpretations, while nonetheless attracting them by its very nature. Corse 1990, Donington 1969, and Shaw 1898 are some examples, although each unified more by a particular method (respectively: Hegel, Jung, Marx, in shorthand) than by a single, coherent reading as such. Newcomers to the Ring will find Holman 1996 and Kitcher and Schacht 2004 (not forgetting *Newman 1949*; General overviews) helpful starting points: the first as an accessible compendium of data (including leitmotifs ), the second as an informal but educated discussion of characters and ideas. Standard scholarly sources on the genesis of the work include Strobel 1930 and Westernhagen 1976 (though cf. also *Bailey 1977-78* in Musical language and compositional method and *Cooke 1991* in Dramatic texts: sources and influences), while McCreeless 1982 presents a holistic scholarly study of one Ring drama, with an emphasis on issues in tonality and form. Wolzogen 1876, often reprinted and translated, is the prototype for many subsequent guides to Wagner s operas based on a similar collation of dramatic synopsis, commentary, and musical themes or leitmotifs, for which Wolzogen s labels remain both influential and controversial. Corse, Sandra. Wagner and the New Consciousness: Language and Love in the Ring. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990. Views the Ring des Nibelungen and Wagner s objectives in it as embodying a version of Hegel s philosophy of history, directed toward a newer and higher form of human consciousness to be achieved by passing through a progressive series of dialectical stages. Donington. Robert. Wagner s Ring and its Symbols. New York: St. Martin s Press and London: Faber, 2nd edn, 1969.

First edition 1963. An interpretation of the Ring cycle according to its perceived manipulation of Jungian mythic-psychological archetypes and their relation to the network of musical leitmotifs. Holman, J. K. Wagner s Ring: A Listener s Companion and Concordance. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996. An extensive fact-sheet on the Ring cycle, including a list of leitmotifs comparing different names and interpretations given to them. Concordance lists the location occurrence of character names, key words and concepts by drama, act, and scene. Kitcher, Philip and Richard Schacht. Finding and Ending: Reflections on Wagner s Ring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 Written by two professional philosophers, but mainly in laymen s terms, exploring central themes, characters, and their development. McCreless, Patrick. Wagner s Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982. A comprehensive study with special attention to developing issues in Wagnerian analysis at the time (e.g., tonality, motive, and musical form in relation to dramatic structure). Shaw, George Bernard. The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on Wagner s Ring. London: Grant Richards, 1898. Shaw s celebrated reading of the Ring cycle as a socialist allegory of socioeconomic conditions in modern Europe, though one that breaks down as the cycle approaches its more conventionally operatic point of origin in Siegfried and Gtterdmmerung (whose texts were the first to be drafted). Reissued numerous times during Shaw s lifetime, with several new prefaces, and reprinted by Dover Books (New York, 1967). Strobel, Otto, ed. Skizzen und Entwrfe zur Ring -Dichtung. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1930. Valuable transcription and annotation of the various stages in the genesis of the libretto of the Ring cycle. Westernhagen Curt von. The Forging of the Ring: Richard Wagner s Composition Sketches for Der Ring des Nibelungen, translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 1976. Originally published in German in 1973. Among the earlier studies of Wagner s musical sketches; cf. also *Bailey 1977* (Musical language and compositional method). Wolzogen, Hans von. Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik zu Richard Wagner s Festspiel Der Ring des Nibelungen. Leipzig: Verlag von Edwin Schloemp, 1876.

The first and most influential guide to the role of leitmotifs in the Ring cycle, followed by similar guides to the other music dramas through the 1880s. See also *Thorau 2003* ( Wagnerism and reception issues).

Tristan und Isolde Scruton 2004 may serve as a high-level introductory handbook to all aspects of the opera, adding more specialized essayistic discussion of some literary and philosophical themes. Bailey 1985 is valuable for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars, while Bailey 1969 and Chafe 2005 address a more professionalized readership (the latter, however, examining all dimensions of the work, not only the score). Grunsky 1906 and Truscott 1963 are both interesting as reflections of the long-term challenges the Tristan score has posed to music historians and analysts alike. Kerman 1956 and Wapnewski 2001 represent, similarly, the range of modern critical responses, and the difficulty of categorizing the work in terms of traditional genres. Zuckerman 1964 is a good starting-point for any interdisciplinary approaches to Tristan. Bailey, Robert. The Genesis of Tristan und Isolde and a Study of Wagner s Sketches and Drafts for the First Act. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1969. A more rigorous approach to the study of sketch sources than *Westernhagen 1976*, also in its attempt to drawn analytical conclusions from such study. Complemented by 1991 German dissertation by Ulrich Bartels on sketches and drafts for Acts 2 and 3 published in 3 vols. (Cologne: Studio, 1995), including a complete transcription and facsimile of the composition drafts. Bailey, Robert. Wagner, Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan und Isolde. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985. In addition to a study score of these famous bookends of the Tristan score, offers detailed history of the genesis and early reception of the music, a study of the sketch materials drawing on *Bailey 1969*, and an invaluable anthology of analytical studies of the Prelude. Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner s Tristan und Isolde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. A detailed analytical account of the score with reference to literary, philosophical, and musical-aesthetic issues, including Wagner s use of Gottfried von Strassburg s epic and the role of Schopenhauer in his thinking at the time of Tristan. Grunsky, Karl. Das Vorspiel und der erste Akt von Tristan und Isolde. In Richard Wagner-Jahrbuch 2 (1907): 207-84. Like *Grunsky 1906* (Musical analysis, general), interesting as an early example of attempts to explain Wagner s compositional principles, in thematic,

tonal, and formal terms, and to demonstrate the underlying symphonic logic of these even in Wagner s most iconoclastic work. Kerman, Joseph. Opera as Symphonic Poem. In Opera as Drama, 192-216. New York: Vintage, 1956. Reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Reads Tristan und Isolde as a paradigm of Wagnerian music drama (also as a form of religious drama rather than tragedy) in which a new symphonic conception of musical structure, texture, and expression creates a vocal-dramatic analogue of the contemporary Romantic genre of symphonic poem. Scruton, Roger. Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner s Tristan und Isolde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. A high level critical introduction to the drama and music amplified by essays on the nature of love, self, death, ideas of redemption, and the value of art for Wagner and for modern society. Truscott, Harold. Wagner s Tristan and the Twentieth Century. In The Music Review 24 (1963): 75-85. This brief essay challenges the notion that the chromatic harmony of Tristan is the necessary harbinger of expressionist atonality and later developments, since as has been stressed more recently by Richard Taruskin in The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 3 Wagner s harmonic idiom is resolutely grounded in the relation of dissonance to tonal resolution. Wapnewski, Peter. Tristan der Held Richard Wagners. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2001. Biographical and literary reflections on the drama. First edition 1981. Zuckerman, Eliot. The First Hundred Years of Wagner s Tristan. New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1964. A well-informed, elegantly executed account of the musical and literary reception of Wagner s most radical musical drama, conceived in commemoration of the 100 year anniversary of the work s premiere. Replace Bailey 1969 or Truscott 1963 with Gross 2011 upon finalizing of publication information.

Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg The symbolic weight of its historical subject matter has often pointed criticism of Die Meistersinger toward discussions of German national identity and its consequences, past and present, as in Gross 1992, Millington 1991, and Vazsonyi 2003. Csampai and Holland 1981 and Warrack 1994 provide all the essential background for an understanding of these debates in relation to the basic materials of the opera. Goehr 1998 suggests some of the ways the debates over tradition and

innovation in the opera, originally keyed to Wagner s own historical milieu, continue to resonate in the cultural contexts of modernity and post-modernity. Csampai, Attila and Dietmar Holland, eds. Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981. From a series of handbooks including full libretto and source materials on reception and interpretation. Goehr, Lydia, Die Meistersinger: Wagner s Exemplary Lesson. In Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, 48-86. The classic debates on old vs. new, freedom vs. rules dramatized in the opera are revisited in the course of four larger arguments about the nature of art identified in the opera and the positions assumed by its characters, their behaviors, and their performances. Gross, Arthur. Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg. In 19th-Century Music 16:1 (Summer 1992): 18-34. Considers the dramatic, social, and historical ramifications of the dialectic of old and new (archaism and avant-gardism) thematized in the musical conception of Die Meistersinger. Millington, Barry. Nuremberg Trial: Is there anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger? In Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 247-60. The first essay to argue for traces of Wagnerian anti-Semitism as being systematically integrated into the music and libretto of the music dramas (following the influential suggestion of *Adorno 2005* (orig. 1952; see Political, social and cultural themes: Anti-Semitism) Vaszonyi. Nicholas, ed. Wagner s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press and Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. Essays by performers, directors, historians, and a variety of humanist scholars, grouped as per the subtitle. Warrack, John. Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. From the Cambridge Opera Handbook series, with essays focusing more on the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions than on nationalism, politics, or reception; also includes a thorough account of Wagner s libretto in relation to his historical sources.

Parsifal

Criticism of Wagner s final work, which he designated as a Bhnenweihfestspiel or stage-consecration festival play, has often centered on questions about its use of sacred, Christian or quasi-Christian symbols. A good introduction to those symbols and contested claims about them is offered by Beckett 1981 as well as several chapters in Kinderman and Syer 2005. The work s complex musical-dramatic representations of gender, sexuality, guilt, and related psychological conditions have been another locus of perennial critical interest, represented in recent literature by Hutcheon and Hutcheon 1995, Winterbourne 2003, and the Spring 2006 special issue of The Opera Quarterly. Differing attempts to place the work in the context of lifelong intellectual preoccupations of the composer (Schopenhauer, redemption, the role of art as a modern equivalent to traditional religious and ritual practices) can be found in Kienzele 1992 and Schofield 2007. Metzger and Riehn 1982 includes material on reception and musical analysis of lasting value. Beckett, Lucy. Richard Wagner: Parsifal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. One of the first volumes in the Cambridge opera handbook series, by a scholar of classics, literature, and religion with an additional chapter on the score by musicologist Arnold Whittall. Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. Syphilis, Sin and the Social Order: Richard Wagner s Parsifal. In Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (1995): 261-75. One of a series of studies on issues of health, disease, and psychology in opera authored jointly by a literary critic and a physician with a shared interest in opera criticism. Looks at the figures of blood and pathologized sexuality with reference to the omnipresence of syphilitic infection in Wagner s day. Kienzele, Ulrich. Das Weltberwindungswerk: Wagner s Parsifal ein szenischmusikalisches Gleichnis der Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1992. Views Wagner s final work as the principal testament to his devotion to Schopenhauer s doctrines of compassion and the renunciation of the Will that had dominated the composer s thought since the mid 1850s. Kinderman, William and Katherine R. Syer, eds. A Companion to Wagner s Parsifal. Rochester, NY: Camden House (Boydell & Brewer), 2005. Substantial essays on the literary background, the relevance of Christian theology, the genesis of the score, dramaturgy, chromatic tonality, and production history. Meztger, Heinz-Klaus and Rainer Riehn, eds. Richard Wagner: Parsifal. MusikKonzepte vol. 25. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1982. Includes essays by Constantin Floros on reception, Siegfried Mauser on leitmotif and compositional procedures.

The Opera Quarterly 22:2 (Spring 2006). Special issue on Parsifal, edited by Brian Hyer and Ryan Minor. Includes critical essays on symbol and psychology, the politics of voice exchange, and analytical perspectives ( hexatonic poles and the uncanny ). Also translates texts from the turn of the twentieth linking Wagner, Parsifal, and homosexuality by Oscar Panizza (1895) and Hanns [sic] Fuchs (1903), and reviews of recent productions and publications. Schofield, Paul. The Redeemer Reborn: Parsifal as the Fifth Opera of Wagner s Ring. New York: Amadeus Press, 2007. Argues that Wagner conceived his final drama as the continuation of themes and objectives that had preoccupied the composer for decades. The Schopenhauerian and Eastern religious insights of Parsfial serve to redeem the whole Ring cycle, born as it was slightly prematurely with regard to Wagner s overall intellectual trajectory. Winterbourne, Anthony. A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner s Parsifal. Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Reads Wagner s neo-Christian Bhnenweihfestspiel through the lens of Otto Weininger s controversial fin-de-sicle essay on race, gender, and psychology, Sex and Character, in particular with regard to the dialectic of sexual desire and asceticism that had fascinated Wagner since Tannhuser.

INSTRUMENTAL WORKS Most of Wagner s purely instrumental works are either juvenilia or later occasional works. Beyond some surveys cited in General overviews, Voss 1977 is the most detailed discussion of the assorted instrumental compositions, while Deathridge 2008 adds interesting reflections (and documentation of) the composer s unrealized plans to return to instrumental composition at the end of his life, following the model of his 1870 Siegfried Idyll. The biographical and pedagogical context of the early works is carefully documented in Daube 1960 [and updated somewhat in Deathridge _________]. The last of the early orchestral works, revised and published at the same time as Liszt was publishing his Symphonic Poems, was read by Hans von Blow 2009 (orig. 1856) as a key example of modern program music. An annotated study score of the work with much supplementary material is provided by Voss 1982. Blow, Hans von. On Richard Wagner s Faust Overture. Translated by Thomas S. Grey. The Wagner Journal 3:3 (November 2009): 7-28. A key document in the gestation of a New German School, written by one of the most prominent followers of both Wagner and Liszt, the pianist and conductor who first married Liszt s daughter Cosima. First published in the Neue Zeitschrift fr Musik in 1856 and reissued as a brochure in 1860.

Daub, Otto. Ich schriebe keine Symphonien Mehr : Richard Wagners Lehrjahren nach den erhaltenen Dokumenten. Cologne: Hans Gerig, 1960. The first thorough evaluation of Wagner s youthful musical education and the pre-operatic juvenilia. Deathridge, John. Wagner s Unfinished Symphonies. In Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Critical reflections, based on surviving sketches, of Wagner s frequently reiterated intention of composing single-movement symphonies or (post-) symphonic poems upon retiring from opera after Parsifal. An essay on the early (completed) C major symphony and its connections with Mendelssohn is included in the same volume. Deathridge on early musical education? Voss, Egon. Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik: Wagners symphonischer Ehrgeiz. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1977. The only monograph devoted to the non-operatic works, by one of the founding editors of the critical edition of the complete works and editor of some of the early instrumental pieces published there. Voss, Egon. Richard Wagner: Eine Faust-Ouvertre. Meisterwerke der Musik, vol. 31. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982. A study score with critical notes, analysis, and documentation.