With characteristic decisiveness, Ian Dallas opens his next work, 'The New Wagnerian':
He writes: "Do not be put off by Wagner's bitterly sarcastic critics, or perhaps, yes, do be put off. If you view life as they do, and envy vastness of spirit and profundity of meditative reflection on existence and nature, and surrender to the erotic drive, yes, do turn away. Wagner is not for you."
Once again the book has several layers. Firstly it is an appreciation of the man and his music. It is also the portrait of a visionary ahead of his time, and the social questions which he tackled. And it is a signpost to something beyond Wagner himself. Dallas quotes the great composer thus:
"'Revolution alone can give me the artists and audiences I need.'" Dallas continues: "He said he would convey in his works the meaning of their revolution in its noblest form. Then, he insisted, there would be an audience which could understand him, for his contemporaries could not."
There are far too many different aspects to The New Wagnerian to cover here, but in analysing 'The Ring' he discusses how Wagner depicts the different archetypes of Coupledom, a subject which I shall come to in more detail.
from Ian Dallas - Collected Works - An Appreciation : The New Wagnerian, The Book of Strangers, The Gestalt of Freedom (By a British convert to Islam)
By Sidi Abdassabur Kirke
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1657325/posts - 31k - Similar pages
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
ReplyDeleteis a cycle of four epic operas or (to use the composer's preferred term) 'dramas' by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883).
The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The four dramas, which the composer described as a trilogy with a Vorabend ('preliminary evening'), are often referred to as the Ring Cycle, "Wagner's Ring", or simply The Ring.
Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four operas that constitute the Ring cycle are, in the order of the imagined events they portray:
Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold)
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
Siegfried
Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods)
Wikipedia