Simply Wagner

by Thomas S. Grey
Simply Wagner

Overview

Richard Wagner was one of the most influential and controversial composers in the history of music. His massive, myth-laden operas revolutionized musical drama and overturned traditional harmony, while his charismatic personality and inflammatory writings made him an object of both veneration and scorn. In Simply Wagner, author Thomas Grey deftly merges biography with an appreciation of Wagner’s musical achievement to produce a fascinating and wholly accessible portrait of this larger-than-life figure, whose radical ideas and complex legacy are still being debated today.


Description

More than 130 years after his death, the operas and philosophy of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) continue to provoke controversy. A man of unquestioned artistic brilliance, he was also a fierce nationalist and outspoken anti-Semite, who was posthumously embraced by the Nazis and became a cultural hero of the Third Reich. Though he changed the course of classical music, in his personal life Wagner was an overbearing and ruthless megalomaniac, who stopped at nothing to achieve his ambitions.

In Simply Wagner, musicologist and author Thomas Grey navigates the turbulent course of Wagner’s life, as he sought to create a total “musical-dramatic art work of the future.” From his early “romantic operas” through the harmonic cataclysm of Tristan und Isolde, to the epic 16-hour cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Grey traces Wagner’s musical development, clearly explaining the nature of his achievement. Grey also shares key events in Wagner’s personal life, including the composer’s relationship with his patron, “mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria, and his extended affair with Cosima von Bülow—eventually his second wife—who bore him three children while still married to someone else.

Written for a general readership, Simply Wagner offers a complete portrait of Wagner the man, the thinker, and the artist, and explores the circumstances that made him the most discussed artistic figure of his time, and one of the most controversial ever since.


About the author

Thomas Grey is a professor of music at Stanford University. He is the author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (1995), as well as editor and co-author of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (2008), and Richard Wagner and his World (2009). Grey has also written on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the history of 19th-century opera.


About the series

Simply Charly's Great Lives Series offers brief, but authoritative introductions to the world's most influential people—scientists, artists, writers, economists, and other historical figures whose contributions have had a meaningful and enduring impact on our society. Each book, presented in an engaging, accessible and entertaining fashion, offers an illuminating look at their works, ideas and personal lives, and the legacies they left behind.


Series trailer



Genre:

Nonfiction

Subgenre:

Biography, Music

Language:

English

Publisher:

Simply Charly

Edition Number:

1

Available for sale on

Amazon
Amazon


Available formats

ePubFor Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo.
mobiFor Kindle devices and Kindle apps.

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