Synopses & Reviews
Few major artists have aroused the ire and adulation of successive generations as persistently as Richard Wagner. Simon Williams explores the reasons for this adulation and antipathy by analyzing heroism in Wagner's work. Beginning with a definition of the concept of the heroic, Williams then examines it as a function of Wagner's theater and music. He also analyzes all thirteen stage works by Wagner as well as his adaptation of the Romantic hero figure.
About the Author
Simon Williams is Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Romanticism, Idealism, and Realism (1985), Shakespeare on the German Stage: 1582-1914 (Cambridge, 1990), and Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre (1994).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Modes of heroism in the early nineteenth century; 2. Wagner and the early nineteenth-century theatre; 3. Early music dramas: between the Romantic and Epic hero; 4. Heroism, tragedy, and the Ring; 5. Toward the Messiah: the hero and Utopia in the last music-dramas; 6. Wagner's heroism on stage; Bibliography; Index.