Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas A Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation of His Work

This is first heard in the introduction to Act II. It reappears when Ortrud begins to reveal her ideas to Frederic, and accompanies each of her suggestions for the overthrow of...

it to the themes now to be considered. He will find in these scores all the classes there enumerated and will note that they are used and developed with extraordinary skill.

It is customary to divide the artistic career of Wagner into three periods, the first embracing the production of the early works and "Rienzi," the second that of "Der Fliegende...

from the older operatic manner. There is a sincere attempt to make the musical forms follow the poem. There is an abundance of real dialogue, in which the setting of the text is...

The excursion to Teplitz in the early summer of 1842 for his wife's health was of great importance in the development of Richard Wagner, for it was there and then that he comple...

The period of Wagner's life which we have now reached was one of much complication and of important results. With the decision to abandon the subject of Barbarossa he made anoth...

In the year 1832, while he was in Prague, Wagner began his career as a composer of operas, and in his first attempt, as in all later ones, wrote his own libretto. His friend Hei...

The composer now set to work right gladly on his "Walküre." He was eager to finish it and begin the writing of what was still called "Jung Siegfried." For a time he was impeded...

The ancestry of Richard Wagner has been traced as far as his grandfather. This good man was Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, a custom house official, whose life-work it was to see that...

The first years of Wagner's residence at Zurich were occupied with the writing of works designed to propagate the reformatory ideas which he aimed at introducing into the compos...

On arriving in Paris Wagner took a furnished apartment in the Rue de la Tonnelerie. This was in an unfrequented quarter, but the house was said to have been occupied once by Mol...

We may now approach the study in detail of Wagner's artistic aims. I have already said that his purpose was to restore artistic truth, dramatic sincerity, to the opera, and to b...

Broadly stated, the purpose of his life was to reform the lyric drama, to restore to it the artistic nature with which it was born, and to bring it into direct relation to the l...

Minna Planer, as she was called, was the daughter of a spindle-maker, and according to Praeger,[8] who knew her well, went on the stage not because she was endowed with histrion...

In its details this Wagnerian system of musico-textual speech divides itself into music constructed of leading motives, or themes with a specified meaning, and music of the pict...

"The noble and kindly man as his friends knew him, and the aggressive critic and reformer addressing the public, were as two distinct individuals." These words of Edward Dannreu...

Wagner went from Paris to Vienna, where he hoped that a production of "Tristan und Isolde" might be arranged. The manager of the opera house, when he learned that the composer w...

It was in April, 1872, that Wagner went to Bayreuth to live. He at first occupied rooms in the small hotel belonging to the Castle Fantaisie, in the village of Donndorf, an hour...

Wagner, in striving for a complete and natural revelation of the emotional content of his dramas, discovered that the continual flow of music which he had adopted was not possib...

When "Tannhäuser" had been completed Wagner went to Marienbad to spend the summer. While there he made the first drafts of his "Meistersinger" and "Lohengrin." He says: "As with...

"This red republican of music is to preside over the Old Philharmonic of London, the most classical, orthodox, and exclusive society on this globe."--Letter of Ferdinand Praeger...

And now, under the guidance of a monarch to whom Wagner's art was almost the inspiration of life, Munich, which in 1858 had rejected "Der Fliegende Holländer" as unsuitable to t...

In the fall of 1877 Wagner's mind was occupied with a plan to found at Bayreuth a music school similar in plan to that which he had once hoped to have in Munich. Delegates from...

abandoned, as impossible, 118; accepted at Vienna, 118; art-theories in, 316; Arthurian legends, now Gallicised, 296; begun, 109; book written, 295; Celtic origin of story, 295...

begun, 64, 273; book written, 273; cadence, dominance of, 284, 285; combat, use of sword in, 277; conception of, 51; "Der Fliegende Holländer," resemblance of story to, 283; "De...

"Every bar of dramatic music is justified only by the fact that it explains something in the action or in the character of the actor."--WAGNER TO LISZT, SEPTEMBER, 1850.