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The Consolations of History: Themes of Progress and Potential in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,474
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The Consolations of History: Themes of Progress and Potential in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Research in Music
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In this book on Richard Wagner's compelling but enigmatic
masterpiece Goetterdammerung, the final opera of his monumental
Ring tetralogy, Alexander H. Shapiro advances an ambitious new
interpretation which uncovers intriguing new facets to the work's
profound insights into the human condition. By taking a fresh look
at the philosophical and historical influences on Wagner, and
critically reevaluating the composer's intellectual worldview as
revealed in his own prose works, letters, and diary entries, the
book challenges a number of conventional views that continue to
impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning. The book
argues that Goetterdammerung, and hence the Ring as a whole,
achieves coherence when interpreted in terms of contemporary
nineteenth-century theories of progress, and, in particular, G.W.F.
Hegel's philosophies of mind and history. A central target of the
book is the article of faith that has come to dominate Wagner
scholarship over the years - that Wagner's encounter in 1854 with
Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy conclusively altered the final
message of the Ring from one of historical optimism to existential
pessimism. The author contends that Schopenhauer's uncompromising
denigration of the will and denial of the possibility for human
progress find no place in the written text of the Ring or in a
plausible reading of the final musical setting. In its place, the
author discovers in the famous Immolation Scene a celebration of
mankind's inexhaustible capacity for self-improvement and progress.
The author makes the further compelling case that this message of
progress is communicated not through Siegfried, the traditional
male hero of the drama, but through Brunnhilde, the warrior goddess
who becomes a mortal woman. In her role as a battle-tested
world-historical prophet she is the true revolutionary change agent
of Wagner's opera who has the strength and vision to comprehend and
thereby shape human history. This highly lucid and accessible study
is aimed not only at scholars and researchers in the fields of
opera studies, music and philosophy, and music history, but also
Wagner enthusiasts, and readers and students interested in the
history and philosophy of the nineteenth century.
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