This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Letters To Wesendonck Et Al reprint Richard Wagner William Ashton Ellis G. Richards, 1899 Music; Genres & Styles; Opera; Music / Genres & Styles / Opera

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... As late as February 10--three days before her husband's death--Frau Wagner wrote me without any apprehension of a crisis. I had expressed a hope that the master would return through the Gothard, so as to visit me at Mannheim. It fell out otherwise. His homeward road was taken, as a corpse, over the Brenner again to his beloved German Bayreuth. If I abstained from depicting the profound impressions made upon me by the Festspiels, with still more justice may I withhold my feelings at the news of the great master's death, my sensations at his solemn burial in Bayreuth. Here, as so often in life, applies that deeply earnest word from the first act of Parsifal: -- "That ne'er is told."-- * * * Frau Wagner's condition remained so precarious for a long time after the master's death, that it was impossible for her to take any personal part in the festival of 1883. The sense of mourning was universal. How quiet every movement On the stage, what an earnest hush among the audience when it took its customary promenade before the playhouse in the entr'actes. The thought of the departed master was manifest on every face. Scaria undertook the stage-management. Every effort was directed to preserving the master's intentions down to the smallest detail. Remarks and observations of witnesses of the 1882 and 1883 performances, alike executants and spectators, were collected in a volume to be kept at Wahnfried. Forty pages here record those notes on the master's own rendering, and subsequent deviations, all tabulated under act and person. This chronicle has proved of the greatest service for retention of the original character of the performances. The Verwaltungsrath, reinforced by Friedrich Schon as administrator of the "Richard Wagner Stipendiary - fund, ..".

William Ashton Ellis (1852-1919) abandoned his medical career in order to devote himself to his Wagner studies. Best known for his translations of Wagner's prose works and of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's multi-volume biography of the composer, Ellis published in 1911 this English translation of Wagner's Familienbriefe, spanning the years 1832-74. An inveterate letter writer, Wagner was the youngest-but-one of ten children and Ellis describes the character of these letters to his sisters, his mother, his brother-in-law and his nieces as a reflection of the composer in the 'driest and most neutral of lights', claiming that within the family it is impossible to be pretentious. An appendix by Glasenapp, giving brief biographical details of family members, is also included. Despite the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the translations, these letters remain of importance, capturing something of the tone of Wagner's prose style and shedding light on his extraordinary life.

The German actress Minna Planer (1809-66) was Wagner's first wife. Though it lasted until her death, their marriage, never an easy one, was punctuated by long periods of separation, and during its early years Minna was the main breadwinner. William Ashton Ellis (1852-1919) abandoned his medical career to devote himself to his Wagner studies. Best known for his translations of Wagner's prose works, he published in 1909 this collection of letters from the composer, translated from the originals in Baron Hans von Wolzogen's Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner (1908). Concerned predominantly with domestic and business affairs, many of them complaining at Minna's lack of support, the letters offer an intriguing and intimate view of this larger-than-life composer. Spanning 1842-58, Volume 1 covers the couple's period in Dresden, Wagner's hurried departure after the 1849 uprising, and the years in Zurich culminating in the relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck.

The German actress Minna Planer (1809-66) was Wagner's first wife. Though it lasted until her death, their marriage, never an easy one, was punctuated by long periods of separation, and during its early years Minna was the main breadwinner. William Ashton Ellis (1852-1919) abandoned his medical career to devote himself to his Wagner studies. Best known for his translations of Wagner's prose works, he published in 1909 this collection of letters from the composer, translated from the originals in Baron Hans von Wolzogen's Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner (1908). Concerned predominantly with domestic and business affairs, many of them complaining at Minna's lack of support, the letters offer an intriguing and intimate view of this larger-than-life composer. Spanning the period 1858-63, Volume 2 covers their uneasy, brief reconciliation in Paris, Wagner's concerns over Minna's failing health, and her return to Dresden in 1862, which marked their final separation.

A master of mystery and paradox, Wagner spent his life composing himself while composing music. Written between 1864 and 1878, the essays in "Art and Politics" converge upon Wagner's desire to define and reform German culture. He was deeply annoyed that Germany seemed to satisfy itself with cheap theater, vulgar songs, and clumsy imitations of French art. In "What Is German?" he declared that German culture must rise above the common ruck. Citing "Music's wonderman" Johann Sebastian Bach as his precursor, Wagner fought to persuade his readers that German culture had a historic destiny, and that destiny was shaped first and foremost by music. As usual, embroiled in the defense of his operas and his person, Wagner recognized that his rescue from attack and poverty could not be expected from "Franco-Judaico-German democracy." He instead fixed his hopes elsewhere: "the embodied voucher" for fundamental law, the Monarch. He found himself at a turning point in his career. In 1864 King Ludwig II of Bavaria befriended Wagner and gave him badly needed financial support. This alliance aroused Wagner's enemies into further fits of jealousy. Yet, amid the public scorn, he worked on the production of "Tristan und""Isolde," drafted the libretto for "Parsifal," and composed sections of "Siegfried" and "Die""Meistersinger." In these essays Wagner resumes his considerations of the close ties between religion and art. He calls art "the kindly Life-saviour who does not really and wholly lead us out beyond this life, but, within it, lifts us up above it and shews it as itself a game of play." These essays express his artistic credo and the knowledge of German literature that underpinned his claims for German genius. Following his ideals, he proclaimed his intention to raise the quality of German opera, by himself if necessary. This edition includes the full text of volume 4 of the translation of Wagner's works commissioned in 1895 by the London Wagner Society.

Near the end of his life, Richard Wagner supervised the publication of his collected writings, providing an extensive view of his thoughts about art and politics from his youth to his final period of triumph. After his death, there was still more to be told: his admirers discovered a large number of writings he had forgotten, misplaced, never published, or had chosen to omit from his collected works. This volume, the last of eight volumes now reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, collects the most illuminating of those works. The title work, "Jesus of Nazareth," was written in 1848 or 1849; its composition coincided with the most widespread revolutionary ferment seen in Europe. It expresses Wagner's own revolutionary ideals, thoroughly justified (or so he thought) by Jesus and the early Church. At the time Wagner considered Jesus as a revolutionary leader whose struggles with authority and traditions were much like his own.
The opening work is "Siegfried's Death," a poem written in 1848 that set the tone for his most famous operatic work, the tetralogy "Der Ring des Nibelungen." Whole sections of the poem were later incorporated into the fourth Ring opera, "Gotterdammerung," but the differences are as revealing as the carryover. The essays that Wagner published in journals but saw fit to exclude from his "Gesammelte Schriften" might have embarrassed the elderly sage but are key documents to Wagner's activities in his revolutionary period. For example, his ardently prorevolutionary essay, "The Revolution," would have displeased the wealthy patrons of his later years. This edition includes the full text of volume 8 of the translation of Wagner's works published in 1899 for the London Wagner Society.

Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality--that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in "Judaism in Music and Other Essays" were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music," which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser," written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism," an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, "Opera and Drama" outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as "The Ring of the Nibelung." Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

"Saint Beethoven . . . . He was clad in somewhat untidy houseclothes, with a red woolen scarf wrapped round his waist; long, bushy grey hair hung in disorder from his head, and his gloomy, forbidding expression by no means tended to reassure. . . ."

When Wagner published the first collection of his writings he was pleased to admit how well he wrote, even when young. Historians and musicians ever since have agreed that some of his most important and revelatory works were written when he was first establishing his reputation in Paris and Dresden. "Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays" provides translations of the first two volumes of his "Gesammelte Schriften" (1871-1873). These works reveal how committed he was to emphasizing Germanic qualities in his music and define his opposition to the music of France and Italy.

In addition to his influential essay on Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony," this volume includes two early essays on Germanic myth--"The Wibelungen" and "The Nibelungen-Myth"--his homages to Carl Maria von Weber, and the complete text of his autobiographical "A German Musician in Paris," with its famous "Pilgrimage to Beethoven."

The volume concludes with his "Plan of Organisation of a German National Theatre" (1849), founded upon Beethoven's moral music. Listeners "inspired by Beethoven's music have been more active and energetic citizens-of-State than those bewitched by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti." Throughout these essays, as throughout his life, Wagner knew how to provoke.

This edition includes the complete volume 7 of the 1898 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

Poor, frustrated, and angered by the “fashion-mongers and mode-purveyors� of art, Richard Wagner published The Art-Work of the Future in 1849. It marked a turning point in his life: an appraisal of the revolutionary passions of mid-century Europe, his farewell to symphonic music, and his vision of the music to come. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was unsurpassable, he wrote. Henceforth "The Folk must of necessity be the Artist of the Future," and only artists who were in harmony with the Folk could know what harmony was for. The essay became a touchstone for Wagner, his family, friends, and followers, as he sought to produce works that thoroughly combined music, dance, drama, and national saga. In addition to Wagner’s epoch-defining essay, this volume includes his "Autobiographical Sketch," "Art and Climate"; his libretto for an opera, "Wieland the Smith"; and his notorious "Art and Revolution." The concluding piece, "A Communication to My Friends (1851), explains his views on his first successes—The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser—and defines his agenda for later works. As spokesman for the future, Wagner spoke most of himself. In these works he set forth his ambitions, identified his enemies, and began a campaign for public attention that made him a legend in his own time and in ours.

""One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion."" With these words Richard Wagner began "Religion and Art" (1880), one of his most passionate essays. That passion made Wagner himself a central icon in the growing cult of art.

Wagner felt that he lived in an age of spiritual crisis. "It can but rouse our apprehension, to see the progress of the art-of-war departing from the springs of moral force, and turning more and more to the mechanical," he wrote. In response to the frightening progress of dynamite and steel, Wagner adopted the role of the Tone Poet Seer, who reveals the inexpressible in concert halls and cleanses souls in waves of symhonic revelation.

"Religion and Art" is the pivot of the works collected here. Also included are his defining essays "Public and Popularity" and "The Public in Time and Space"; his papers relating to the creation of the Bayreuth School; his complaint against publishers, "On Poetry and Composition" (1879); his article on the first production of "Parsifal" (1882); and other works that speak his mind about strengthening the spirit through music.

These works participated in the duel between Wagner and Nietzsche that ensued after the breakup of their friendship in 1878. Nietzsche publicly called Wagner an incurable romantic, emphasizing how sick he thought both Wagner and his art were. Here Wagner counterattacks with arch innuendo and sarcasm.

This edition includes the complete volume 6 of the 1897 translation of Wagner's works commissioned by the London Wagner Society.