Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century's most important operatic productions - and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed nearly twenty volumes of writing on opera. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk - the "total work of art" - famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well-known, however, are Wagner's strange theories on sexuality - like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other developing fields of study that informed Wagner's world, Adrian Daub traces the influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d'Albert, Schreker, and Strauss.
For decades after Wagner's death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan's shadow.
- ISBN10 022608213X
- ISBN13 9780226082134
- Publish Date 3 December 2013
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English