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This chronicle of renowned composer Richard Wagner and his descendants features “a cast of characters who are positively operatic in their histrionics” (The Guardian). Richard Wagner was many things—composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite—and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy. In his “lively and wry” history of the legendary composer and his family, biographer Jonathan Carr also offers fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Arturo Toscanini, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Adolf Hitler—a passionate fan of the Master’s music and an adopted uncle to Wagner’s grandchildren...
Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism considered in the context of his time, place, and aspirations rather than in relation to his later appropriation by the Nazis.
This report examines Russia’s growing use of private military companies (PMCs) to increase its influence through irregular means. In recent years, Moscow has expanded its overseas use of PMCs to countries such as Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, and Mozambique. Many of the PMCs operating in these countries, such as the Wagner Group, frequently cooperate with the Russian government—including the Kremlin, Ministry of Defense (particularly the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Federal Security Service (FSB)—and perform a variety of combat, paramilitary, security, and intelligence tasks. However, many of these PMCs have a poor track record—including operational failures and human rights abuses—and there are opportunities to exploit PMC vulnerabilities. Although Russian PMCs present only one of a variety of national security threats and challenges facing the United States, this report assesses that they warrant a more substantive and coordinated response from the United States and its partners.
Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagner's world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of music's most influential figures.The perfect introduction to the Master. A hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner's music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music. They have never been more popular, nor so violently controversial and divisive. His music is still banned in Israel - the only classical composer whose music is banned in the western world. His ten great mature masterpieces constitute an unmatched body of work, created against a backdrop of poverty, revolution, violent controversy, critical contempt and hysterical hero-wors...
“[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin ...
‘A fine, intellectually sparkling and always engaging little book – a welcome addition to any Wagner library’ Hans Vaget, Opera Quarterly
These essays explore the parameters of Wagner's rich literary and architectural creations.
’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
Even though September 11 hovers over this mesmerizing look into the nature of eventsit was the fall of the Twin Towers that inspired Robin Wagner-Pacifici initiallythe richly evocative and thoughtful story she tells scales up to the level of major historical events and it scales down to the micro-level of ruptures in individual lives. Wagner-Pacifici moves back and forth between events experienced with all their vivid, pulsating, and demanding realities, and events understood systematically and conceptually. It is an astonishing achievement: a book that works with events, and a book that builds a model for analyzing them. She makes contact with specific eventful ruptures and turning-points; ...
Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner ...