| Abstract |
Richard Wagner's works are among the most controversial in the history of European music--aesthetically, for their ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or 'total work of art', which inspired such productions as the Ring cycle; and, in wider terms, because of their ultimate assimilation into the official culture of the Third Reich. The aesthetic and the ideological and political are subtly interwoven throughout this book. Adorno, who studied under Alban Berg in Vienna and went on to become the most brilliant exponent of the Frankfurt school of German Marxism, was in many ways the cultural anti-type of his subject. In this concise synoptic account, he provides deft musicological analyses of Wagner's scores, of his compositional techniques, orchestration and staging methods, quoting copiously from the music dramas themselves. At the same time, he sets down incisive reflections on Wagner's social character, and on the ideological impulses of his artistic activity. This book is alert to the many ambiguities of the composer's career; it is attentive equally to the failures and the innovations of his aesthetics, to his irrational urge to self-destruction and his utopian intimations of a life without fear. Delicate in its explorations yet trenchant in judgement, Adorno's study in the end surprises all partisan expectation. |
