Wagner

A review-article based around three recent publications:

[i] Nicholas Vazsonyi, __Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand_ (CUP, 2010); [ii] Daniel Foster, _Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks_ (CUP, 2010); and [iii] Laurence Dreyfus, _Wagner and the Erotic Impulse_ (Harvard UP, 2010)

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

Scholars have long framed similarities between Bedřich Smetana’s “Vyšehrad” (the first movement of Má vlast) and Zdeněk Fibich’s symphonic poem, Záboj, Slavoj, and Luděk (prem. 1874), as a threat to Smetana’s originality. In his biography of the composer, for example, Brian Large moved to “exonerate” Smetana from charges of “plagiarism” by arguing that Smetana began “Vyšehrad” at least two years before Záboj’s premiere, not six months later as Smetana’s diary attests. Rather than regarding these works’ similarities as a problem, this discussion embraces their close relationships as a starting point. Situating both symphonic poems and their reception within the discourses generated by a powerful organization called the “Umělecká beseda” (“Artistic Society,” or UB, in which both Smetana and Fibich participated) illuminates the larger intellectual and aesthetic space from which they emerged. Such a process of contextualization reveals how both composers’ works constructed each other and uncovers Smetana not as a “lone genius”—a composer untainted by influence—but as a participant in a shared conversation. Ultimately, this examination opens up new understandings of Smetana and his “Vyšehrad” and, as an extension of Michael Beckerman’s landmark “In Search of Czechness in Music,” invites scholars to reengage with the deliberate subjectivity of Czechness and nationalistic sounds more broadly.

Long considered to lie ‘light years’ apart, Ravel and Wagner actually have multiple
points of contact. Several appear in the comments Ravel made about the German composer in his articles, interviews and correspondence. Another is a previously unrecognised allusion to Parsifal in the Passacaille of Ravel’s Trio (1914), which he composed shortly after writing a review of the opera’s premiere in Paris. Additional Wagnerisms can be located in Daphnis et Chloe´ (1909–12) and L’Enfant et les sortile`ges (1920–5). More broadly, Wagner plays a central role in the ‘decadent dialectics’ of Ravel’s style.

L’article analyse les écrits critiques (réunis dans Nos Maîtres) et les textes littéraires de Teodor de Wyzewa, en fonction de son attitude à l’égard de ceux qu’il considérait comme ses maîtres. L’évolution de la pensée de Wyzewa démontre que cet adepte du wagnérisme s’est progressivement éloigné de ceux qui l’ont influencé, en remplaçant une approche intellectuelle de l’art et la foi aveugle dans la science, jugée vaine, par un idéal à la fois esthétique et éthique. Dans le roman Valbert ou les Récits d’un jeune homme Wyzewa décrit un détachement de l’idéalisme aliénant au profit d’une attitude spontanée face à la vie. Sa relecture des paraboles bibliques met en question la philosophie schopenhauerienne au profit du tolstoïsme (Contes chrétiens). La quête des valeurs morales entraîne une rupture avec la pensée symboliste en faveur d’une religion de l’amour et de la beauté. En formulant son propre enseignement Wyzewa a donc dépassé l’autorité de ses maîtres, sans pourtant amoindrir leur importance pour toute sa génération.

Kamu harcamaları ile milli gelir arasındaki ilişki ekonomi literatüründe çeşitli teoriler ve bakış açıları çerçevesinde uzun yıllardır tartışma konusu olmuştur. Bu çalışmada, söz konusu ilişki Türkiye ekonomisi için Keynes ve Wagner’in ortaya koyduğu teoriler çerçevesinde analiz edilmiştir. Söz konusu ilişkinin belirlenebilmesi ve hangi teorinin geçerli olduğunun tespit edilebilmesi için Granger nedensellik testi ve Vektör otoregresyon (VAR) modeli kullanılmıştır. 1998-2018 yıllık verileri kullanılarak yapılan çalışmada değişkenler arasında herhangi bir nedensellik ilişkisi olmadığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Diğer yandan, kurulan VAR modelinde etki-tepki analizine göre kamu harcamalarında ortaya çıkan şokların yaklaşık beş dönem boyunca GSYİH üzerinde etkili olduğu belirlenmiştir. Ayrıca varyans ayrıştırması sonuçlarına göre GSYİH’nın açıklanmasında kamu harcamalarının önemli bir faktör olduğu görülmektedir. Elde edilen bulgular, Türkiye ekonomisi için Keynesyen hipotezin geçerli olduğu sonucunu ortaya koymuştur.

Indeed, there have been many comparisons of Hebrew mythology and Wagner's-and generally Nordic mythology-evoking Biblical imagery.  Scholar H.C. Washington has described the comparison and even gone as far to suggest that Biblical imagery has inspired Nordic myths, "a wide-ranging ethnographic argument for the universality of sacral warfare among "Naturvölker," and draws parallels between Hebrew sacral war motifs and those of Old Germanic mythology. The Hebrew celestial hosts, צבאות‎, who accompany Yhwh in battle are compared to the wild heavenly army of Wotan, to the ghostly troops of the war-god Skanda, and to the Valkyries. Schwally likens the Hebrew military banners, דִּגְל֤וֹ (Num. 2:2; Ps. 74:4,9), or הוָ֥ה (Num. 10:14), to those of the Old Germans who, because they also "knew no divine images," used an attribute like Wotan's spear or Thor's hammer to depict the divinity on the battle flag. He compares the rampages of Samson to those of the Berzekers in Nordic lore."
In the Bible, first (after Adam & Eve's original disobedience, at least), the Abrahamic covenant was one of ecclesiological identity,  a promise that one old man's Adamic descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the sky or the sands by the seashore,  in exchange for a simple promise of obedience and devotion (the very covenant which Adam and Eve had broken).  Next, the Mosaic Covenant shaped his descendants into a nation with a strong foundation in fundamental law (the ten commandments + Leviticus 19) and an elaborated law of social and economic relations stated throughout Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers.  Following the Christian theological story, Christ came to relieve the people of Israel and the world of both covenants  (the Abrahamic Covenant and the "Absolutism of Law" inherent in the Mosaic Covenant),  by and through the power of love and forgiveness.  Covenants such as these can inform international covenants and even set up the basis for modern contract law.

Called the "Colored Wagner" throughout his life, African American opera composer Harry Lawrence Freeman wrote dozens of operas during the Harlem Renaissance. In 2015, the Morningside Opera Company, Harlem Opera Theater, and the Harlem Chamber Players performed one of his grand operas, Voodoo. This article analyzes their performance, contextualizing it with archival documents located in Columbia University's archives.

The essay means to disclose a comparative perspective between theoretical, epistemic and hermeneutical issues of two musical projects with an intense metaphysical value such as the compositions by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. They are dialectically antithetical composers and for this reason fruitful of reflections concerning the essence of the music, its connection with the transcendence and its dramaturgic and symphonic declinations.
Wagner and Mahler proceed along two different paths but both involve in their compositions a constant reflection about the human essence and its connection with the universal. Ultimate purpose of this essay is to establish a dialogue between the symbolic revelation and redemption of the Wagnerian idea of Gesamt and the tragic irony of the Mahlerian Panic sentiment, or rather between the presence of the idea in Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel and the nostalgia for the present in Mahler’s symphonies.

This article focuses on a meeting of generations that takes the form of an interview film : Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Winifred Wagner oder die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried (1975). The only ‘ac¬tress’ of the five-hour film is Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who was the head of the Bayreuth Festival in 1933-1945. A historical narrative, Syberberg’s film is simultane¬ously also a document and an oral history based on an individual’s memory. Although the film is extraordinary in many ways, it gives the spectators an opportunity to reflect on the ways of nar¬rating history that are common in audiovisual historical narration. Syberberg presents us with a witness who has experienced the past, but simultaneously also comments on the problem of remembering. Despite its controversies and ambivalence, Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s memory-historical film comes very close to the post-positivist thoughts that researchers like Luisa Pas¬serini and Alessandro Portelli were sketching while pondering the possibilities of oral history.

Several scholars have drawn attention both to the many Scottish references in Richard Wagner's initial sketches of "The Flying Dutchman" and to the close links between the opera and the composer's own disastrous Nordic Sea journey, but discussions tend to centre on the opera's libretto. What appear to be musical reminiscences of Hebridean songs in the opera's core thematic material have not been alluded to since Marjory Kennedy-Fraser pointed them out at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having a long-standing interest in Wagner's œuvre, she associated various themes and tunes she had collected in the Outer Hebrides with the German composer, and among her extant field recordings – now at Edinburgh University Library – there are indeed snippets of music that closely resemble Wagnerian leitmotifs and airs, in particular Senta's ballad in "Der fliegende Holländer". Drawing on a paper Kennedy-Fraser read to the Musical Association in London in 1918, various scattered references and letters from Sir Granville Bantock and John Lorne Campbell, my article discusses the potential links between Hebridean songs and, in particular, Senta's ballad.

Liszt’s decision to stage the premiere of _Lohengrin_ in Weimar on 28 August 1850 involved political as well as artistic risk. Wagner’s compromised public profile, following his activities as a republican agitator during the Dresden uprising in 1849, risked tainting the Grand Duke Carl Alexander’s Weimar court by association. Yet the money invested by the Grand Duchess Maria Pawlowna in the premier was unprecedented, and the event was widely trumpeted as part of a new progressive agenda for music in Weimar. The evidence suggests, however, that the premiere was much less of an artistic success than Wagner had hoped. In seeking to uncover the motives and machinations of the figures involved in the unveiling of _Lohengrin_, this article examines the political dynamics of Wagner’s interaction with Carl Alexander alongside the apparent artistic failure of the premiere itself (evidenced through Liszt’s conducting score as well as discourse analysis). It raises the question of why Liszt wrote his essay on _Lohengrin_ so quickly after the premiere, and the extent to which he sought to steer Wagner’s public profile away from any unwanted political associations.