Table of Contents

PREFACE vii CHAPTER ONE: Love's Madness, Fairy-Tale Enchantment, and a Sicilian Carnival: Die Hochzeit, Die Feen, and Das Liebesverbot 1 CHAPTER TWO: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for the Music Drama-Grand Opera: Die hohe Braut, Rienzi, and Their Consequences 29 CHAPTER THREE: The Transformations of Ahasuerus: The Flying Dutchman and His Metamorphoses 79 CHAPTER FOUR: Venus in Exile: Tannhuuser between Romanticism and Young Germany 101 CHAPTER FIVE: Lohengrin: The Mythical Palimpsest of Wagner's Last Romantic Opera 147 CHAPTER SIX: Love and Objectification in the Music Drama: Tristan's Isolde and Her Sisters 157 CHAPTER SEVEN: Nuremberg as an Aesthetic State: Die Meistersinger, an Image and Counterimage of History 180 CHAPTER EIGHT: The Myth of the Beginning and End of History: Der Ring des Nibelungen 212 CHAPTER NINE: Redemption and Apocatastasis: Parsifal and the Religion of the Late Wagner 238 CHAPTER TEN: An Encounter between Two Anomalies: King Ludwig II and Wagner 261 CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wagner and Bismarck: An Epoch-Making Nonrelationship 279 CHAPTER TWELVE: Two-Faced Passion: Nietzsche's Critique of Wagner 288 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Parallel Action: Thomas Mann's Response to Wagner 308 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Disinherited Heir to the Throne: Franz Wilhelm Beidler, Wagner's "Lost Grandson"-a Postlude 329 NOTES 338 INDEX 383

Promotional Information

In his well-organized and eminently readable new book, Dieter Borchmeyer investigates in detail the intrinsic forces, as well as the various intertextual references, influences, and connections, of Wagner's libretti, in the course of which he succeeds impressively in developing the literary, historical, and cultural context of the time in which Wagner the librettist and composer worked. Borchmeyer writes without jargon in a comprehensible, clear, and lively style. -- Walter Hinderer, Princeton University This book presents a good deal of entirely new material on Wagner's earliest operas and unrealized opera projects (some of these surprisingly little represented in the vast Wagner literature). Written in a straightforward, nontechnical style free of professional jargon, it provides individual chapters covering the entire Wagner canon, as well as the noncanonic early works, all related here in interesting ways to the composer's literary and intellectual environment. -- Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University A literary scholar of considerable accomplishment, Borchmeyer ... offers English readers the chance to share in his erudition on Wagner and his place in German culture of the past century and a half. -- "Choice"

About the Author

Dieter Borchmeyer is Professor of German Literature and Theater at the University of Heidelberg. Since 1980 he has been program annotator for the Bayreuth Festival. His books include "Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre" (1991) and "Goethe: Der Zeitburger" (1999).

Reviews

"Borchmeyer ... program annotator for the Bayreuth Festival where Wagner's music dramas are famously showcased each year, considers the whole range of those works--characters, themes, literary sources, political and ideological contexts--in a straightforward yet exhaustively researched and well documented manner."--Symphony "Dieter Borchmeyer provides unique insights into the Wagnerian outlook and purpose, insights not likely encountered elsewhere."--Clifford D. Alper, Opera Journal