Modernism After Wagner


Book Description

This is a critical history of Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its impact on European modernism. Koss explores the legacy of Wagner's concept, laying out its genealogy and the political, aesthetic, and cultural context from which it emerged.




The Routledge Introduction to American Modernism


Book Description

The modernist period was crucial for American literature as it gave writers the chance to be truly innovative and create their own distinct identity. Starting slightly earlier than many guides to modernism this lucid and comprehensive guide introduces the reader to the essential history of the period including technology, religion, economy, class, gender and immigration. These contexts are woven of into discussions of many significant authors and texts from the period. Wagner-Martin brings her years of writing about American modernism to explicate poetry and drama as well as fiction and life-writing. Among the authors emphasized are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck and countless others. A clear and engaging introduction to an exciting period of literature, this is the ultimate guide for those seeking an overview of American Modernism.




After Wagner


Book Description

This book is both a telling of operatic histories 'after' Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The 'after' of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write 'after' himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the stheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss's Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, reveals a more 'political' work than either first acquaintance or the composer's 'intention' might suggest. Then come three composers from subsequent generations: Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, and Hans Werner Henze. Geographical context is extended to take in Wagner's Italian successors; the problem of political emancipation in and through music drama takes another turn here, confronting challenges and opportunities in more avowedly 'politically engaged' art. A final section explores the world of staging opera, of so-called Regietheater, as initiated by Wagner himself. Stefan Herheim's celebrated Bayreuth production of Parsifal, and various performances of Lohengrin are discussed, before looking back to Mozart (Don Giovanni) and forward to Alban Berg's Lulu and Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore. Throughout, the book invites us to consider how we might perceive the sthetic and political integrity of the operatic work 'after Wagner'. After Wagner will be invaluable to anyone interested in twentieth-century music drama and its intersection with politics and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in Richard Wagner's cultural impact on succeeding generations of composers. MARK BERRY is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.




Three Artists (three Women)


Book Description

Art historian Wagner looks at the imagery and careers of three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.--From publisher description.




Modern Architecture


Book Description

In 1896, Otto Wagner's "Modern Architecture" shocked the European architectural community with its impassioned plea for an end to eclecticism and for a "modern" style suited to contemporary needs and ideals, utilizing the nascent constructional technologies and materials. Through the combined forces of his polemical, pedagogical, and professional efforts, this determined, newly appointed professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts emerged in the late 1890s - along with such contemporaries as Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Louis Sullivan in Chicago - as one of the leaders of the revolution soon to be identified as the "Modern Movement." Wagner's historic manifesto is now presented in a new English translation - the first in almost ninety years - based on the expanded 1902 text and noting emendations made to the 1896, 1898, and 1914 editions. In his introduction, Dr. Harry Mallgrave examines Wagner's tract against the backdrop of nineteenth-century theory, critically exploring the affinities of Wagner's revolutionary élan with the German eclectic debate of the 1840s, the materialistic tendencies of the 1870s and 1880s, and the emerging cultural ideology of modernity. Modern Architecture is one of those rare works in the literature of architecture that not only proclaimed the dawning of a new era, but also perspicaciously and cogently shaped the issues and the course of its development; it defined less the personal aspirations of one individual and more the collective hopes and dreams of a generation facing the sanguine promise of a new century




The Total Work of Art in European Modernism


Book Description

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.




Wagnerism


Book Description

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist 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. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.




Between Romanticism and Modernism


Book Description

Carl Dahlhaus here treats Nietzsche's youthful analysis of the contradictions in Wagner's doctrine (and, more generally, in romantic musical aesthetics); the question of periodicization in romantic and neo-romantic music; the underlying kinship between Brahms's and Wagner's responses to the central musical problems of their time; and the true significance of musical nationalism. Included in this volume is Walter Kauffman's translation of the previously unpublished fragment, "On Music and Words," by the young Nietzsche.




The Cambridge History of Modernism


Book Description

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.




The Rest Is Noise


Book Description

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.