Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama PDF

Author: Richard Wagner

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780803297654

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With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. ø In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. ø This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

Rabelais's Carnival

Rabelais's Carnival PDF

Author: Samuel Kinser

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0520311132

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How is it possible, after four centuries, that a major episode in Rabelais's novels remains systematically misread? The episode, which playfully and grotesquely treats the relation of Carnival to Lent, occurs in Rabelais's Fourth Book, his last and most artfully crafted novel. Samuel Kinser argues that the text has been distorted because critics have not attended to the episode's performative as well as literary contexts, overlooking the innovative use Rabelais made in his work of his immediate world. In this original interpretation of the Fourth Book, Kinser evokes the gestures, games, and visual, oral, bodily semantics of Carnival and Lent as they were performed in Rabelais's day. He also underscores the importance to Rabelais of the invention of printing, an innovation which revolutionized the relationships of author and reader. Understanding this and fearing it, Rabelais adopted an extraordinary set of disguises as an author, disguises which in their bewildering interplay constitute the truest sense of his carnival. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.