Parsifal Unveiled

Author: Samael Aun Weor
Publisher: Glorian Publishing
ISBN: 1934206911
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
"When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain." - Richard Wagner Parsifal, the epic, final opera by Richard Wagner, stunned audiences and set the stage for the decline of modern civilization. For more than one hundred years, Parsifal has been one of the most controversial dramatic works in the world, not only moving the world's top composers and writers to tears and inspiring generations of creative geniuses, but it was also admired by Adolf Hitler. Wagner's retelling of the myth of the Holy Grail and the knights who protect it showed the secret path to liberation from suffering, but no one understood it. Wagner himself never explained Parsifal, and in his wake thousands of writers, critics, and artists have attempted to penetrate its mysteries yet have failed, since they were not initiated into the secret tradition it came from. Finally, in this book by Samael Aun Weor, the meaning of Parsifal is fully revealed, and the genius and spiritual accomplishments of Richard Wagner are made radiantly clear. "The year 1914 will always be a memorable date among the remarkable dates of this humanity, because of the explosion of the First World War and the simultaneous debut of Parsifal in all the civilized world." - Samael Aun Weor Features: • A complete exposure of the spiritual archetypes hidden in Parsifal, with examples from other religions and mythologies • Detailed instructions for sexual transmutation, including postures and mantras • Includes the complete libretto of Parsifal

Wagner's Parsifal

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Allen Lane
ISBN: 9780241419694
Category : Redemption
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
This short but penetrating book, shows us how Wagner achieves this profound work, explaining the story, its musical ideas, and their coming together into a sublime whole which gives us the musical equivalent of forgiveness and closure

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal

Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571132376
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
New essays demonstrating and exploring the abiding fascination of Wagner's controversial work.

Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation

Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195366921
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
This study explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career, and offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of 'Parsifal' that illuminates the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar sketches and manuscript sources held at Bayreuth, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works.

Wagner's Parsifal

Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190623543
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 660

Book Description
William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the composer as his "last card," explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career. This book offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The compositional genesis is traced through many unfamiliar manuscript sources, revealing unsuspected models and veiled connections to Wagner's earlier works. Fresh analytic perspectives are revealed, casting the dramatic meaning of Parsifal in a new light. Much debated aspects of the work, such as Kundry's death at the conclusion, are discussed in the context of its stage history. Path-breaking as well is Kinderman's analysis of the religious and ideological context of Parsifal. During the half-century after the composer's death, the Wagner family and the so-called Bayreuth circle sought to exploit Wagner's work for political purposes, thereby promoting racial nationalism and anti-Semitism. Hitherto unnoticed connections between Hitler and Wagner's legacy at Bayreuth are explored here, while differences between the composer's politics as an 1849 revolutionary and the later response of his family to National Socialism are weighed in a nuanced account. Kinderman combines new historical research, sensitive aesthetic criticism, and probing philosophical reflection in this most intensive examination of Wagner's culminating music drama.

Wagner's Parsifal

Author: Richard H. Bell
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1620328852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Parsifal, Wagner's final opera, is considered by many to be one of the greatest religious musical works ever composed; but it is also one of the most difficult to understand and many have questioned whether it can be considered a "Christian" work at all. Added to this is the furious debate that has surrounded the composer as an anti-Semite, racist, and inspiration for Hitler. Richard Bell addresses such issues and argues that despite any personal failings Wagner makes a fundamental theological contribution through his many writings and ultimately in Parsifal which, he argues, preaches Christ crucified in a way that can never be captured by words alone. He argues that Wagner offers a vision of the divine and a "theology of Good Friday" that can both function as profound therapy and address current theological controversies.

Richard Wagner: Parsifal

Author: Lucy Beckett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521296625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
A comprehensive account of Wagner's last, and strangest opera.

Hans Jürgen Syberberg and His Film of Wagner's Parsifal

Author: Solveig Olsen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Book Description
While much has been published abroad about the German filmmaker and author Hans J rgen Syberberg, this is the first English monograph about him. Author Solveig Olsen presents a biographical overview of the controversial artist and his body of work, and offers an in-depth analysis of Syberberg's film of Richard Wagner's Parsifal and his later works. Syberberg gained international fame as a filmmaker with the films of his "German Cycle," which included Our Hitler, a study of the Hitler potential in human nature. Parsifal of 1982 concluded the German Cycle. Preserving Wagner's libretto and score, the film uses the visual component to imbue the work with a surprising interpretation. In addition to the medieval story about the Grail seeker, the director draws on several other frames of reference, such as the theories of Freud and Jung, alchemy, and Syberberg's main aesthetic views and philosophy that have gone unrecognized until now. Olsen explores the role of Parsifal as Wagner's artistic and philosophical testament, and the implications of Syberberg's reinterpretation.

After Wagner

Author: Mark Berry
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843839687
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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.

Wagnerism

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429944544
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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.