“[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner’s compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. A landmark study of one of music’s most important figures “People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years . . . will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.” —Tablet “Geck describes a Wagner who is grounded, focused and even cautious, a savvy realist and ironist rather than a flamboyant, flailing ideologue . . . Suffused with his readings of contemporary productions of the operas, Geck’s musical analyses are succinct and superb” —New York Times “As an editor of Wagner’s Complete Works, Geck brings a deep familiarity with the composer to his task.” —Weekly Standard “A thoroughly approachable yet consistently provocative study.” —Thomas S. Grey, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner

Excerpt from The Life of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1 This volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner's life, with his entry, as composer of two successful operas, upon a so-called practical career at one of the principal German theatres. How he fared there, how he turned his back on Dresden and all office-bearing, and how he planned and actually commenced his great artistic reformation, will form the subject of Volume II. (to appear, as I hope, in Volume III. Will follow his changing fortunes, through the last two-thirds of his exile, down to his rescue by King Ludwig. This, I trust, will be ready in 1902; whilst, Subject to Herr Glasenapp's state of forwardness, I expect to complete the Life by a fourth volume in 1903. As I fancy I heard the bell ring, Ladies and Gentlemen, I withdraw to let the curtain rise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"Ronald Taylor has set out to provide in a single volume a substantial all-round life-and-work to place alongside the many specialist and partial studies of Wagner. He essays to cover all main aspects of Wagner within a coherent biographical framework, basing his account on primary sources such as Wagner's autobiographical writings and letters, the reminiscences of Liszt, Nietzsche and other friends and associates, and the complete diary of Cosima, first published in 1977. The restless existence that Wagner led from his schooldays to the end of his life, his revolutionary activity, his love affairs, his pursuit of luxury and his perpetual debts, his extraordinary self-centredness and manipulation of others, the famous men and women around him, the heaven-sent patronage of the lonely and eccentric arch-romantic King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the building of his personal temple, the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth--this is the stuff of absorbing biography. And there can be scarcely any other composer whose life was so bound up with the events of his time, and so compellingly illustrative of them, as Wagner's. The 1830 Revolution in France and the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, the heady radical and hedonistic notions of the Young German movement, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the urge towards German political unification--these played crucial parts in moulding his mind. Ronald Taylor not only discusses Wagner's compositions as works of art, but shows how each of them, from Die Feen to Parsifal, is grounded in its creator's intellectual and spiritual development. He considers, for example, the allegorical significance of The Ring in terms of Wagner's views on society and human relationships, the indelible mark left by the experience of being spurned by the bourgeois taste of 1830s Paris, and demonstrates how a work which contains such nationalistic elements can at the same time be one of the overwhelming achievements in European culture. The elaborate structure of ideas and theories that surrounds Wagner's music is further revealed by succinct accounts of his political, social, and musical thinking at all periods of his career as expressed in his key writings on culture and society, the role of the artist in the community, the musical scene in nineteenth-century Europe, and many other subjects. In a postscript the main lines of the controversies--musical, philosophical and psychological--that have raged over Wagner from his lifetime onwards are shown in a balanced selection of statements by prominent, and diverse, figures such as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Debussy, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, Bruno Walter, Adorno and Boulez." --Jacket.