Mary A. Cicora Boeken

Wagner's Ring , an important phenomenon of the German drama tradition, is situated and examined alongside other major works of the canon. Wagner defines tragedy as a mythological drama. The theoretical foundation of the Ring is a complex dialectic of history and myth. By contrasting the Ring with the dramas of Schiller, Hebbel, Hofmannsthal, and Brecht different facets of Wagner's work are uniquely highlighted beyond theoretical generalizations or broad overviews. This series of comparisons offers fresh insight into the interrelationships of the Ring with the previous German drama tradition, and also investigates its influence on twentieth-century drama and opera.Scholars of German literature and culture will appreciate this innovative interpretation and study of the Ring . New ideas proposed include the suggestions that Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy might have served as a covert source for the Ring and that Ariadne auf Naxos and Mahagonny represent parodies of the Ring . The theory underlying the Ring will attract musicologists and interdisciplinary literary scholars interested in the interrelationship between words and music and literature and opera.

Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how Wagner's dramas use their legendary or mythological raw material in a specifically 19th-century Romantic way to create meaning. It is argued that by means of Romantic irony, internal self-reflection or self-consciousness, each work deconstructs its own mythological or legendary nature.Musicologists with an interest in Wagner's works, and literary scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary applications of literary-critical theory, will appreciate this unique application of literary, theoretical, and critical concepts to the understanding of his music-dramas. This work will also appeal to scholars of German literature and of German cultural history. It discusses Wagner's single dramas from Holl^Dander to Parsifal .

This literary and critical approach to Wagner's Ring provides an original interpretation of the Ring tetralogy and challenges the standard political analyses of the work. The Ring is examined in the tradition of the Romantic drama as a reworking of Greek tragedy as theoretically expressed in the second part of Oper und Drama . In the Ring , using myth as a metaphor for history presents a paradoxical world. The innertextual reflection that Wotan performs in his monologue causes the Ring to self-destruct from within. He actually dismantles or deconstructs the text of the Ring . The doom of the gods happens because the Ring has undermined, unworked, and dismantled its system of signification.Studies of Wagner's theoretical writings and music-dramas have not emphasized aspects of his works within the tradition of German drama and aesthetic theory. This discussion of Wagner's revision of Greek tragedy in Oper und Drama , supplemented by an original interpretation of the Ring operas, places Wagner's writings within these realms. As a fresh interpretation of the Ring tetralogy, this valuable analysis will appeal to Wagner scholars and musicologists interested in Wagner's operas as well as to German cultural history and literary scholars.

The book places Wagner's Tannhäuser within the German literary tradition. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to discussions of the medieval sources and the analogous works by Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine. These studies, which converge on Wagner's opera, not only highlight various aspects or facets of Wagner's Tannhäuser , but at the same time show the transmission of the Tannhäuser and song contest legends into the nineteenth century and how Wagner combined them.