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Zusatztext The literature on Wagner is, unsurprisingly, enormous. But Hilda Meldrum Brown's new book will be one that's extremely useful. For not only does it give survey the antecedents to ideas of a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total art-work) before Wagner, but it delineates Wagner's own creative approach and surveys some of the principal ways in which his music-dramas have been interpreted. As such it should be quite useful, a book to which many different people - conductors, stage-directors, singers and future audiences - can refer for both information and stimulus. Informationen zum Autor Professor Hilda Meldrum Brown, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Oxford, is internationally known for her work on Heinrich von Kleist. She has published widely on German literary topics from Goethe to Christa Wolf. Her research has for some years had a strong interdisciplinary bias and involves studying connections between literature, drama, music, the visual arts, especially in the field of German Romanticism and Richard Wagner. Her new book on the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner combines a number of these areas of research and has been supported by The Leverhulme Trust (Emeritus Research Fellowship) and a Hawthornden Fellowship at The International Retreat for Writers. Klappentext This study examines the nature of the interdisciplinary procedures implicit in 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and suggests a new critical methodology to illuminate the processes and techniques which Wagner used as a bridge between dramatic text and music, thus creating a unique fusion of the major elements that constitute the 'total work of art'. Zusammenfassung This study examines the nature of the interdisciplinary procedures implicit in 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and suggests a new critical methodology to illuminate the processes and techniques which Wagner used as a bridge between dramatic text and music, thus creating a unique fusion of the major elements that constitute the 'total work of art'. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: The Nature of the Quest Part I Approaches to the Gesamtkunstwerk before Wagner 1: The Landscape Garden 2: Romantic Drama and the Visual Arts 3: Goethe's Faust: Gesamtkunstwerk or Universaltheater? Part II Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk: Moment and Motiv 4: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Theoretical Approaches 5: Moment and Motiv: Critical Approaches to the Ring Cycle 6: Analysis of the Erda Scenes Part III Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and Performance of the Ring 7: Adolphe Appia: A Watershed in the Evolution of the Gesamtkunstwerk 8: Wieland Wagner: The Appia Heritage and the Gesamtkunstwerk 9: The Centenary Ring: Deconstruction and the Gesamtkunstwerk Conclusion Appendix - The genesis of Goethe's Faust ...
