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Alexander H. Shapiro provides a fresh look at the influences on Wagner's
Götterdämmerung, and critically re-evaluates the composer's intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters and diary entries. The book challenges conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1: Siegfried as historical anomaly
Chapter 2: Brünnhilde and the tragedy of jealousy
Chapter 3: Brünnhilde’s immolation: dramatizing species consciousness
Chapter 4: Brünnhilde’s mercy
Chapter 5: Renunciation on the Rhine?
Chapter 6: Myth versus history
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Alexander H. Shapiro is a practicing lawyer and independent scholar based in New York, U.S. His published works include “McEwan and Forster: The Perfect Wagnerites” in The Wagner Journal (2011), and “‘Drama of an Infinitely Superior Nature’: Handel’s Early English Oratorios and the Religious Sublime” in Music & Letters (1993).
Summary
Alexander H. Shapiro provides a fresh look at the influences on Wagner's Götterdämmerung, and critically re-evaluates the composer’s intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters and diary entries. The book challenges conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work’s meaning.
Additional text
“A pleasing feature of this book is the clear and comprehensible discussion of the music of Gotterdammerung.”...the book “deserves to be widely read with close critical attention”...“it is a significant contribution to the ongoing debate that will always swirl around this most controversial of artworks.”
Roger Allen, The Wager Journal
