Overview

While the music of Richard Wagner has long served as a touchstone for music-theoretical and analytical models both old and new, music analysts have often been intimidated by the complexity of his works, their multi-layeredness, and their sheer unwieldiness. This volume brings together ten contributions from an international roster of leading Wagner scholars of our time, all of which engage in some way with analytical or theoretical questions posed by Wagner's music. Addressing the operas and music dramas from Die Feen through Parsifal, they combine analytical methods including form-functional theory, Neo-Riemannian theory, Leitmotiv analysis, and history of theory with approaches to dramaturgy, hermeneutics, reception history, and discursive analysis of sexuality and ideology. Collectively, they capture the breadth of analytical studies of Wagner in contemporary scholarship and expand the reach of the field by challenging it to break new interpretative and methodological ground.

Full Product Details

Author:   Steven Vande Moortele (University of Toronto)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108837064

ISBN 10:   1108837069
Pages:   259
Publication Date:   24 April 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of figures; List of tables; List of music examples; List of contributors; Introduction: analyzing Wagner Steven Vande Moortele: Part I Orientations: 1. 'Wo sind wir?': Tristan Disorientations Arnold Whittall; 2. Bottoming for Wagner: listening, analysis and (gay-male) subjectivity Matthew Bribitzer-Stull; Part II. Form, Drama and Convention: 3. Wagner and the uses of convention? La solita forma from Die Feen through Lohengrin William M. Marvin; 4. Elsa, Ortrud, the grail and the forbidden question: formal functions and rotational form in Lohengrin Graham Hunt; 5. Scena, form and drama in act 1 of Die Walküre Steven Vande Moortele; Part III. Time, Texture and Tonality: 6. Time, sound and regression in Tristan und Isolde Tobias Janz; 7. Waltraute's plaint: Riemannian tonal function and dramatic narrative J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Oliver Chandler; 8. Wagner's Late Counterpoint Ariane Jeßulat; Part IV. Reception: 9. Silence and Gesture in Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Wagner's Parsifal Anna Stoll Knecht; 10. Wagner's early analysts Alexander Rehding; Bibliography; Index.

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Author Information

Steven Vande Moortele is Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. His books include Robert Schumann: Szenen aus Goethes Faust (2020), The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (2017), Two-Dimensional Sonata Form (2009), and (as co-editor) Formal Functions in Perspective (2015).

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