Overview

This volume uses the historic staging and legacy of the 1903 production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, directed and conducted by Gustav Mahler, to explore a wide range of interdisciplinary issues in the history of the opera, performance, and the reception and interpretation of Wagner's work. The production marked a turning point in twentieth-century opera, as Mahler and the designer Alfred Roller broke with nineteenth-century naturalistic traditions and used new technologies to transform the aural and visual experience of opera. With chapters contributed by scholars from musicology, art history, theatre studies, and other disciplines, this book provides a uniquely multifaceted perspective on Wagner's opera in the historical setting of the early twentieth century. Chapters in the first part address specific aspects of the 1903 production, including staging, lighting, and performance practice, while the second part sets the production in wider political, artistic, and literary context. Together, they show how the visual and musical elements of the staging interacted to express new artistic philosophies. Enriching our understanding of Wagner, stage history, and the cultural ferment emerging from fin-de-siècle Vienna, this book will be of interest to researchers of music, theatre, and performance studies, and art and cultural history.

Full Product Details

Author:   Anna Stoll Knecht ,  Anastasia Belina
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9780367773267

ISBN 10:   0367773260
Pages:   292
Publication Date:   15 June 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Foreword Part I: The Mahler-Roller 1903 Tristan production 1 21 February 1903: Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller stage Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera, 2 'Wie, hör ich das Licht?': Music and Light in Tristan und Isolde and the Mahler-Roller Production, 3 Electric designs: The Working Relationship Between Adolphe Appia and Mariano Fortuny, 4 Tristan und Isolde staged by Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller (1903) at the Vienna Court Opera with a revival by Wilhelm Furtwängler (1943), 5 Lighting the Way from Vienna to Bayreuth: Tristan und Isolde, 1903-1962, 6 Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, the Dark Isolde, 7 Early Recordings as a Window onto Mahler's 1903 Tristan, 8 Mahler Conducting Tristan; Orchestral Re-Touching Part II: Wagner in Vienna: Literary, Historical, Political, and Artistic Contexts of Tristan 1903 9 The way out? Recalling Vienna's 1903 Tristan, 10 The Darker Side of Vienna – Hitler and the Nationalist Wagnerian Milieu, 11 Wagner and Wagnerism in fin-de-siècle Vienna: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), 12 Alfred Roller's Secessionist Tristan and the birth of 'affect', 13 Koloman Moser, Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk in the Viennese Secession Appendix

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Author Information

Anna Stoll Knecht is Assistant Professor at the University of Fribourg, leading a five-year Starting Grant project on music at the fairground (Swiss National Science Foundation). She is the author of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (OUP 2019) and of several articles and essays on Mahler, Wagner, and physical comedy. Anastasia Belina is a musicologist, writer, and artist manager based in Sweden. Her publications (as author, editor, and co-editor) include Die tägliche Mühe ein Mensch zu sein (2013), Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (2013), The Business of Opera (Ashgate 2015), Cambridge Companion to Operetta (2019), and Music History and Cosmopolitanism (2019).

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