Wagner : a biography

"Why produce another biography of Wagner? There are a number of answers to this question. In the first place, the archives are being opened and new documents are appearing all the time. Dr von Westernhagen, a scholar who has devoted his life to Wagner, has produced the only general biography on this scale which is truly up-to-date in making use of this fresh archive material. In the second place, there is a need for a biography which focuses on Wagner's artistic achievements. In recent years Wagner has become a 'problematic' figure, largely because recent biographies have concentrated on his anti-Semitism, his egoism and his sexual life, and have presented the picture of an implausible scoundrel who by chance also wrote some music dramas. Westernhagen's approach is much more positive: his starting point is the importance and the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry. This is therefore a positive biography, which combines an appropriate largeness of scale with factual accuracy and familiarity with the source documents. Dr von Westernhagen quotes extensively from letters and diaries to throw light, for example, on Wagner's relationship with Cosima, his idea of emigrating to America, his estrangement from Nietzsche (and the way this was later wilfully misrepresented by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth), and the later years as they are reflected in the so-called Brown Book, a notebook for the years 1865-82 which Wagner kept for Cosima and which was first published only in 1975. The author has also consulted the composition exercises which Wagner wrote in his teens for his teacher Theodor Weinlig, and the contents of the composer's Dresden library help to establish what were the early intellectual influences upon him. This biography concentrates on the nature of Wagner's art, its development, its achievement: the way, for instance, that Wagner was able to keep many projects in mind simultaneously, all of them dovetailing into one another with an inexorable logic. Particularly useful features of this study are the appendices which include a chronological summary of Wagner's life, a complete list of his musical and literary compositions and an up-to-date bibliography. This is a definitive biography which will stand beside Newman's classic work as an indispensable reference book for all future studies of Wagner, and a judicious account for those approaching this fascinating life story for the first time." --Dust jacket.… (more)