Richard Wagner and His World by Grey Thomas S

Author:Grey, Thomas S. [Grey, Thomas S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3178-4
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. Wagner to Samuel Lehrs, 7 April 1843, Dresden, in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York and London, 1988), 107-8.

2. For more information on the social and economic unrest as well as the political conditions that prepared the ground for widespread revolution in 1848, see David Blackbourn’s detailed history of the topic, The Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 1998), 138-74.

3. Newman pursued a “common sense” approach rather than a “judicial enquiry” into the available details to weigh the evidence of Wagner’s active involvement in the Dresden uprisings of May 1849. He summarizes that “far from his being a mere curious spectator of events, [Wagner] was as active a participator in [the Dresden uprisings] as most.” See Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner: 1848-1860 (London, 1937), 2:24-102, here 87.

4. Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1895; repr. 1993), 1:43.

5. Wagner to Adolf Stahr, 31 May 1851, in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe (henceforth SB) (Leipzig, 1967-2000; Wiesbaden, 1999-), 4:57-58.

6. In Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1893; repr. 1995), 2:211.

7. A Communication to My Friends, in Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1:284.

8. “in der absoluten gedankenlosigkeit,” Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, 27 July 1850, Zürich, in SB, 3:363.

9. Raff, Die Wagnerfrage (Braunschweig, 1854), 5-6 (my translation).

10. Slavoj Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York, 2006), 231.

11. Quoted in August Hitzschold, “Zur Physiologie des musicalischen Dramas,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 23 (3 December 1853): 177 (my translation).

12. Quoted in Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1991), 70.

13. His stated motivation was to “establish firm roots for these masterpieces in German soil,” in La Mara, ed., Franz Liszt’s Briefe, (Leipzig, 1893), 3:136.

14. Liszt’s words from his letter of 26 February 1849; Wagner’s from 1 March 1849. See Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, trans. Francis Hueffer (New York, 1897; repr. 2005), 18-21.

15. Liszt first told Wagner of his plan for the two transcriptions on 26 February 1849, to which Wagner responded on 1 March: “I feel highly flattered by your proposal.” See Hueffer, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, 21. The warrant for Wagner’s arrest (Steckbrief) was printed in the Dresden Anzeiger on 19 May 1849, one day before the scheduled performance of Tannhäuser.

16. The article “Le Tannhaeuser” appeared in the feuilleton section of the Journal des Débats on 18 May 1849, which had a sizable circulation of 10,600 in 1849. The same article appeared again two days later in La Musique. Gazette de la France Musicale. This double publication is unusual and may have been an attempt to hold Meyerbeer’s continued ascendency in check; that is, to counter the enormous success ofLe prophète, which had premiered in Paris on 16 April of that year. The Tannhäuser essay subsequently appeared with musical examples in Brockhaus’s pamphlet

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