(Ebook) The New Grove guide to Wagner and His Operas (New Grove Composers) by Barry Millington ISBN 9780195305883, 9780195311280, 9781429416290, 0195305884, 0195311280, 1429416297

(Ebook) The New Grove guide to Wagner and His Operas (New Grove Composers) by Barry Millington ISBN 9780195305883, 9780195311280, 9781429416290, 0195305884, 0195311280, 1429416297

The rich, multi-textured operas of Wagner have always provided fertile ground for commentators from a wide variety of disciplines. Aspects of the text have been examined by philosophers, philologists, historians, political analysts, and many others, affording varying degrees of illumination. Only in the last few decades have the analytical tools of musicology been sharpened on the whetstone of Wagner’s music dramas, contextualizing them with relation to 19th-century German thought, examining their large-scale tonal structure and motivic organization, and bringing to bear the insights of narrative, feminist, and other critiques in a broad range of hermeneutical enquiry.

Some of the most significant work is acknowledged in the ‘Suggested Further Reading’ section of this book. The publication originally took the form of entries on Wagner, his operas and related subjects, along with other material, all culled from the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992).

For this new edition I have completely overhauled the material, radically revising and updating several sections in the process. The entries on Wagner’s life and works remain substantially the same, but I have compiled a new chronology, glossary, bibliography, and discography. An updated entry on the staging of Wagner’s works (also from Opera Grove) has been incorporated, as has one on Wagner’s orchestration (from the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, revised edition, 2001). All the above material, along with the entry on ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, is my own. I have brought the late Geoffrey Skelton’s excellent ‘Bayreuth’ article up to date  and am delighted to include once again Arnold Whittall’s magisterial entry on ‘Leitmotif ’, as deployed by both Wagner and later composers.