"Saint Beethoven . . . . He was clad in somewhat untidy houseclothes, with a red woolen scarf wrapped round his waist; long, bushy grey hair hung in disorder from his head, and his gloomy, forbidding expression by no means tended to reassure. . . ." When Wagner published the first collection of his writings he was pleased to admit how well he wrote, even when young. Historians and musicians ever since have agreed that some of his most important and revelatory works were written when he was first establishing his reputation in Paris and Dresden. Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays...

"One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion." With these words Richard Wagner began "Religion and Art" (1880), one of his most passionate essays. That passion made Wagner himself a central icon in the growing cult of art.

Wagner felt that he lived in an age of spiritual crisis. "It can but rouse our apprehension, to see the progress of the art-of-war departing from the springs of moral force, and turning more and more to the mechanical," he wrote. In response to the frightening progress of dynamite and steel, Wagner...

With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft.In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as...

A master of mystery and paradox, Wagner spent his life composing himself while composing music. Written between 1864 and 1878, the essays in Art and Politics converge upon Wagner's desire to define and reform German culture. He was deeply annoyed that Germany seemed to satisfy itself with cheap theater, vulgar songs, and clumsy imitations of French art. In "What Is German?" he declared that German culture must rise above the common ruck. Citing "Music's wonderman" Johann Sebastian Bach as his precursor, Wagner fought to persuade his readers that German culture had a historic destiny, and that...

Near the end of his life, Richard Wagner supervised the publication of his collected writings, providing an extensive view of his thoughts about art and politics from his youth to his final period of triumph. After his death, there was still more to be told: his admirers discovered a large number of writings he had forgotten, misplaced, never published, or had chosen to omit from his collected works. This volume, the last of eight volumes now reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, collects the most illuminating of those works. The title work, "Jesus of Nazareth," was written in 1848...

A reprint of the first English paperback edition of Richard Wagner's autobiography.

Francis Hueffer (1845 89) was born and studied music in Germany, but moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited the series 'The Great Musicians' for Novello and Co., was music critic of The Times, wrote libretti for some now-forgotten operas, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. As well as writing Wagner in his own 'Great Musicians' series (1881), and Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (1874), he translated the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. This fascinating two-volume selection, published in 1888, covers...

Francis Hueffer (1845 89) was born and studied music in Germany, but moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited the series 'The Great Musicians' for Novello and Co., was music critic of The Times, wrote libretti for some now-forgotten operas, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. As well as writing Wagner in his own 'Great Musicians' series (1881), and Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (1874), he translated the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. This fascinating two-volume selection, published in 1888, covers...

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