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Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner's Music-Dramas
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Mary A. Cicora
Book Code: GM0539
ISBN: 0-313-30539-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-30539-9
232 pages
Greenwood Press
Publication: 1/30/2000
List Price: $131.95 (UK Sterling Price: £75.00)
Availability: Out of stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance
Series Number: 57
Reviews:
  • Cicora's German translations are brilliant.
    —Choice
  • Endorsement From Paul Robinson
    Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University:     In Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions, Mary Cicora extends to Wagner's non-Ring operas the incisive critical method with which she has already so suggestively illuminated the tetralogy in Mythology as Metaphor. She ingeniously reveals Wagner's self reflective dramatic procedures.
Description: Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Holländer to Parsifal with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how Wagner's dramas use their legendary or mythological raw material in a specifically 19th-century Romantic way to create meaning. It is argued that by means of Romantic irony, internal self-reflection or self-consciousness, each work deconstructs its own mythological or legendary nature. Musicologists with an interest in Wagner's works, and literary scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary applications of literary-critical theory, will appreciate this unique application of literary, theoretical, and critical concepts to the understanding of his music-dramas. This work will also appeal to scholars of German literature and of German cultural history. It discusses Wagner's single dramas from Holländer to Parsifal.
Table of Contents:
  • Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner's Music-Dramas by Mary A. Cicora
  • Preface
  • Introduction: Romantic Irony, Secondhand Mythology, and Operatic Deconstruction
  • Der Fliegende Holländer, or, The Crisis of Romantic Intertextuality
  • Tannhäuser at the Song Contest? Mythical-Historical Synthesis as Musical-Dramatic Catastrophe at the Wartburg
  • Elsa's Dream, Ortrud's Magic, the Forbidden Question, and Aesthetic Self-Reflection in Lohengrin
  • "The potion, I brewed it myself!" Love, Death, and Deconstruction in Tristan und Isolde
  • Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: The Song Contest Revisited, or, Hermeneutics Set to Music
  • Parsifal: Metaphor Redeemed
  • Conclusions: Wagner and Derrida
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 99-31628
LCC Class: ML410
Dewey Class: 782
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