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Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner's Music-Dramas
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Mary A. Cicora
ISBN: 0-313-30539-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-30539-9
232 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 1/30/2000
List Price: $131.95 (UK Sterling Price: £91.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description: Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander 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 Holl^Dander 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
About the Author: MARY A. CICORA is the author of Wagner's Ring and German Drama: Comparative Studies in Mythology and History in Drama (Greenwood, 1999) and Mythology as Metaphor: Romantic Irony, Critical Theory, and Wagner's Ring (Greenwood, 1998).
LCC Class: 782
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