...Emily Allegra Dreyfus What does postwar Hollywood cinema have to say about the commodification of musical listening and the effects of new technologies from the long-playing record to the loudspeaker on the cultural reception of Wagner? The act of recognizing excerpts from Tristan und Isolde...

.... Mahler’s model here was almost surely the contralto role of Erda—a guide who loses her own way—in Wagner’s Ring cycle. But Mahler changes the contralto’s gender, or, more exactly, makes the contralto guide a hybrid being who belongs to no gender, much like the angels in Rainer Maria Rilke’s near...

...Mark Everist The French reception of Wagner is often based on the two pillars of the 1861 Tannhäuser production and that of Lohengrin in 1891. Sufficient is now known about the composer's earliest attempt to engage with Parisian music drama around 1840 to be able to understand his work on Das...

...Martin Knust Wagner's music, aesthetics, and personality were influenced profoundly by the declamation and recitation techniques of his time. “Declamation” as an optic-acoustic phenomenon embraces in this context both the actor's artificial speech and physical delivery. The theatrical declamation...

...Marc Brooks The obvious debt that Strauss's operas owe to Wagner often led early critics to view their conspicuous lack of spiritual depth as an unintentional failure. Recent commentators such as Charles Youmans, Leon Botstein, and Michael Walter have rightly characterized this feature...

...William Gibbons The 1861 productions of Wagner's Tannhäuser and Gluck's Alceste at the Paris Opéra led to a major turning point in reception of both composers in France. After Tannhäuser 's spectacular failure in March of that year, the management of the Opéra decided to mount Alceste , a move...

...Katherine Kolb This article analyzes the writings of Berlioz on Wagner and, to a lesser extent, of Wagner on Berlioz, emphasizing the covert innuendoes of their verbal sparring during the period surrounding the Tannhäuser debacle at the Paris Opéra (1860) and Berlioz's tribulations with Les Troyens...

...Matt Baileyshea This article examines the degree to which characters in Wagner's Ring might be heard to control the orchestra for specific rhetorical purposes. Using Edward Cone's work as a starting point, I adopt a "fully diegetic" perspective in which music is understood as a physical presence...