Rounding Wagner's Mountain
Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera

Bryan Gilliam explores the composer's response to Wagner in his discussion of Strauss' stage works and their historical contexts.

Bryan Gilliam (Author)

9781108464789, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2018

356 pages, 17 b/w illus. 3 tables 135 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.64 kg

'… [a] fine piece of work … beautifully written, subtle, authoritative and perceptive … elegant and important … [This] book is refreshingly literate, learned, economical and unerringly incisive.' Leon Botstein, President, Bard College

Richard Strauss' fifteen operas, which span the years 1893 to 1941, make up the largest German operatic legacy since Wagner's operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss's works were based on texts by Europe's finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the post-war years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In the first book to discuss all Strauss's operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer's legacy unique. Addressing Wagner's cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss's compositions.

Preface
Introduction
A musical-analytical postscript
1. Guntram and the crisis of German musical metaphysics
2. Élan vital: Feuersnot, Salome, and radical individualism
3. The way to the social: Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier
4. Intermezzo: Ariadne and her transformations
5. The marriage operas: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and Die ägyptische Helena
6. Composing without Hofmannsthal: Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau
7. The politics of peace: Friedenstag and Daphne
8. Opera in time of war: Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio.

Subject Areas: Musical scores, lyrics & libretti [AVQ], Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Theory of music & musicology [AVA], Music [AV]