Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-xq9c7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-09T18:41:31.875Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - “Wagnerism”: responses to Wagner in music and the arts

from PART IV - After Wagner: influence and interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

Thomas S. Grey
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

Summary

Wagner's impact on Western culture can hardly be overestimated. When Howard Shore describes his use of leitmotifs in the Oscar-winning score for the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), for example, he reveals himself as but one recent musician in a long line of creative artists affected by Wagner the composer. Wagner's theories about musical theater can be felt even in contemporary discussions of Broadway musicals, such as Oklahoma! (1943) and Rent (1996). As for modern opera, Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (1983), Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto (1984), and Karlheinz Stockhausen's cycle Licht (1977–2004) are among the more recent responses to the challenges posed by Wagner almost 150 years ago. In fact, artists from all disciplines over the last century and a half have likewise relied on aesthetic concepts shaped prominently by Wagnerian ideas about the nature of art, whether Symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé avant-garde painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer; the sculptors Hans Arp and Auguste Rodin; or the architects of the Bauhaus. Media technology itself, when related to art, has drawn its aesthetic justification from Wagner's thoughts. And his political and social views influenced the Zionist Theodor Herzl as well as the anti-Semitic fascist Adolph Hitler, with repercussions still powerfully felt in concert life today – in Israel, above all, but worldwide as well.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×