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Interpreting Wagner
In this fresh and inventive book, James Treadwell lays open the rich possibilites for interpretation offered across the full range of Wagner’s art. Focusing on Wagner’s music, dramas, and prose writings, rather than on questions of biography or influence, the book carefully traces the tensions and uncertainties embedded within the composer’s central themes.
Treadwell identifies and pursues the habitual concerns of Wagner’s operas and enchantment, seduction, heroism, victory, transcendence, and sacredness. While Wagner’s work repeatedly and urgently sets itself to deny various or ambiguous interpretations, the operas themselves are nevertheless far more intricate and conflicted than this denial allows for. In this altered light, the dimensions of Wagner’s art are unexpectedly extended, and its enduring vitality is refreshingly reasserted.
Treadwell identifies and pursues the habitual concerns of Wagner’s operas and enchantment, seduction, heroism, victory, transcendence, and sacredness. While Wagner’s work repeatedly and urgently sets itself to deny various or ambiguous interpretations, the operas themselves are nevertheless far more intricate and conflicted than this denial allows for. In this altered light, the dimensions of Wagner’s art are unexpectedly extended, and its enduring vitality is refreshingly reasserted.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published May 11, 2003
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About the author
James Treadwell
25 books49 followersJames Treadwell was born in West London and is still living there more than forty years on. Formerly an academic specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, he is now, and hopes always to be, a writer of fantasy novels.
His current vocation can probably be blamed on reading Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen and Barbara Leonie Picard’s retellings of the Iliad and Odyssey at a formative age. Once exposed to such lethal doses of the faraway and the solemn and the strange, he inevitably found his way to Narnia and Middle Earth and Gormenghast and Earthsea and Pern and Britain (but it was Susan Cooper’s Britain). He played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons at school and read a lot of serious fantasy at university; despite that, he still managed to make a start on a scholarly career before the chance to become a full-time writer presented itself.
He has lived in London, Oxford and Montréal, but really always in London, where he’s now settled with his wife and two children.
His current vocation can probably be blamed on reading Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen and Barbara Leonie Picard’s retellings of the Iliad and Odyssey at a formative age. Once exposed to such lethal doses of the faraway and the solemn and the strange, he inevitably found his way to Narnia and Middle Earth and Gormenghast and Earthsea and Pern and Britain (but it was Susan Cooper’s Britain). He played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons at school and read a lot of serious fantasy at university; despite that, he still managed to make a start on a scholarly career before the chance to become a full-time writer presented itself.
He has lived in London, Oxford and Montréal, but really always in London, where he’s now settled with his wife and two children.
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January 21, 2025
A more helpful title might be Understanding Wagner.
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