By Naomi Graber It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Star Wars saga is inherently Wagnerian (Kalinak, 1992; Schroeder, 2002). Just how Wagnerian is up for debate (Paulin, 2000), but the musical parallels between… Read More
by Christopher Reynolds Professor Reynolds here reflects on the genesis of Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth (University of California Press, 2015). [Professor Strunk was fond of reminding us how “You have to be in the haystack before you can find the needle.” —DKH]… Read More
Musicologist David Trippett, winner of the American Musicological Society’s 2014 Lewis Lockwood Prize for Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge University Press, 201) has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for 2014. The Philip Leverhulme Prize… Read More
by Ryan Minor Another summer, another scandal: for opera scholars, Wagner fans, and perhaps anyone who reads newspapers, this was the summer of Frank Castorf’s bicentenary production of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth and the firestorm it unleashed. First-hand accounts gauged the boos for the director following Götterdämmerung at over… Read More