The Life of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from The Life of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1

This volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner's life, with his entry, as composer of two successful operas, upon a so-called practical career at one of the principal German theatres. How he fared there, how he turned his back on Dresden and all office-bearing, and how he planned and actually commenced his great artistic reformation, will form the subject of Volume II. (to appear, as I hope, in Volume III. Will follow his changing fortunes, through the last two-thirds of his exile, down to his rescue by King Ludwig. This, I trust, will be ready in 1902; whilst, Subject to Herr Glasenapp's state of forwardness, I expect to complete the Life by a fourth volume in 1903.

As I fancy I heard the bell ring, Ladies and Gentlemen, I withdraw to let the curtain rise.

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England. At times, however, they are necessary evils. I will endeavour to make the present ill as brief as possible. There is absolutely no need to dwell upon the lack of a full and authoritative English Life of Wagner, for pace MrH. T. Finck stwo entertaining volumes the thing has never yet been seriously attempted. The same might be said with regard to every country, save for one exception :even in Germany, the Bayreuth masters native land, there exists but one biography of him that aspires to the completeness of a standard work ;it naturally has both fed and swallowed up the rest. That biography is the incomparable work of Carl Fr. Glasenapp. Originally published in 1876, for the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, in 1882 (the year of Parsifal it was brought down to date by a second edition with a supplemental section ;then came a pause. Richard Wagner died in 1883, and it might have been thought advisable for Herr Glasenapp to hasten forward yet a third edition, with a second supplement ;but he felt, and rightly, that no further edition ought to be issued before time, research and meditation should have enriched his work with riper thought and a far larger body of material. Meanwhile appeared the shorter monographs of Wilhelm Tappert and Richard Pohl; supplying valuable information in many respects, however, they made no pretension to that monumental character Herr Glasenapp had prefigured as his own ideal. At last in 1894 the first volume of his third edition saw the light; containing in itself almost as much matter as both the volumes of its predecessor (1882), it was practically a new .
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