Wagner's Das Rheingold
- Author: Darcy, Warren
the most comprehensive study of the opera yet ... Darcy uses his work on the sources to describe the compositional process of the opera, but also as a springboard for a thoroughgoing analysis....
Wagner's Das Rheingold
- Author: Darcy, Warren
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the most comprehensive study of the opera yet ... Darcy uses his work on the sources to describe the compositional process of the opera, but also as a springboard for a thoroughgoing analysis....
About
Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold is a milestone in the composer's outlput and in the history of music in general. It marked Wagner's return to operatic composition after a hiatus of five years, and signified his definitive break with earlier operatic conventions. it also represents a reconsideration of the whole question of dramatic-musical form, and the role of tonality in articulating this form. Warren Darcy traces here the genesis of Das Rheingold through the various textual and musical sketches and drafts to the full score, and also develops a theoretical framework within which the opera may be meaningfully analysed. Using Wagner's manuscripts as a point of departure, Darcy discusses the formal, harmonic, and linear structure of the work. In so doing, he challenges a number of contemporary views about the opera, including those of Curt von Westernhagen and Carl Dahlhaus.
Contents
- Structural outline of "Das Rheingold"
- preliminaries
- the documentary sources
- the forging of the text
- analytical positions
- the opera as a whole
- "creation ex nihilo" - the prelude
- scene one
- first transformation and scene two
- second transformation and scene three
- third transformation and scene four. Appendices: transcriptions from Wagner's complete draft
- works cited.
Awards and reviews
the most comprehensive study of the opera yet ... Darcy uses his work on the sources to describe the compositional process of the opera, but also as a springboard for a thoroughgoing analysis. This invaluable study necessarily grapples with minutiae and isn't for the faint-hearted
