Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on abbreviations of sources
- Introduction
- 1 Modes of heroism in the early nineteenth century
- 2 Wagner and the early nineteenth-century theatre
- 3 Early music-drama: the isolated hero
- 4 Heroism, tragedy, and the Ring
- 5 The last music-dramas: toward the messiah
- 6 Wagner's heroism on stage
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Early music-drama: the isolated hero
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on abbreviations of sources
- Introduction
- 1 Modes of heroism in the early nineteenth century
- 2 Wagner and the early nineteenth-century theatre
- 3 Early music-drama: the isolated hero
- 4 Heroism, tragedy, and the Ring
- 5 The last music-dramas: toward the messiah
- 6 Wagner's heroism on stage
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
All Wagner's heroes are, to a greater or lesser degree, travelers. They come from outside society and are surrounded with an aura that suggests they possess special knowledge and exercise unusual powers. Those who encounter the heroic stranger find his presence either invigorating, as through him they grow more intensely aware of their own inner life, or disquieting, as he disrupts their settled ways. Whatever wonder or anxiety the hero arouses, few can open themselves to him unconditionally, and he must eventually leave the world because it is incompatible with him. His death is not, however, an unmitigated defeat, because as with the epic hero of myth, it intensifies rather than cancels the potency of his heroic aura. Nevertheless, in Wagner, the glory is rarely the hero's alone, for it is often shared by a woman who dies with and for him, and, by her very act of self-sacrifice, she not only vindicates his heroic stature, but evinces her own mode of heroism, based upon pure altruism. In each case where that altruism prevails, it embodies values superior to those for which the male hero stands.
This progress of the hero through Wagner's music-dramas reflects, in most instances, his own emotional and artistic concerns and crises. Indeed, his work was unique in his time, first because it employed the stage as a means of representing personal crisis, secondly because none of his stage-works was ever written on commission, all were written out of personal need.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Wagner and the Romantic Hero , pp. 37 - 67Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004