Melancholy by Lars von Trier and Music by Richard Wagner: Unity of Poetics or Collage?

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

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A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel12010048 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 48

Author(s):

Philip Smith ◽

Florian Stoll

Keyword(s):

Emotional Experience ◽

The Body ◽

Richard Wagner ◽

Mixed Methods Study ◽

Historical Research ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Paradigm Case ◽

Comparative Sociology ◽

Sacred Spaces ◽

Classical Work

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.

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6.15 Briefwechsel Richard Wagner – König Ludwig II. von Bayern

Handbuch Brief ◽

10.1515/9783110376531-098 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1195-1206

Keyword(s):

Richard Wagner

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