Author: WAGNER (Richard). CHAMBERLAIN (Houston Stewart):
Title: Richard Wagner. Mit zahlreichern Portraits, Faksimiles, Illustrationen und Beilagen.
Description: München Verlagsanstalt für Kunst und Wissenschaft vormals Friedrich Bruckmann 1896 FIRST EDITION. 4to, 305 x 229 mms., pp. xi [xii blank], 368, including half-title, collotype portrait of Wagner as frontispiece, title-page in red and black, illustrated throughout with portraits, music quotations, etc., original pebbled cloth, gilt spine, title in gilt on cover, top edge gilt; lower front cover binding defective, hinges a bit tender. A very heavy book. The philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855 - 1927) was born in Southsea but spent much of his adult life in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, where, resident in Vienna, he wrote this biography of Wagner. His second wife was the composer's daughter, Eva Wagner; he is buried in Bayreuth. In 1892, Chamberlain had written Das Drama Richard Wagners, but in this work, he wanted to present Wagner from within, as he was seen and saw himself. In A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal, William Kinderman, and ?Katherine Rae Syer note, "Chamberlain's new book [the biography], was widely distributed, lavishly illustrated, luxuriously bound in a manner that would grace the bookshelves of any bourgeois household. In its iconography, it often lapses into a form of bloated hyperbole that has result in its subsequent dismissal as mere sychophantic hagiography written to please the watching eye of Haus Wahnfried."

Keywords: music biography prose


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