Obituary: Roy Wagner (1938-2018)

American Antjhropologist, 2023

Obituary of Roy Wagner

OAC Press BOOK REVIEW SERIES, 2018

Review of "A invenção da cultura" (Cosac Naify, São Paulo, 2010), Brazilian translation of Roy Wagner’s "The Invention of Culture". Published as “O Fim da Antropologia”. Novos Estudos CEBRAP 89: 195-211 (March 2011): htp://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0101- 33002011000100012&script=sci_artext

19th-Century Music Review 15, no. 1 (2018): 99-102, 2018

2019

Acceptance speech on behalf of Rudolf G. Wagner on his award of the Karl Jaspers Prize, November 14, 2019, reworked November 25, 2019

Richard Wagner , the greatest operatic composer ever, was not a religious man in the conventional sense, although he had been baptised in the church of St. Thomas in Leipzig (Wagner, 1993,1; but cf. Osborne, 10). He was, however, preoccupied from his early years till his death with the problems of human destiny and with the search for a final solution to its dilemma. He longed for salvation and was aware that it required discipline, renunciation, even saintliness. But he also had an urge to embrace life in full, whose culmination he saw in the 'unique beauty of overwhelming love between man and woman' with its 'unconstrained sexual love'. Didn't, after all, sexual union culminate in the merging of souls in ecstasy, which transcended temporality and the sense of being in the world, and was a state of 'untroubled, pure harmony' (ungetrübte, reine Harmonie), in effect nirvân . a (Wagner, 1975, 198)? Death would then be the gate to final redemption. It would seem that Wagner genuinely believed that sexual union could culminate in the merging of souls in ecstasy and a shifting from temporality into a timeless dimension akin to nirvân . a. Death in this state would be the gate to final redemption. All this is expressed in his mature operas, partly in words, but fully by a powerful musical language.

2007

's published writings present various topoi to which he returned repeatedly. Often he adopts a historiographic approach in his arguments, and this feature suggested the present study concerning the composer's concepts of history. Wagner's historiographic approach is reflected in his discussions of the Greek influence on music. The contents of his personal libraries, first in Dresden and then in Zurich/Bayreuth, are also considered as further resources for the composer's study of history. Along with these sources, his autobiography, letters, and the extensive diary of his wife Cosima provide further substance for the present discussion. The shifts in Wagner's theories under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer are also examined as is the composer's eventual realization that much of what he was attempting to do in his own works had already been foreshadowed in the early Italian humanist experiments that led to the birth of opera. Examples from his works, particularly Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, reveal his adoption of traits of various historical style periods in music history in his own compositions. Wagner's reverence for Palestrina and Bach are also highlighted.

An Analysis of Richard Wagner's Political and Religious Views

David Trippett, ed., "Wagner in Context," Cambridge University Press, 2024