title: Opera and Drama
author:  Richard Wagner 
description: With Richard Wagner, opera reached the apex of German Romanticism. Originally published in 1851, when Wagner was in political exile, Opera and Drama outlines a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work, which would finally materialize as The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's music drama, as he called it, aimed at a union of poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft. In a rare book-length study, the composer discusses the enhancement of dramas by operatic treatment and the subjects that make the best dramas. The expected Wagnerian voltage is here: in his thinking about myths such as Oedipus, his theories about operatic goals and musical possibilities, his contempt for musical politics, his exaltation of feeling and fantasy, his reflections about genius, and his recasting of Schopenhauer. This edition includes the full text of volume 2 of William Ashton Ellis's 1893 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.
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  CONTENTS 
   
  Vorwort: For the Love of the Opera 
   
  Einleitung: "Meine traeume schaff'ich nicht" 
   
  Death Drive and the Wagnerian Sublime - The Forced Choice - The 
  Disavowal 
   
  1 "Deeper than the day could read" 
   
  The 'What-Ifs' - Tristan's Journey to the Bottom of the Night - 
  Transgression? No, thanks! - Wagner's Sexualized Politics - The 
  Moebius Band 
   
  2 "The Everlasting Irony of the Community" 
  Wagner with Kierkegaard - Kundry's Laughter ... - ... and her Kiss - 
  The Feminine versus Woman 
   
  Interlude: The Feminine Excess 
   
  3 Run, Isolde, Run 
   
  The Cyberspace Tristan - The Morning After - "It quacks, hoots, pants, 
  and gasps" - The Separated Flames - No More Running 
   
  Literature 
   
   
  
   
  VORWORT: FOR THE LOVE OF THE OPERA 
   
   
  In recent times, the psychoanalytic approach to opera deservedly 
  enjoys a bad press: what we usually get is a "deconstructionist" 
  reading of the libretto, or, perhaps even worse, a rather primitive 
  "Freudian" denunciation of its 