Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche

About the Book

Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

Table of Contents:
Preface

Prologue: Beyond Autonomy
The Uncanny Grace: A Gloss on Kleist’s Marionettes
Reason
Beyond Reason
 History
 Nation
 Will
Religion, the Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment: The New Configuration

part one
1. The Secret of Music-Dramatic Form: Music Drama as Opera
2. Der Ring des Nibelungen: The Anarchist Utopia
Das Rheingold: The Fall
Die Walküre: How One Becomes Human
 Act 1: Becoming Wagner
 Act 2: Becoming Brünnhilde
 Act 3: Waiting for the Hero
Siegfried: How One Becomes a Hero
 Act 1: Getting the Sword
 Act 2: Using It
 Act 3: The Awakening
Götterdämmerung: The Apocalypse
 Prologue: The Past and the Future
 Act 1: The Entrapment 1
 Act 2: The Entrapment 2
 Act 3: Death and Transfiguration
 The Myth of Revolution

part two
3. Tristan und Isolde: The Erotic Utopia
 The Lyrical Axis
 The Narrative Axis
 The Orchestral Strand
 The Music-Dramatic Form
 The Myth of Will
Postscript
4. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Politics after Tristan
 Act 1: The Knight’s Failure
 Act 2: The Clerk’s Failure
 Act 3, Part 1: A Lesson in Poetics
 Act 3, Part 2: The Shoemaker’s Triumph
 The Myth of Nation
5. Parsifal: Ethics after Tristan
 The Communion Sequences of Acts 1 and 3
 The Monologues of Acts 1 and 3
 Act 2: The Kiss of Self-Knowledge
 The Music-Dramatic Form
 Eros and Agape
 The Myth of Redemption
 Epilogue: Wagner contra Nietzsche
 Wagner and Nietzsche: A History of the Relationship
 Becoming Nietzsche
 Nietzsche contra Wagner, Wagner contra Nietzsche

Appendix 1. Das Rheingold: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 2. Die Walküre: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 3. Siegfried: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 4. Götterdämmerung: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 5. Tristan und Isolde: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 6. Die Meistersinger: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Appendix 7. Parsifal: The Music-Dramatic Plan
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in Notes
Notes
Works Consulted
Index

About the Author :
Karol Berger is Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus, Department of Music, Stanford University. His award-winning books include Musica Ficta; A Theory of Art; and Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow. 

Review :
"The author develops his new interpretative perspective with so much mastery and such highly reflective circumspection that he is sure to convince even some inveterate Nietzscheans. ... Karol Berger has written a great and momentous book, and only now the work begins. What more could one wish from the contemporary Wagner research?" "This is an exceptionally clear and accessible book on topics on which it is traditionally difficult to be clear and accessible: the origin, genesis, and nature of Wagner's achievement in his ‘music dramas’, and the evaluation of these dramas in terms of their impact on German culture from a philosophical point of view. . . .Musicologists will have a feast with this work, as Berger surprisingly shows the origin of Wagner's musical forms in Italian operatic models, and also shows how superficial and incorrect was Nietzsche's later, spiteful criticism of his former master and idol. . ." “… it is the textual-critical in­terpretation of Wagner’s works that is most satisfying in Beyond Reason. Berger’s freshly imagined and vividly expounded narratives have most in common with such apprecia­tive readings, of a predominantly literary character, as those published in recent years by Richard H. Bell, Paul Dawson-Bowling and Roger Scruton….Berger deploys his chosen terminology with confidence, and argues for his interpretations with eloquence and unflagging commitment.”