Description: While the music of Richard Wagner has long served as a touchstone for music-theoretical and analytical models both old and new, music analysts have often been intimidated by the complexity of his works, their multi-layeredness, and their sheer unwieldiness. This volume brings together ten contributions from an international roster of leading Wagner scholars of our time, all of which engage in some way with analytical or theoretical questions posed by Wagner's music. Addressing the operas and music dramas from Die Feen through Parsifal, they combine analytical methods including form-functional theory, Neo-Riemannian theory, Leitmotiv analysis, and history of theory with approaches to dramaturgy, hermeneutics, reception history, and discursive analysis of sexuality and ideology. Collectively, they capture the breadth of analytical studies of Wagner in contemporary scholarship and expand the reach of the field by challenging it to break new interpretative and methodological ground.
Brief description: Steven Vande Moortele is Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. His books include Robert Schumann: Szenen aus Goethes Faust (2020), The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (2017), Two-Dimensional Sonata Form (2009), and (as co-editor) Formal Functions in Perspective (2015).