Bøker av Paul Brian Heise

Scholars of Richard Wagner's works have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our understanding of his art systematically. Paul Heise's quest to grasp the allegorical unity underlying Wagner's canonical artworks began in the 1970s. Following his allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this fresh installment of Heise's lifelong Wagner project will demonstrate how the composer employed key facets of the plots of his first three canonical operas The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin in building the sophisticated allegorical superstructure which culminated in his Ring of the Nibelung and his other mature music-dramas, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal. This study casts a retrospective light on the many meanings hidden within these three operas, which were the prequel to the Ring, revealing their heretofore subliminal content as never before.

Scholars devoted to analysis of Richard Wagner's operas and music-dramas have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our systematic understanding of his art. Following Heise's allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this second installment of the author's lifelong Wagner project will examine Wagner's mature music-dramas Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal in light of their relationship to the Ring as understood through Heise's allegorical interpretation. It will demonstrate how Wagner's Ring is a master-myth which can make sense of these other mature music-dramas as never before.

Paul Brian Heises The Wound That Will Never Heal is an original allegorical reading of Richard Wagners epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelung. Heise challenges the standard view that Wagner merely dramatizes the conflict between love and power and demonstrates instead that his greatest work is an allegory exploring humanitys longing for transcendent value and that quests paradoxical establishment of a science-based secular society. By employing a more extensive analysis of primary evidence than any prior interpretation, The Wound That Will Never Heal is the first interpretation to propose and sustain a global and conceptually coherent account of the entire Ring.