Clearly aware that intellectual influences are only one stream flowing into great operas, Magee doesn't overstate the...
A sound and highly readable exploration of the composer’s philosophical milieu.
What were the ideas floating through Wagner's head when he wrote his operas, and how can they be seen at work in his music? Veteran popularizer Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher, 1998, etc.) offers intriguing answers. Here, he maps Wagner’s intellectual and emotional transformation by tracking the influences that shaped his worldview. The first concepts to inspire him were Hegel’s living reality, Feuerbach's liberation of mankind through love, and the anarchists’ direct action. Young Wagner fought at the barricades of Dresden side by side with Bakunin and believed that just as injustice arose, so righteousness might rise instead. Society gave life meaning and value, he affirmed, even though the society he lived in was loathsome and in need of radical realignment. These notions can be seen at play in Wagner’s first operas, particularly in the early elements of the Ring Cycle. There, love and sex and art can be seen in the context of socially subversive intoxication with specific ends in mind. But Hegel and Feuerbach gave way to Schopenhauer as Wagner gave in to the bitterness of a disappointed middle-aged left-winger; in his life and art, political struggle was superseded by metaphysics. Wagner's outlook at this time evinces an Eastern sensibility, considering life as indecipherable and touched with a generalized pessimism that pervades the latter parts of the Ring, Tristan and Isolde, and Parsifal, which view any form of political power as corrupting. Magee also convincingly argues that, contrary to popular belief, Nietzsche’s philosophy had no effect on Wagner's music.
Clearly aware that intellectual influences are only one stream flowing into great operas, Magee doesn't overstate the significance of such currents, yet his mellow, lucid interpretation of how they informed and nourished Wagner's libretti is highly persuasive.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6788-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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