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Wagner
- His Life and Music
- Narrated by: Stephen Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
Well over a century after Wagner's death, the man and his music are as controversial as ever. Praised for his profound insights into the workings of the human heart, he has also been condemned as a dangerous libertine, a proto-fascist and an arrogant bore. His vast four-part operatic Ring cycle has been elevated as one of the greatest achievements of western culture and dismissed as an unparalleled example of creative megalomania.
This audiobook makes no attempt to gloss over the darker sides of Wagner's character, personally or artistically, but argues that the finer aspects of his vision transcend its flaws. It tells the story of an extraordinary life and charts Wagner's development, from unpromising beginnings into the creator of some of the most brilliantly innovatory and seductively beautiful music ever composed.
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Not Just for Wagner Experts!
- By Rupert Pupkin on 09-26-20
By: Alex Ross
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Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
- Why the Greeks Matter
- By: Thomas Cahill
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.
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Super super
- By Richard on 12-28-03
By: Thomas Cahill
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
- 1599
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: James Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Abridged
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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
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Note!--Abridged version
- By Scott on 01-05-16
By: James Shapiro
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William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Apollo's Angels
- A History of Ballet
- By: Jennifer Homans
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 23 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 400 years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to 16th-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps and gestures are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed.
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a great book poorly read
- By Anonymous User on 04-14-11
By: Jennifer Homans
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Kierkegaard
- A Single Life
- By: Stephen Backhouse
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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An accessible, expert introduction to one of the greatest minds of 19th century. Whether you're completely new to him, or if you're already familiar with his work, Kierkegaard: A Single Life presents a fresh understanding of his life and thought. Kierkegaard was a brilliant and enigmatic loner whose ideas permeated culture, shaped modern Christianity, and influenced people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Martin Luther King Jr. Though few people today have read his work, that lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is changing with this biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse.
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Great!
- By Will on 07-11-17
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The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
- By: Friedrich Nietzsche
- Narrated by: Duncan Steen
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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One of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a remarkable source of inspiration. It is here that the philosopher expresses his frustration with the contemporary world and urges man to embrace Dionysian energy once more. He refutes European culture since the time of Socrates, arguing that it is one-sidedly Apollonian and prevents man from living in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life.
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The Apollonian vs The Dionysian
- By JCW on 02-05-18
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The Creation of Anne Boleyn
- A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen
- By: Susan Bordo
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.
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Most Enjoyable Biography--Win!
- By Roswatheist on 03-29-14
By: Susan Bordo
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A Wicked Company
- The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach’s Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends.
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Excellent Book on Radical Enlightenment
- By EJJ on 02-15-15
By: Philipp Blom
What listeners say about Wagner
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MDS
- 05-12-24
The wonderful narrative
Regret no music examples for Tristan & Isolde. Also nothing from Rheingold, particularly the very introduction itself.
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- Adeliese Baumann
- 12-15-13
An essential contribution
May 22, 2013 marked the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner's birth. Perhaps not surprisingly, the magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover on its March 30th issue featuring a portrait of Wagner holding a tiny fire-breathing dragon as if it were his pet. The headine: "Das wahnsinnige Genie," or "The Insane Genius." This was visual shorthand for the pop culture view that we already know all there is to know about Wagner, danke schön.
But what do we know, and is it even true?
Often we are reminded Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer, and his music is used as background in TV programs featuring the Third Reich. Many of Hitler's minions did not share his taste for Wagner's operas, but never mind. We are primed to imagine the horrors of that regime set to the work of one composer in particular.
Wagner was not a pleasant man. If you need to love the person to enjoy his work, this isn't the composer for you. But the personality characteristic criticized most often, Wagner's anti-Semitism, is rarely put into the context of his times and the many who sadly shared his views.
On a lighter note, jokes are made about things "Wagnerian," while brides still continue to use the march from Wagner's Lohengrin as they proceed down the aisle, and cartoons feature fat, horn-helmeted women belting out glass-shattering tunes.
So who was this Richard Wagner, and why should anyone care?
Stephen Johnson answers that question admirably and contributes a great deal to the study of classical music in this book. It will reward anyone who is interested in Wagner, of course, but also makes a valuable addition to those starting their discovery of his music.
As Johnson says, "While this book makes no effort to gloss over the less pleasant aspects of Wagner's personality and thinking, its main purpose is to show that what matters most about Wagner's work are the very aspects of his work that make it greater than the man."
Far greater than the man. Listen and see if you don't agree with him.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Honest review
- 09-11-22
Wrong Title!
I bought this audiobook to learn anything new, no matter how little (or insignificant) about Wagner life. All I heard instead was mostly political. I am sure the author of this book is fully qualified to write the history of Judaism, and be well rewarded for it. But why bother with musical topic at all in the first place? To the point that you’re not even able to guess that some people actually understand music at far more profound level. These people are called Wagnerians. They have passed all other layers of previous art and now speak a new language. To conclude, the level of elevation that Wagner offers is such, that once organically grasped, transform the subject. Needless to say, the author of this book has no idea what that implies.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Timoteo
- 03-07-18
Wagner's life and music
I am grateful for this work, which is mostly narration but also has musical excerpts. The narration by the author is quite good. It's not clear how rigorous the scholarship that went into writing this work was, but Johnson seems to have fairly solid knowledge. Johnson correctly notes that Wagner was antisemitic, and focuses on that, even finding some sort of fascist tendency in the music itself (not the libretto, but the music, because it is "overly insistent"). Wagner was a German nationalist antisemite and later became a favorite of some Nazis (though it's not clear they cared for Parsifal), but to pin the evil of the Nazis on Wagner, as some authors are wont to do, seems excessive. Johnson provides historical context that is helpful, and the musical excerpts are of excellent sound quality. I have listened to this work more than once, so I definitely do not regret this purchase.
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