Richard Wagner

Avant Garde and the Profit Motive

by Peter J. Leithart

Avant-garde writers and composers profit by renouncing vulgar profit. Continue Reading »

Wagner, Tristan, Love

by Peter J. Leithart

Did Wagner think eros a form of self-dissolving death? Continue Reading »

Why We Can't Hear Wagner's Music

by David P. Goldman

Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the . . . . Continue Reading »