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Wagner. Ride the storm
Sezione 1
Sezione 2
The music of '48
MUNICH, Nationaltheater. 1848
PLAY ME
The years between Lohengrin,
completed in 1848, and L'oro del Reno,
this one several years later, were crucial to the process of stylistic evolution. L'oro del Reno had its first performance at the National Theatre in Munich. That period of musical inactivity was marked by the writing of several theoretical books in which
I explained my new artistic conception and world politics: Opera and Drama, Opera d'arte dell'avvenire, Art and Revolution. In them, we read that the most urgent and strongest need of the artist man is to communicate himself, in all the fullness of his nature, to the entire community.
This can only be achieved through drama. The work itself was seen by me as a kind of sublimation of a world freed from hypocrisy and the power of the rich over the poor. It was a positivist theory that was still precarious, pre-Schopenhauerian, but akin to the spirit of the revolution that was burning
like wildfire across Europe at the time. And it was precisely the revolution of 1848 that saw me erecting barricades alongside Bakunin, the anarchist and revolutionary philosopher. Moreover, in those years, the first female sympathies began to manifest themselves and they dotted my life, since I was easy prey to fleeting love affairs.
Sezione 3
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