Redemption Through Love!

There is a world of music - beautiful, thrilling, powerful and romantic music - that one composer wrote to express the theme of Redemption Through Love. Richard Wagner set out to transform the world through art. He was hip to the power of myth long before Joseph Campbell, and even before Carl Jung himself. Wagner’s ten “sacred music dramas” move people so deeply they have inspired observations like “Some people are made to feel by his music that they are in touch with the depths of their own personality for the first time - a feeling of wholeness, yet unboundedness; compared to a mystical or religious experience." When an opera company produces his four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, people travel from all over the world to attend, bringing $30 million to that city’s economy over a typical three-week, three-cycle festival. But then there’s the intimidating dark side to Wagner, the nasty wack job side. Everybody knows Hitler used his music as a soundtrack for the Third Reich. Few know that for all his anti-Semitic ravings, Wagner himself had Jewish backers and chose Jewish conductors for his operas. Or that Theodor Herzl got his inspiration for Zionism while attending a performance of Tannhäuser in Paris. That’s just scratching the surface of the bizarre Wagner saga. Wagner’s family and Europe’s unhinged fin de siècle anti-Semitic theorists are people one is dearly tempted to mock … but can’t, because no satire could come close to the actual story. Fortunately, this story ends with Wagner’s grandsons stripping his festival house of scenery after the war and creating an operatic “director as auteur” practice to make Wagner European, not just German, so his operas could belong to the world. Redemption Through Love! Is an irreverent, entertaining and funny guide to Wagner that cuts through the insanity and opens the door to the magic. Wagner fan and satirical novelist Beth Elliott takes the reader on a leisurely yet richly analytical tour of Wagner’s ten major operas, the legends on which they are based, and the spiritual and metaphysical themes that work with the music to make them inspiring, transformative experiences. There’s no need to fear the Wagner cult, because this book will show you how to get Wagnerian opera thrills without being a nut.