Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 5 of 5 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Can there be such a thing as music criticism?

John Deathridge, 20 February 1986

Music and Civilisation: Essays in Honour of Paul Henry Lang 
edited by Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates and Christopher Hatch.
Norton, 499 pp., £35, March 1985, 0 393 01677 3
Show More
The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901-1914 
edited by Kay Dreyfus.
Macmillan, 542 pp., £25, December 1985, 0 333 38085 1
Show More
Musicology 
by Joseph Kerman.
Collins/Fontana, 255 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 00 197170 0
Show More
Show More
... from other disciplines. But a dissection of The Rite of Spring adapting from linguistics, say, John Lyon’s version of the theory of semantic structure, or a semiotic analysis of Grainger’s Handel in the Strand are liable to end up, too, as involved technical explanations communicating less real critical insight than the trenchant views of Taruskin and ...
Wagner in Performance 
edited by Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer.
Yale, 214 pp., £19.95, July 1992, 0 300 05718 0
Show More
Wagner: Race and Revolution 
by Paul Lawrence Rose.
Faber, 304 pp., £20, June 1992, 9780571164653
Show More
Wagner Handbook 
edited by Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, translated by John Deathridge.
Harvard, 711 pp., £27.50, October 1992, 0 674 94530 1
Show More
Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini and An Evening at Rossini’s in Beau-Séjour 
by Edmond Michotte, translated by Herbert Weinstock.
Quartet, 144 pp., £12.95, November 1992, 9780704370319
Show More
Show More
... in Wagner scholarship (or what passes for it) is congenitally resistant to study.’ Thus John Deathridge, the leading Wagner scholar of the English-speaking world, at the beginning of his chapter on Wagner research in the Wagner Handbook. If so learned and au courant a scholar as Deathridge is daunted by ...

La Côte St André

Julian Rushton, 22 June 1989

Berlioz 1803-1832: The Making of an Artist 
by David Cairns.
Deutsch, 586 pp., £25, February 1989, 0 233 97994 8
Show More
Show More
... musical training at an age when Berlioz had never used a piano or heard an orchestra. According to John Deathridge, Wagner wanted posterity to view him as an autodidact; but this claim should not be taken, as it apparently is by Cairns, at face value. He is right, of course, that Berlioz’s early years were not wasted for they contributed indispensable ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
Show More
Show More
... in the 1890s at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin, and his short story ‘The Coming of John’ features an episode in which the protagonist is intoxicated by a performance of Lohengrin. This rapturous feeling is only shattered when a white childhood friend arrives and asks him to vacate his seat – an experience that Du Bois compared to the Veil ...

Going Against

Frank Kermode: Is There a Late Style?, 5 October 2006

On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain 
by Edward Said.
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., £16.99, April 2006, 9780747583653
Show More
Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work 
edited by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow.
Getty, 235 pp., $40, August 2006, 0 89236 813 6
Show More
Show More
... by older biographers as they sought to confer a fitting lateness on the composer, who died at 35. John Deathridge’s chapter on Wagner will probably outlast the other contributions; he shows that Wagner, even when he was working on his last opera, Parsifal, really wanted to be writing symphonies. Deathridge provides ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences