Wagner: The Complete Experience: And Its Meaning to Us

Paul Dawson-Bowling's Wagner: The Complete Experience and Its Meaning to Us is a comprehensive guide to Wagner's life, works, and their significance. It offers insights into the man, his operas, and their life-enhancing lessons, drawing on a lifetime of experience in General Medical Practice and the thought of Carl Jung.

Format: Hardback
Length: 1228 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2023
Publisher: de la Porte Publishing

In this second edition, Wagner: The Complete Experience and Its Meaning to Us, Paul Dawson-Bowling introduces, deepens, and enriches the Wagner Experience for the newcomer and seasoned Wagnerian alike. Expounding in colorful style the stories, sources, and lessons of Wagner's great dramas, the author offers unusual insights into the man, his works, and their meaning while grappling with the music's almost occult power. Before taking us through Wagner's operas (including three new chapters unveiling Wagner's rarely examined early operas Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi), he explores Wagner's formative experiences, aspirations, and mentality; also Wagner's first wife Minna and her immense but unrecognized impact. This sets up lenses through which the reader may more accurately view not only Wagner the man but, more importantly, his stage works, since, as Dawson-Bowling insists, the best encounter with Wagner's dramas is a direct one. Uniquely drawing on a lifetime's experience in general medical practice, the author brings us great wisdom, humanity, and psychological understanding to his study on the life and work of Wagner, with special reference to the thought of Carl Jung. Above all, this book draws out the vital lessons that Wagner's extraordinary, didactic dramas can over us. It reveals their lessons as life-enhancing: capable of transforming our society, our lives, and ourselves. There is no other book about Wagner quite like it.

Weight: 1934g
Dimension: 162 x 247 x 77 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781838326906
Edition number: 2 ed