Richard Wagner: My Life [Two Volume Set]
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A01=Stewart Spencer
Annotated Edition
Author_Stewart Spencer
Autobiography
Bayreuth
Beethoven Successor
Category=AVC
Category=AVM
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
German Edition
Love Life
Music Biography
My Life
Revolutionary Activities
Richard Wagner
Stewart Spencer
Western Civilization
Product details
- ISBN 9781837650569
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 29 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The first fully annotated scholarly edition and masterful new translation of Wagner's autobiography, revealing the composer's self-fashioning and mythmaking.
Richard Wagner's life was as tempestuous as his music and in his own retelling it constitutes a gripping narrative. His autobiography, My Life, matters if one wants to understand the composer's life or the way in which he himself saw that life. And yet, it has a flawed publishing history: Bayreuth published the first commercial edition in 1911, but it was not until 1963 that the full text appeared in an annotated German edition. An anonymous English translation was published in 1911, the work of a translator unfamiliar with the subject. A second translation, published in 1983, remains problematical. Until this day, no edition published in any language has risen to the challenge of providing adequate annotation. This new scholarly edition and translation by Stewart Spencer is the first edition to do so.
Annotations provided here explain references and allusions that Wagner himself took for granted and correct lapses of memory that the text contains. The edition highlights various strategies of concealment as far as Wagner's love life and revolutionary activities were concerned. As the text illustrates, by the 1860s Wagner was anxious to portray himself as Beethoven's natural successor, and his life in defence of art as a bulwark against the decline of Western civilization. This new critical edition and translation of Richard Wagner's autobiography is a response to one of the most pressing needs in the entire Wagner bibliography.
STEWART SPENCER has been translating books on music and art history for sixty years, and is an authority on the life of Richard Wagner. STEWART SPENCER has been translating books on music and art history for sixty years, and is an authority on the life of Richard Wagner.
