Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Powell, Larson

Titel

Narben des Gesamtkunstwerks – Wagners Ring des Nibelungen. Ed. Richard Klein. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001. 311 pp. with 18 pictures. (ISBN 3 7705 3565 0)

Ist Teil von

• Cambridge Opera Journal, 2005-11, Vol.17 (3), p.303-308

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The resulting methodological pluralism is nonetheless unied by larger concerns. [...]the various contributions to the volume, by musicologists like Klein and Eckehard Kiem, literary critics such as Samuel Weber, and renowned philosophers Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank (whose work on Hegel and hermeneutics respectively is known to an English public), are in mutual dialogue if not necessarily agreement.7 The emphasis on scars, ruptures and contradictions does not, fortunately, inspire a knee-jerk application of Derridean post-structuralism, with its attendant dangers of cyclopean close readings, of details pulled out of context and predictable attacks on the poor old straw man of Occidental metaphysics. (To get a sense of the gulf separating this book from much mainstream English Wagner criticism, one might compare Kleins subtle reading of the spat between Wotan and Fricka with Philip Kitcher and Richard Schachts rather blithe characterisation of Frickas perspective as merely myopic.10) One of the most remarkable aspects of Kleins essays is the quality of the writing. Kleins reading distinguishes itself equally from the hermeneutical organicist perspective of Ludwig Finscher (from Bermbach and Borchmeyer) and from the well-known media-theory reading of Friedrich Kittler, who reduces Wagner not merely, as did Adorno, to an ancestor of lm music, but also to the spiritual father of the rock-concert amplier.13 Kittler claims that the opening of Das Rheingold is nothing but der Sound, deliberately using the English word in German. Rather, just as Brnnhildes delity to her father Wotans internally divided will had to mean interpretation of, and even disobedience to, the external Letter of his law, so a staging of Wagner that does justice to its internal contradictions and its conicted relation to its historical origins cannot but be complex.