Jane Röckel News
Last update
2024-03-28
Refresh
2022-04-14 14:14:00
Richard Wagner and the Nationalisation of Feeling, exhibition at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
[…] period of history. Homing in on Wagner, we move from meaningless nonsense to blatant untruth: ‘His aim was not to change the individual, but society as a whole.’ A false opposition at best, it becomes truly absurd after Wagner’s reading of Schopenhauer—another figure I cannot recall encountering, though perhaps I forget. What, then, is renunciation of the Will? And what of Wotan’s, let alone Wagner’s Schopenhauerian realisation, as outlined in Wagner’s celebrated letter to August Röckel of 25/26 January 1856? Next comes a ‘Prologue’. It offers an arresting array of images: portraits, cartoons (including one new to me, ‘Don Richard Juan Lohentrist’ from the Sinnige Bilderbogen für grosse Kinder (Leipzig, c. 1869)), busts, death mask, etc. Matching this, or not, we learn in the text that Wagner ‘developed artistic and entrepreneurial strategies in which emotions played a central role’. Again, how novel. It sounds like the sort of meaningless guff […]
2020-08-05 13:00:00
Wagner and August Röckel
(Article first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encycopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Röckel, (Karl) August (born 1 December 1814, Graz; died 18 July 1876, Budapest.) Conductor, composer, pamphleteer; son of tenor, Joseph Röckel. Assisted Rossini at the Paris Théâtre Italien, before assuming positions in Bamberg, Weimar, and finally Dresden (1843-9) as assistant to Wagner. Röckel withdrew his 1839 opera, Farinelli, accepted for Dresden performance, as unworthy compared to Wagner’s work. Dismissed for subversion, Röckel edited the socialist Volksblätter, to which Wagner contributed. Following the Dresden uprising (account published in 1865), Röckel received a death sentence, commuted; prison correspondence adds greatly to understanding of the Ring. In a letter of 25/26 January 1854, Wagner presents Wotan (Wodan) rising to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction, summarising a fundamental ‘pessimistic’ shift in his conception. Following release from prison in 1862, Röckel edited newspapers in Coburg, […]
2020-07-25 11:53:00
Wagner and Bakunin
[…] political nature, Bakunin rejoicing in his “creative passion” for destruction (Bakunin 58). Had Wagner not yet heard of Marx, he most likely would have done so during these walks. Upon Bakunin’s next return from revolutionary Prague, he threw himself into the Dresden uprising, despite disapproving of its amateurism. He proposed centralizing gunpowder reserves in the Rathaus to blow up approaching Prussian troops. Captured and arrested in Chemnitz with other revolutionaries, including August Röckel but not Wagner, Bakunin received commuted death sentences in Saxony and Austria, before extradition to Russia, where he was held in solitary confinement in St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Fortress from 1851 to 1857. Released into Siberian exile, he escaped via Japan to San Francisco, whence he resumed his itinerant activities, through London, Lithuania, Stockholm, Switzerland, Lyons, Bologna, etc. Disdaining participation in the corruption of “bourgeois” political life, his anarchistic conflict with Marx’s “scientific socialism” intensified, […]
2020-07-17 10:41:00
Wagner and Revolution
[…] social and political affairs characterized the period, “revolution” and reaction very much alive (Young Germany). Few were surprised – Metternich wearily confessed to propping up rotten buildings – when revolution engulfed Europe in 1848-9, Wagner’s experience culminating in the Dresden uprising. Barricades in Dresden, 1849 Wagner’s writings now breathed “Revolution,” afforded a capital letter even when he abandoned the practice for other nouns. Die Revolution(1849), written for August Röckel’s Volksblätter, hymns the “sublime goddess Revolution,” the “ever-rejuvenating mother of mankind,” who prophesies a new world of love (Feuerbach’s influence), in which “all as brothers” would be “free in their desires, free in their deeds, free in their pleasures” (SSD 12: 245, 251). Die Kunst und die Revolutionand other Zurich writings look to a post-revolutionary “artwork of the future”: essentially Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, the promise of revolution […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): R...