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Wagner and Philosophy
  • Published: 3 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780141929378
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

Wagner and Philosophy



Wagner was one of the few major composers who studied philosophy seriously. Bryan Magee places the composer's artistic development in the context of the philosophy of his age, and gives us the first detailed and comprehensive study of the close links between Wagner and the philosophers - from the pre-Marxist socialists to Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Magee explores the relationship between words and music, between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between art and philosophy. It tackles soberly and judiciously the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity and anti-semitism are repugnant, as well as the Wagner of artistic genius. The resulting text illuminates Wagner and the music-dramas in altogether new ways.

  • Published: 3 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780141929378
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

About the author

Bryan Magee

Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career. In the 1960s and 70s he worked in broadcasting, as a current affairs reporter on ITV and a critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at Oxford, where he was a tutor at Balliol College. His best remembered television programmes are two long series about philosophy: for the first he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Television Society, while the book he based on the second was a bestseller. From 1974 to 1983 he was Member of Parliament for Leyton, first as Labour, then as a Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author and has written over twenty books, including Clouds of Glory, a memoir about his childhood in Hoxton. He has also written several books on the history of philosophy. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

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