The Wound That Will Never Heal (Paul Brian Heise)

Paul Brian Heise has published a new book that may interest Wagnerites - The Wound that will Never Heal - An allegorical Interpretation of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. It is a study of the entirety of Wagner’s Ring and his employment of musical motifs to enhance its meaning.

By comprehensively assessing the Ring’s drama and music — rather than cherry-picking portions of it — this approach reveals the Ring’s underlying allegory, a new vision of its ‘meaning’ that calls for the wholesale revision of our received conception of it.

The Wound that will Never Heal demonstrates that Wagner’s allegory narrates how music-dramatist Wagner (Siegfried and his muse of inspiration Brünnhilde) inherited dying religious faith’s (Wotan’s) longing for redemption when faith was threatened by science’s (Dark-Alberich’s, and Wotan’s [Light-Alberich’s]) accumulation of a hoard of objective knowledge.

It reveals the Ring as Wagner’s master-myth — the key to understanding all of his canonical artworks from the The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal.

The study provides an annotated guide to the Ring’s musical motifs (193), indicates every instance in context, and identifies their initial and definitive occurrences. It also contains dozens of original insights into the influence of anti-Semitism, Greek myth, Christianity, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheism upon the Ring, and presents a thorough assessment of Wagner’s related writings and recorded remarks for comprehending the Ring.

$59.95 Hardcover ($10.00 surcharge for foreign delivery)

Order: orders@academicapress.com

Social Media

One of the finest monuments in sound ever to have been raised to the everlasting glory of music. (Claude Debussy on Parsifal)

"The thing about Wagner is that there can be no true success in any production of his operas, only degrees of failure. There is so much in these bloody pieces, all you can do is try to live up to them." (Keith Warner, The Guardian)

"I have never come across an audience with so much hatred, so much anger, such a thirst for revenge. They take everything personally. It makes you a little bit scared, and it's really quite terrifying." (Lance Ryan on the audiences at Bayreuth)

"People sometimes complain that Wagner operas are too long, that they get stiff and sore about 10.30 because they have rushed in to hear one of his works straight from work and are not properly prepared for listening to his music. The audience, as much as the artists, must be prepared for a performance."
(Benjamin Britten to Alan Blyth, Gramophone)

"I was bowled over. It was the year after Wieland Wagner had died; to be able to see his productions was a total knock-out. These bare stagings, where everything was done with lighting. The light changed with the music, and the shadows and patterns seemed as archetypal as the music itself. Nobody had done that on the stage before. I thought it was extraordinary and wonderful."
(Patrick Carnegy to The Guardian)

Wagneropera.net