Download Wagner`s Ring - Royal Holloway

Code:
MU2286
Title:
Course
Value:
Status:
Option (Honours)
Wagner’s Ring
Availability:
Autumn or Spring
Prerequisite:
None
Recommended:
None
Co-ordinator:
Dr Paul Harper-Scott
Course Staff:
Dr Paul Harper-Scott
This course will:
- provide students with intensive exposure to a central work of the Wagner and, indeed, the
Western, canon
- set the work in its cultural and philosophical context, also taking account of its reception in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- investigate, through comparison of the Ring with earlier nineteenth-century opera, the nature
of Wagner’s operatic reforms and his significance as an operatic composer
By the end of this course students should:
- be familiar with the main compositional procedures which Wagner advocated, and be able to
discuss their use (or not) in the four music dramas of the Ring cycle
- understand the ways in which Wagner’s compositional attitudes changed over the quarter
century it took to complete the Ring
- understand the kinds of cultural politics that Wagner espoused, and be able to discuss them
in relation to both his writings and his music
- be able to place Wagner’s work in historical perspective.
Aims:
Learning
Outcomes:
Course
Content:
0.5
This course examines the operatic cycle that lies at the heart of Wagner’s output: Der Ring
des Nibelungen. The chronological range of the course spans Wagner’s earliest thoughts on
setting the Nibelung myth in 1848 and their eventual realisation at the première of the
complete cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in the summer of 1876.
The methodology and scope of the course are interdisciplinary, taking account of Wagner’s
writings in the context of the social upheaval of 1848-9 and examining his debt to German
philosophy. Individual seminars devoted to each of the four music dramas examine the
cumulative effect of Wagner’s changing compositional practice through the cycle, and the
relation of practice to theory.
Teaching and
Learning
Methods:
Key
Bibliography:
In-course
Feedback:
Assessment:
20 hours of lectures, in conjunction with formative activity, with tutorial feedback, contributing
to some 130 hours of private study, resulting in the notional total of 150 hours of study for the
course.
Warren Darcy, Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold’ (Oxford University Press, 1993)
J.K.Holman, Wagner’s ‘Ring’: a Listener’s Companion and Concordance (Portland, OR, 1996)
Stewart Spencer & Barry Millington (eds.), Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’: a Companion
(London, 1993)
James Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner (Yale University Press, 2003)
Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama [1851] (University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
One 2500-word essay to be written during the course and contributing to the final course
mark; the essay to be returned with tutorial mark and written comment, together with
annotations where appropriate. See also under Teaching and Learning Methods.
Exam: 2 questions from 6 in 2 hours (50%).
Coursework: One essay completed during the course (50%).
Deadlines: The essay to be submitted by the appropriate in-course deadline in order to
qualify for final submission for assessment.