Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century by Martin Gregor-Dellin (1926- ) - 1983

x+575 pages with plates, appendices bibliography and index. Royal octavo (9 1/4" x 6 1/4") bound in original publisher's quarter beige cloth with purple lettering to spine over white blind-stamped boards in original pictorial jacket. Translated by J Maxwell Brownjohn. First edition.Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theater director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionized opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). Condition: Page ends soiled, heal corners bumped else very good in like jacket.