The Wagnerian Romances
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Listeners new to Wagner's operas who want the stories first
- Readers who enjoy myth and legend and are interested in opera as literature
- Music lovers and general readers who want a plot guide to the operas
- Teachers looking for background material when staging or explaining opera stories
Not a good fit for
- Professional readers seeking score analysis or instruction in composition
- Researchers expecting rigorous scholarly notes and textual scholarship
- Readers who want only plot summaries and dislike prose narration
Reading tips
- Pick an opera you are currently listening to, read only the relevant chapter, then return to the music for comparison.
- Before reading, learn briefly where the opera's myth comes from; this makes the character relationships easier to enter.
- Treat the book as story preparation before listening; there is no need to read every chapter at once.
- If character names become confusing, make your own character list to help you remember.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
FAQ
Is this book a translation of Wagner's opera librettos?
Can I read it without a background in classical music?
Which operas' stories does the book cover?
Is this book suitable for academic citation?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Gertrude Hall Brownell (1863–1961) was an American poet, novelist, and translator. Public information about her life is limited, and the available record centers mainly on her creative and translation work. Her writing spans poetry, essays, and translations from French literature, reflecting broad literary interests and considerable linguistic skill. Two of her works are held in this collection: The Wagnerian Romances and Aurora the Magnificent. The former engages with the romantic narratives of Wagner's operas, while the latter is a work of fiction; both show her attention to European literary and musical subjects. Her translations helped English-language readers encounter French literature, and her poetry and essays share the aesthetic orientation of American literary circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, she was a woman writer active across genres and languages, with a place in the literary translation and writing of her time.
