Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will

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Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagners world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of musics most influential figures.
A hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagners music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music. They have never been more popular, nor so violently controversial and divisive. His music is still banned in Israel the only classical composer whose music is banned in the western world. His ten great mature masterpieces constitute an unmatched body of work, created against a backdrop of poverty, revolution, violent controversy, critical contempt and hysterical hero-worship.

As a man, he was a walking contradiction, aggressive, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, heroic, visionary and poisonously anti-Semitic. At one point, he had four lengthy operas written with no hope of being performed when, as if in a fairy-tale, he was rescued by a beautiful young king with limitless wealth which he bestowed on the composer. When one of those works, Tristan and Isolde, was at last performed, it revolutionised classical music at a stroke. Finally he fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating a vast epic to rival the work of the great Greek playwrights, a music drama in four massive segments, ushering gods and dwarves, heroes and thugs, dragons and rainbows onto the stage, the apotheosis of German art as he saw it, so extreme in its demands that he had to train a generation of singers and players to perform it, and erect a custom-built theatre to house it. Wagner died, exhausted, after creating one final piece Parsifal that seems to point to an even more radical new future for music.

Simon Callow recalls the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner worked, recording the almost superhuman effort required to create his work, and evoking the extraordinary effect he had on people this composer like no other who ever lived, extreme in everything, creator of the most sublime and most troubling body of work ever known.

Reviews

Would Callow be able to tell me, in laymans language, what it is about Tristan that makes it so powerful The answer, I am happy to say, is yes. The perfect introduction for those, like me, who may not be obsessives but who sense that something profound is going on, and would like to know more. A delightful little book Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

A sparkly written, witty, learned and absorbing account, Callow brings The Master vividly to life The Times

Intelligent, fluent and buoyant The Daily Telegraph

Praise for Simon Callows Charles Dickens:

Simon Callow is not simply a terrific actor who happens to write you could as well call him a terrific writer who happens to act The Times

This is the book we have long been waiting for and only Simon Callow could have written it A marvellous book. Michael Slater

A comprehensive biography as enthralling as one of his own performances A great achievement.
Catherine Peters, Literary Review

Vivid and exuberant This book, with its fresh angles and out-of-the-way sources, is the harvest of [Callows] dedication [to impersonating Dickens on stage] His book is a celebration, jubilant, vigorous, imaginative, and, as Dickens might have said, an all-round sizzler. John Carey, Sunday Times

Callow writes with great authority and elegant insouciance, which makes this "biography with a twist" very entertaining Independent on Sunday

By his enthusiasm for his subject, Callow has ensured that his book is a worthy addition to the Dickens studies Sunday Express

An excellent book Andrew Marr, Start the Week

Intelligent, fluent and buoyant Daily Telegraph

4/5 a crisply succinct account Sunday Telegraph

Colourful, almost salacious anecdotes abound Sunday Times

Author Bio

Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared on the stage in many films, including the hugely popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. Callows books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, a highly acclaimed biography of Charles Laughton, a multi-volume biography of Orson Welles (of which the first two parts have been published) and Love is Where it Falls, an account of his friendship with the great play agent, Peggy Ramsay.