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Just published thee first of several physics books featuring my fine art photography alongside my theory dx4/dt=ic, titled Light Time Dimension Theory: The Foundational Physics Unifying Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics!
The book features some of my fine art photography as a celebration of light! And I am also working on a couple photography books! :)
All the best on your epic hero's odyssey! And enjoy the golden number ratio my photography:
© 2015 Eric Adeleye Photography. All rights reserved.
Some of my work with Model Lily Nicole (Model Mayhem @ www.modelmayhem.com/2485363) published in the February 2015 issue of Muotoilla Magazine (www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/706975).
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Honk! The sound there of some self-trumpet blowing.
Last month the editor of What Digital Camera sent a Flickr mail asking if the magazine could use puddling about in a feature on bad weather photography (in exchange for a free mag and a bit of cash). I said yes, hoping he didn't mean bad weather photography.
A copy of this month's issue finally arrived today, making it a nice way to celebrate a year's D40 ownership.
....my photo published in the online magazine, nthWORD December 2010 issue!! ...
...It was chosen as part of the "Good with Words" contest by nthWORD magazine whereby the winning 6 words will be published alongside the image...
..Thank you Annette Halette for your winning 6 words and to all of you for your words of encouragement!..
- Merry Xmas Happy New Year! Hugs & Kisses from Malaysia -
Character Creation
Steel is a superhero appearing in comic books published by DC Comics. He is a genius engineer who builds a mechanized suit of armor that mirrors Superman's powers. Steel initially seeks to replace Superman, who has been killed by Doomsday. After Superman is resurrected, he accepts Steel as an ally. Steel's sledgehammer and real name of John Henry Irons are references to the mythical railroad worker John Henry. He has a niece named Natasha Irons who is also a superhero with similar steel armor.
Publication history
First appearing in The Adventures of Superman #500 (June 1993), he is the second character known as Steel and was created by Louise Simonson and artist Jon Bogdanove.
The character is portrayed by Shaquille O'Neal in the 1997 film adaptation of the same name and Wolé Parks in the television series Superman & Lois. Additionally, Michael Dorn and Zeno Robinson have voiced the character in animation.
Modern Age: New Earth: Reign of the Supermen
After the death of Superman, Metropolis was without a protector watching over it. After several weeks without a Superman, new heroes appeared and declared themselves to be Superman. One was Eradicator, dubbed "the Last Son of Krypton," who looked the most like Superman but was merciless in his approach to crime-fighting. Also, Superboy tried to take up the mantle by getting the media on his side, but his youth and arrogance prevented him from being a true successor.
Also, Cyborg Superman claimed to be the real deal, and got the federal government to back his claims. After realizing the the weapons he used to design for a living were being manufactured and sold to street gangs and inspired by the example Superman set, John created a suit of armor to help him fight crime and stop the sale of his weapons.
Due to all of the new Supermen running around, the media focused on all of them, with the press giving John the title the "Man of Steel." Also, a local psychic told the media that he was the real Superman reincarnated in a robotic body. During his adventures, the Man of Steel ran into Superboy, and explained to him how a Superman should act. He also encountered Lex Luthor, who tried to get hire him. However, he turned Lex's offer down. He later ran into Lois Lane, who wanted to know if he really was Superman. He set her straight by telling him that he never claimed to be Superman. Though she realized he was not actually Superman, Lois believed he was most like the original.
Eventually, Steel found the location of the one distributing his weapons. When he went to confront them, he discovered that his ex-girlfriend and development partner, Angora Lapin a.k.a. White Rabbit was the distributor. Having pieced together the Man of Steel's identity, she offered him a chance to join her in her pursuits, but he promptly turned her down. To escape, she shot him with a Toastmaster and fled as he recovered.
While trying to track White rabbit down, he had a run-in with the Eradicator. After watching him kill a criminal he had apprehended, John told Eradicator that he could not be the real Superman. Upset at the notion, Eradicator attacked John until Lois arrived and stopped the two. However, Eradicator got upset again and flew Steel into orbit. The two landed in California and fought to a standstill. When Steel tells Eradicator that a Superman needs to have compassion, he calms down and leaves.
Unable to fly back to Metropolis, Steel hitches a ride on an airplane. When they land, White Rabbit and her men ambush him at the airport. He manages to fight them off, grab Angora, and force her to take him to the plant where she is producing the Toastmasters. However, the plant was rigged with traps that John manages to escape. He manages to get clear of the plant as it explodes, but Angora is still inside and is presumed dead. Despite the death of the supplier, John knows that there will still be Toastmasters may resurface on day.
The Return of Superman
After Coast City is destroyed, he investigates the destruction personally and runs into Cyborg Superman. He tells John that Eradicator was responsible, but Steel does not fully trust his account. After running into Lois Lane, also suspicious of the story, the notice a disturbance near the harbor, meeting Luthor and Supergirl on the scene. As Steel attacks the suit, Superboy arrives to to warn everyone that Cyborg Superman was truly responsible for the events in Coast City, and that he's coming for Metropolis next. At that moment, the real Superman comes from inside of the warsuit. Despite being powerless, he vows to stop Cyborg Superman's plans.
No one present, including John, believes he is the real Superman, but he nonetheless goes to the ruins of Coast City with Superman and Superboy. Once there, the group sees Engine City where Coast City used to be and manage to force their way inside, but Superboy leaves to stop a missile fired at Metropolis. Once inside, Supergirl appears, having been secretly tailing them at Superman's suggestion. While talking, Superman abbreviates his title from Man of Steel to simply Steel. The three encounter Mongul, who had just activated the jets inside the city in a bid to knock the Earth out of orbit.
While Superman and Supergirl fend off Mongul, Steel heads off to shut down the reactors powering the jets. Once there, Cyborg Superman uses his connection to the machinery to control and morph the room to stop him. Eventually, he takes over his armor, but before he can kill him, John flies the armor into the gear system, jamming it with his armor and disabling the jets.
Though John survives with minimal injuries, his armor is destroyed, leaving him defenseless when Cyborg Superman uses the landscape to try to kill him again. This time, Superboy arrives just in time to save him.After Superman regains his powers and defeats his Cyborg counterpart, everyone returns to Metropolis. With no armor, he continues trying to get toastmasters off the street with little success. After a talk with Superman, Steel decides to leave Metropolis and retire as Steel.
Steel: Returning Home
After his adventures in Metropolis, Steel decides to return to his hometown: Washington D.C. Having originally stayed away to avoid being pursued by his old bosses at Amertek, he decides to take the chance that they have lost interest in him and move back in with his family. Present to greet him at the bus station is his niece Natasha, who greets him by her childhood nickname "Uncle Hunk." While the two talk, a fight breaks out between the Central Avenue Sharks, who are using Toastmasters, and the East Streeters who rely on the strength enhancing drug Tar.
Though John tries to intervene, he is distracted by the sight of his nephew Jehmal in the fray, giving a Tar-Freak an opening to knock him out. When he recovers, he and Natasha head home, where John is greeted by the rest of the family; his grandparents Butter and Bess, his sister-in-law Blondell, her second son Paco, and her foster kids Tyke and Darlene.
While the Irons family is having dinner Jehmal arrives home late. John, remembering what happened that afternoon, asks Bess how he has been, but while they talk, and group of armored thugs working for Amertek appear and attack the family. John manages to take them out, but Butter takes a stray shot. Feeling guilty about bringing danger to his family, John uses his old armor and parts he salvaged from the thugs' armor to improve the suit and become Steel once again. Knowing that his mission would require him to operate outside the law, John keeps the "S" shield off his new armor to avoid dishonoring Superman.
Steel begins balancing investigating Amertek with stopping the constant gang skirmishes plaguing the neighborhood. During on fight, Steel sees Jehmal fighting, confirming his suspicions that he was in a gang. In response, he forces him to tell the rest of the family about it and quit the gang (he actually did not quit). Steel then finds the location of the place where the Toastmasters are sold by a member named Spiral. Steel interrupts the sale and manages to get a lead on the source of the weapons.
However, Spiral, afraid of being considered as a snitch, tricks the gang leader Cowboy into thinking Jehmal sold them out to Steel. The group then captures Jehmal and turns him over to the supplier of the weapons, Amalgam. Before Jehmal is killed, Steel arrives, having tracked Spiral again. As he battles Amalgam, Steel tells Amalgam that Jehmal was innocent. Steel manages to pin Amalgam down, but he assumes Spiral was his informant and kills him. Once the police arrive, Steel leaves, but thanks to something Amalgam said, John gets the idea to use the media to fight Amertek.
Later, John confront his former boss, Col. Weston about dealing the Toastmasters, but he feigns innocence, and john trusts him enough to leave. After breaking into Amertek to find incriminating evidence, a fight involving armored guards lead to the building being destroyed, but he manages to escape with a CD-ROM with the evidence he needed to take down Amertek. Weston uses the incident to paint Steel as a criminal in the eyes of the public. To further add to his troubles, he begins orchestrating on John directly and members of his family.
In a short period, John is attacked by a Tar-Freak at a funeral, Tyke loses the use of his legs after he and Jehmal are caught in a drive-by shooting, Natasha is hit by a car, and Blondell is mugged. Realizing he can't beat Amertek alone, he enlists Detective Shauna Beryl to use the a hard disk full of evidence he broke into Amertek for to take down Amertek. While she gets the information decrypted, John learns that Jehmal found out his gang was responsible for hurting his family. Seeking revenge, Jehmal steals a more powerful, potentially lethal version of Tar and uses it to confront Cowboy. Steel findd them and pins Jehmal down until the S-Tar wears off.
Worlds Collide
After getting Jehmal to the hospital, he then goes to Amertek intent on taking down Weston. The armored guards aren't enough to stop Steel from getting to Weston. He considers killing him, but Detective Beryl arrives to arrest him, and talks Steel down. John forces Weston to tell him who has Amertek selling weapons to gangs. Weston tells about a group in Metropolis led by a man named Hazard, before John hands him over to the police. He then heads to Metropolis to track down Black Ops.
When he arrives he find the city is still recovering from recent events. While searching for Amertek, he encounters Superboy, Rocket and Hardware, the latter two having been transported from their universe into the DC Universe. Steel put his search for Black Ops on hold to help stop their two universes from merging together.
War with Black Ops
When John continues investigating Black Ops, Hazards begins sending his team to attack Steel and further his agenda in Washington. Along the way, he deals with a super-powered serial killer and helps Maxima avoid being captured by an alien warlord. At the same time, his armor begins mysteriously teleporting on and off his body seemingly at random. His fight with Black Ops is interrupted again by the return of White Rabbit, who survived her last encounter with Steel and now plans to brainwash several Congressmen to help her monopolize gun sales in the country.
She sends one of her super-powered thugs to distract Steel and a visiting Superman while her plan came into fruition. However, Natasha was interning for a Congresswoman who was brainwashed, and tipped Steel off that something was wrong. While investigating, he met and befriended actor/British spy Double, and the two team up to stop Angora. While they shut down her plan and capture her crew, Angora herself escapes.
When he returns from fighting White rabbit, he finds out that Tyke has been kidnapped. He begins searching for him to no avail. At the same time, a hi-tech bounty hunter begins targeting Steel, and he finds out that someone is offering a money reward for his armor. He then gets a lead from Detective Beryl that leads him to a child-experimentation operation.
When Steel goes to shut the operation, the bounty hunter from before arrives for another round. After John shows him that his employer is exploiting children, he decides to help Steel free them instead of continue fighting, and tells Steel that Hazard was the one who put up the bounty and that he knows where Hazard's base is.
The two head out to take down Black Ops. They storm the base and take down most of the team, but Hazard and Split escape. However, he finds Tyke inside, but it turns out Tyke went with Hazard willingly because he had promised Tyke the use of his legs again. Though he is returned home safely, he now harbors a deep hatred for his uncle.
Underworld Unleashed
A few days after Tyke is returned home, Steel is helping contain a protest that evolved into a riot when a bomb goes off at a nearby mosque. While rescuing people trapped inside the building, he is attacked from behind. He turn around to find Metallo was the culprit. Remembering Metallo's weakness from his time in Metropolis, Steel manages to knock Metallo's head off.
However, when Neron was supercharging the powers of supervillians around the world, he gave Metallo the power to survive having his head knocked off and control any nearby metal to create a new body, which he does. Steel tries again, knocking his head into the Potomac. With no metal nearby, Steel is satisfied and returns to helping people in the mosque. However, the junk at the bottom of the river and a nearby patrol cruiser provide enough metal to create a bigger and better body. He then tries to absorb Steel's armor,but he can't.
The distraction gives Steel an opening to knock Metallo's head off again, and it conveniently lands at the feet of Lieutenant (formerly detective) Beryl. She then warns Steel about another bomb threat at a local hospital. Steel instructs her to take Metallo's head to S.T.A.R. Labs and races to find the bomb. After capturing the thugs who planted the bomb, they reveal that it is wired to blow if it is tampered with. With less than a minute on the timer, Steel flies as fast as he can to get the bomb to a less populated area.
On the way, he is stopped by Metallo, who managed to reform himself before he could be taken to Star. Steel tries to keep moving, but Metallo equipped himself with rockets, allowing him to follow. With no time to move the bomb, John tosses the bomb at Metallo, but he absorbs it instead. However, while the bomb casing was metal, the explosive was actually plastique, which he couldn't absorb. The bomb then goes off, destroying Metallo entirely. Steel survives the blast, but he passes out in midair.
The Superman Rescue
Before Steel can fall, Alpha Centurion catches him. He tells Steel that Superman has been kidnapped and he is assembling a rescue team to find him before the world realizes he is missing. Steel agrees to help, but wants to get this done as soon as possible before Washington falls apart.
Steel joins Supergirl, Superboy and the Eradicator on the Centurion's ship and head out into space. Superboy tells the others he does not trust the Centurion. These fears are realized when the Centurion abandons the rest to battle an alien platoon on an asteroid. Out-manned and stranded, Steel manages create a makeshift transport. Arriving on a nearby planet, the team is confronted by the Cyborg Superman, who takes them all down. He turns them over as prisoner of the Tribunal he is allied with.
While in custody, Steel discovers the Alpha Centurion is also a prisoner. Steel manages to teleport his armor to him an escape along with Supergirl and Eradicator. While Steel and Supergirl, both in disguise, go to a local bar to try and find information, Eradicator stays behind to try and rescue Superboy. Unfortunately, Steel and Supergirl are discovered and a bar fight breaks out. It ends quickly when the Cyborg turns up and recaptures them. For escaping, they are both sentenced to death.
Fortunately, the group is taken the same place as Superman. Together they manage to escape and rally behind Superman. Thanks to the Cyborg turning on the Tribunal. Superman leads them to confront the Tribunal itself, which ultimately decides to drop the charges against them rather than keep fighting. The group then returns to Earth.
On the way back, Superman thanks Steel for going so far for his sake, John believes that they did little to help, while he saved them and an entire planet. Superman disagrees, and asks him to hang out with him when they reach Metropolis home. Though grateful, John declines in order to get home in time for thanksgiving.
Ending Black Ops
When John returns from space, he parts ways with the squad and return to Washington. However, Tyke, still bitter over having been denied a chance to walk again, was searching for a way for it to be so. Thinking he had found an operation that could restore his legs in a local tabloid, Tyke sought a way to pay for such an operation. When he learned that federal agents were offering a reward for information on Steel's secret identity, Tyke tracked them down and told that Steel was John Henry Irons.
However, they only gave him a measly $20 for the information, meaning he sold out his uncle for nothing. Also, the agents were working with Hazard, meaning his enemy now know who he is. In response, Hazard sics a cyborg named Hardwire (who, ironically, was transformed by the same process Tyke thought would cure his paralysis) on Steel. When he gets there, he guns down the Irons family as they sit down for dinner. No one is killed, but a seriously wounded John is captured..
Hardwire takes John to the agents, but before they can take him, Hardwire turns on them. He grabs them all and flies them to the Washington Monument and blows the top off. When John recovers, his armor appears around him and the two fight. During the fight, Hardwire attaches explosives on himself, Steel, and the two agents, planning to kill himself and them. As they fight, the two agents are killed before the countdown even finishes. Unable to get Hardwire to disarm the devices, Steel teleports his armor off to save his life, so the bombs only kill Hardwire. When the police and the media arrive, John had no choice but to reveal his secret identity to the public.
After his declaration, John is blamed by the police for the destruction of the Monument and is arrested. However, Hazard sends Split to bring John to Hazard's base. Angered at all Hazard has done, he rushes him, but is suspended in the air by his telekinesis. When he asks him why he broke him out of holding, he responds that he is using the "breakout" to distract everyone with a manhunt and masks his agenda. That said, he prepares to kill John.
In a desperate gambit, John tries to summon his armor. He succeeds and fights off the Black Ops members. They reach a standstill when Steel takes Shellshock's twin sister Shellgame hostage. He manages to get her to reveal Hazard's plan; he is hacking into the Pentagon's computers to gain control of America's nuclear arsenal. Once he learns the truth, Hazard nearly kills him with his telekinesis, but Steel manages to teleport himself away along with his armor.
Steel reappears in the "White Zone" his armor goes to when it teleports. However, both he cannot remain there with his armor on, so he teleports back to Washington. However, he winds up in the air with a military chopper that immediately attacks him. As he recovers, Black Ops teleports in to renew their attack, and Steel retreats with the intent to expose Hazard's plan. Steel fends them off, but realizes he still needs to warn someone about Hazard's plan.
He then teleports back to the White Zone to come up with a new plan. When he does, he teleports to his old laboratory to find something he hid there long ago, hoping never to use it but keeping it just in case. The object he finds is the Annihilator, the most powerful weapon he ever designed. Deciding to wait before using it, he begins his plan to stop Hazard.
First, he posts the details of Hazard's plan on the internet, knowing the government would have to investigate. Shortly after, part of the Black Ops team arrives to fight at the same time the FBI arrives to arrest Steel. While Black Ops defeats the agents, Steel flies off again, but they quickly catch up again. They quickly overpower him. The tides tun when Natasha, haven ingested a vial of Tar, helps him out.
Together they fend Black Ops off, but the military arrives to stop them all. Black Ops teleports away, but the grab Natasha and offer her safety for his surrender. Unable to see a better option, Steel takes the Annihilator from it's hiding place and arms it, ready to take the fight to Hazard. After a quick test, he teleports to Black Ops base, ready to take them all down.
He gives the team one chance to free Natasha, but they refuse. He then begins fighting them, but avoids firing the Annihilator. The chaos gives Natasha time to free herself and the two fight Black Ops together. When the are cornered, Steel tries to teleport them both out, but he cannot teleport others with him.
Backed into a corner again, Steel begins using the Annihilator to destroy Hazard's computers, stopping him from hacking into the Pentagon. Hazard tries to immobilize him, but Steel keeps firing into the base, so Hazard has Split teleport them back outside. The fight continues, but Hazard pulls his team back after Steel accidentally hit three of his people with the Annihilator. The two go at it, but when the military intervenes, Steel uses the opening to defeat Hazard.
Once Hazard is detained, Steel learns of the consequences of his actions. While everyone is still alive Child Protective services reclaim Tyke and Darlene feeling that being around Steel is too dangerous. Later, John meets with the government, who claim that Hazard will be dealt with. However he was secretly allowed to go free and granted custody of Tyke. In order to keep the Annhilator out of the wrong hands, he leaves it in Hazard's base and triggers it's self-destruct.
Leaving D.C.
Now that Steel's identity is out, his family has no peace. They are harassed by neighbors and mobs of people, who feel he is too dangerous to have near their homes. Later, Natasha is kidnapped by Plasmus, who is trying to blackmail Steel into creating a suit for himself. Steel rescues her by building a suit with a trap for Plasmus inside.
Though Natasha is safe, John is still worried that he is endangering his family. Steel moves out (temporarily staying with his friend Dr. Amanda Quick) but the family is still harassed. His family is attacked by both Doctor Polaris and the Parasite, both arriving seeking the Annihilator. John Henry's beloved grandmother Bess is killed in the fight when she tries to attack Parasite. Deciding it is too dangerous for his family, he enlists Double to move them somewhere secret.
After teleporting into White Zone, he sees a nightmarish looking version of his armor. He quickly teleports again, ending up at Hazard's old lair. He discovers the three Black Ops member he killed were actually still alive. They corner him, as he teleported without his armor, but the armor has followed him to the lair.
John Henry works with the other three to try and fight off the armor. They try to flee, but the armor keeps finding them. Natasha, having run away to avoid being relocated, took some Tar and followed him there and tries to help. John Henry realizes that the armor is his dark side given form. Realizing this, Steel banishes the armor to the White Zone, seemingly for good. Later, John realizes Natasha is handling Bess's death poorly.
She spends several nights sleeping at the cemetery and then attacks John in a Tar fueled rage when he confronts here there. A blind gravedigger tells them that Bess's soul is not at rest because someone stole her wedding ring and she wants to be buried with it. Steel manages to track down the thief and the recover wedding ring. To return it, John and Natasha exhume Bess's body is exhumed and rebury her with the ring, letting her soul rest. John Henry and Natasha fix up their old home before leaving it and D.C. behind.
The Death of Steel
Irons suffered mortal wounds after releasing Doomsday from the JLA Watchtower to battle Imperiex. Superman was unable to turn away the Black Racer, a being that gathers souls and ushers them into the afterlife. This time, however, the Black Racer showed mercy and delivered Irons to Apokolips, where the evil Darkseid healed Iron's body. Darkseid placed Irons in the Entropy Aegis, a burned out Imperiex-probe altered by Apokoliptan science. This new armor was far superior to his old, but the upgrades made it more of a curse than a blessing. Darkseid was able to use the Entropy Aegis to control Steel and make him serve Apokolips.
Superman gathered the members of Team Superman and challenged Darkseid on the field of battle for the return of Steel. After his defeat Darkseid removed Steel from the armor only to reveal that he was returning him as he found him in a state of near death. Natasha Irons and a Multiverse displaced Supergirl were able to act quickly and save his life. Upon his return to Earth John allowed his niece, Natasha to take up the mantle of Steel while he recovered.
52 Weeks
During the year where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman disappear, Steel was the active hero of Metropolis. Using a new armor he had to deal with his rebellious niece, Natasha, who wants to be a superhero, the mystery of Supernova, and Lex Luthor's Everyman Project. When Natasha tries to join the Teen Titans, he stops her by destroying her armor, and tells her to build her own armor if she wants it badly enough. As part of Luthor's conspiracy, John Henry was unknowingly given new powers: a steel coated skin than he could heat at will.
When Natasha found out, she was upset as he forbade her from participating. In response, she joins anyway and earns a spot on Lex's Infinity Inc. team. When Steel comes to get Natasha away from Lex, she attacks him and drives him away. However, when Natasha catches onto Luthor's plans, she tries relaying her findings but is caught. When John comes to help her, he finds Natasha's teammates opposing him. He easily tears through them, but the Teen Titans arrive to back him up.
Steel dispatches Everyman at the cost of his armor, but he reaches Luthor. However, that Luthor used the meta-gene therapy to give him powers like those of Superman. Steel fights him anyway but is overpowered. Thanks to Luthor being overwhelmed by his super-senses and Natasha finding a way to disable his powers, Steel comes out on top. Before he knocks him out, Steel reveals that the meta-gene therapy was toxic to the human body, and he would have died in six months if they hadn't intervened.
Infinity Inc.
Several months after the Everyman Project was shut down, John realized something was wrong with Natasha. Despite going to therapy to help with her state of mind, Natasha did not get better. When Natasha refused to continue therapy, he tried to talk to her about it. When he touched her though, Natasha turned into a cloud of mist that dissipated. Distraught, he asked Superman to search for her to no avail. After checking with other former Everyman project members Gerome and Erik, he is attacked by Kid Empty, another Everyman participant who feeds on the minds of others.
Before he can kill him, Natasha regains her solid form and drives him away. John realizes that everyone involved in the project is gaining new powers and deduces that their powers reflect their mental state, with Natasha's power reflecting her fear of abandonment. At the same time, Mercy Graves, trying to avoid being found by Luthor, who is in hiding after the Everyman Project fell apart, asks to run with him to avoid being caught. Skeptical that she has changed, he gives her a chance to prove herself.
After Jerome, Erik, and Natasha use their new powers to take down an Kid Empty, John decides to have them and their new friend Lucia reform Infinity Inc. to help them round up the the participants who gain new powers and show the world that the Everyman members are not all dangerous. While the team was in the field, John remained in touch with them from Steelworks to lend support.
After a few missions Steel answers a call from Superman who found a gruesome body of an Everyman teen in the Arctic. Eventually he and the team realizes that someone is capturing, experimenting on, and killing Everyman participants. When the teams gets a lead on the killer's location, Natasha opts not to tell Steel. Leaving alone, Natasha sent a voicemail telling John what they were up to. Rushing after them, Steel and Superman arrive to find a crater where the building the killer was hiding in used to be. Supermans asks if Steel is okay, and responds that he vows to find Natasha and the team again.
Reign of Doomsday
Steel resurfaces for a fight with Doomsday. With no other heroes around, Steel is left to fight Doomsday by himself. Natasha Irons tries to persuade her uncle not to fight Doomsday, but John insist and heads off into battle. John gave the fight all he had. John even managed to hit Doomsday with a direct hit from his hammer. Steel had hurled his hammer from a thousand feet away.
During the fight Doomsday evolves growing armor out his body and also possess the ability to fly. John manages to break away a piece of Doomsday's chest armor which allowed John to introduce nanonytes into Doomsday's body. The nanonytes were suppose to paralyze Doomsday for an hour until help arrived, but the effects only lasted a few seconds. John then gets pounded by Doomsday until he is knocked unconscious. We last see John being carried off by a flying Doomsday.
New 52
John Henry Irons debuted as a scientist working for Gen. Sam Lane for Metal-0 Project, an initiative to develop an armored super-soldier designed to stop the recently debuted Superman. But he quit when he saw how Luthor tortured the captured Superman, under Lane's license.
When Brainiac, calling himself the Collecter of Worlds, attacked Metropolis and take control of John Corben, Irons donned a Metal-0 suit prototype and stopped the controlled soldier with a PC virus of his own design.
Steel has been seen within the pages of Action Comics, during a back up storyline. In this story, Steel helps Superman to fight crime. Steel was then seen in Action Comics Annual helping Superman fend off the villain called Kryptonite Man. Steel defeats the villain and managed to make his powers defunct. He is later was seen in Australia, helping the poor and searching new ways to use his technologies in less aggressive scenarios.
He has joined The Reverse Suicide Squad with Power Girl, Unknown Soldier, and Warrant. The Thinker under the guise of Amanda Waller is leading them.
After Forever Evil, Steel joined the forces than were fighting against Doomsday, but he was affected by the toxic emanations from the monster. To stop the damage and prevent more infection, Steel added to his armor a film of liquid metal. He would join to Lana Lang in a search for Doomsday possessed Superman in space to help him but they discovered than in Superman absence, Brainiac attacked the earth again.
Currently he is in a relationship with Superwoman aka Lana Lang.
DC: Rebirth
As things begin to change in the DC Universe, Steel began a new initiative in Metropolis. Having started up Steelworks with Natasha and letting Lana move in with him while she starts a new job in Metropolis while operating as Steel. Using new armors, he fights alongside Natasha and Lana, now operating as Superwoman. When Ultrawoman takes over the city in a bid to steal Superwoman's powers, Steel helps lead and coordinate the efforts take the city back and defend the people from her army of female Bizarro clones.
Once Ultrawoman is defeated, John Henry has to help Lana, whose powers have begun killing her. Desperate to save his girlfriend, he enlists Superman's help, and he stays with her while she recovers. When she does, they discover that Lana has lost all of her powers. John tries to support her while she copes, but she pushes him away instead, though they later reconcile.
John Henry and Natasha then give Lana a power suit to help her continue as Superwoman. However, they discover that the last time Lana donned it, the suit was able to permanently copy her now lost powers. With Lana's problem resolved, the three return to fighting crime and rounding up the escaped metahuman prisoners.
Powers and Abilities
John Henry Irons possess no superhuman powers. He is an exceptionally gifted intellect that specializes in various fields of engineering. A genius of the highest order, he built a bullet proof suit of armor whose computerized pneumatic exoskeletal joints gave him superhuman strength.
In specific situations Steel had temporarily developed superpowers:
Teleportation: When under unexplained circumstances he was able to transport himself to a "white void zone".
Organic steel skin: During 52 Steel was injected with the formula of the Everyman Project by Lex Luthor and developed an invulnerable organic steel skin than he could super heat at will and throw as a projectile.
Weapons and Equipment - Armors
Steel had used different armors since his first appearance:
Man of Steel armor: Homemade armor created in homage to Superman.
Shieldless armor: Used after the return of Superman and from the time Steel fought against Hazard and AmerTek.
JLA armor: From the time he joined the JLA, and used a similar yet different "S" shield.
Faceless armor: Similar to the previous one, but with a faceless helmet instead his steal coated face.
Entropy Aegis armor: Forged in Apokolips, was instrumental to bring him back to life. However it was feeding of his soul, so he had to quit using it.
52 armor: Using after Infinity Crisis and during the year of absent of Superman, he used again the El house crest as his own symbol.
Metal-0 Prototype armor: In the New 52 continuity, this was his first armor. He used it to fight Metallo and the Kyptonite Man.
Shield Armor: Using against the Suicide Squad and Doomsday. He would later add a film of liquid steel.
Armor Systems
Helmet systems include broadband communications array, VDU readouts for environmental controls, and retractable one-way visor.
Life-support systems which recycle oxygen supply, remove waste, and convert perspiration to potable water.
Independent heating and freon-compressed air-conditioning units regulate internal temperatures.
Hydraulic servomotors along his exoskeletal joints increase strength and speed tenfold
Air-cooled cannons in his forearms gauntlet fire metal spikes and rubber projectiles. They function as the launching platform for concussive sonic grenades.
Segmented breakaway boots that can be jettisoned if necessary.
Micro-jet engine compressors controlled by Pressure sensitive toggles in his gloves.
Thrusters proved a wide range of airborne manoeuvrability.
Armor is composed of breathable fire-retardant nomex fabric.
Embedded solar cells help keep his armor fully charged.
His suit is made of a composite high-tensile steel alloy treated with micron-thick reflective sealant to shield against microwave and subatomic particle radiation.
Trivia : According to JLA 1000000, his Armor is going to last all the way to the 118th Century and be worn by Steel 7 in the 51st Century, Steelman of New Centurions in the 100th Century and Lancelot Grail, the Cosmic Knight in 118th Century
Hammer Abilities
Remote-controlled
Can alter trajectory or stop mid-throw
Polarizing inertial dampers within hammer increase inertia relative to distance hurled
Magnetically attaches to back of armor.
Segmented handle telescopes into locked position.
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
_____________________________
A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Dr. John Henry Irons II
Publisher: DC
First appearance: The Adventures of Superman #500 (June 1993)
Created by: Louise Simonson (Writer)
Jon Bogdanove (Artist)
First appearance cover:
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/51737806513/
This is Steel's first appearance, but his namesake, John Henry, appeared in BP 2019 Day 270!
For Best Result
click on an image, once you're on the photo-page
to view higher resolution image on black background
This photo is/was part of the first flickr@paris exhibition.
Official flyer here.
See all my sold, published, and exhibited photos in this collection : [Sold - Published - Exhibited Works]
[Taken in Paris (France) - 04Aug05]
My book is finally available: app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/natural-origami/b23d0866-0...
It includes 15 animal-based models using a new crease pattern diagramming method for experienced folders.
Just sharing. :o) I got published with 3 cards in the latest issue of the norwegian stamping magazine called "Ett Trykk" - YAY!
The Library Congress One of migratory family
I claim no rights other than colorizing this image if you wish to use let me know and always give due credit to The Library of Congress I have no commercial gain in publishing this image.
Title
One of migratory family in Farm Security Administration (FSA) labor camp. Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California
Contributor Names
Lange, Dorothea, photographer
Created / Published
1939 Feb.
Subject Headings
- United States--California--Imperial County--Calipatria
- FSA camps--Calipatria--California
Format Headings
Safety film negatives.
Genre
Safety film negatives
Notes
- Title and other information from caption card.
- Transfer; United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944.
- More information about the FSA/OWI Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsaowi
- Temp. note: usf34batch2
- Film copy on SIS roll 19, frame 2277.
Medium
1 negative : safety ; 4 x 5 inches or smaller.
Call Number/Physical Location
LC-USF34- 019223-C [P&P] LOT 350 (corresponding photographic print)
Source Collection
Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
Repository
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Digital Id
fsa 8b15449 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b15449
Library of Congress Control Number
2017771617
Reproduction Number
LC-USF34-019223-C (b&w film neg.)
Rights Advisory
No known restrictions. For information, see U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html
Online Format
image
Description
1 negative : safety ; 4 x 5 inches or smaller.
My Gannet Colony shot commended in Landscape category. I don't think I ever uploaded this B&W shot to Flickr...
Congrats to Kah Kit Yoong for winning this category!
Just sharing. :o) I got published with 3 cards in the latest issue of the norwegian stamping magazine called "Ett Trykk" - YAY!
My first book has been released! I am one of the 56 artists featured in the Chinese publication "I LOVE HANDICRAFT- 56 Craft Creators' interview and DIY Tips". There is an interview, a bunch of photos of my work, and the instructions for my iPod cover. ISBN: 978-7-5019-6288-4
Find order information here.
SOLD OUT
published on the "hoof blog"
hoofcare.blogspot.com/2009/12/farriers-portrait-no-chestn...
please, view it large.
Milton H. Greene (March 14, 1922 in New York City - August 8, 1985) was a fashion and celebrity photographer.
He is best known for the photoshoots he did with Marilyn Monroe.
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- Click -
-----on Black --------->>
© The Best of Today ©
Better © View
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# Photographer: Milton Greene
lived with Marilyn Monroe, went fishing with Paul Newman, and hung out on the Cape with Norman Mailer and in Hollywood with Steve McQueen.
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Since his death in 1985, most of his works have yet to see the light of day, but thanks to his widow Amy, that’s recently changed.
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A whole chapter is dedicated to photos of Marilyn Monroe, where some of her most iconic portraits mix with private moments from her life. Ultimately, Greene’s photography invites us back to an era when film and fashion, art and style were at their highest.
style: published fashion and celebrity series ( and American Airlines in the 1950s)
original clarity and integrity
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The range of Milton Greene’s subjects include such people as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Sammy Davis, Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, Groucho Marx, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, Judy Garland, Giacometti, Lauren Hutton, Alfred Hitchcock, Romy Schneider, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Ava Gardner, Steve McQueen, Claudia Cardinale, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Dizzy Gillespie, Catherine Deneuve and Norman Mailer as well as many others.
But it was his unique friendship, business relationship and ensuing photographs of Marilyn Monroe for which he is most fondly remembered.
____
My --- stream on black -------
My stream on black recent shots.
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Before marrying Arthur Miller, Monroe lived with Milton and his family in their Connecticut farmhouse. It was during this period that Greene was able to capture some of the most beautiful photographs ever taken of Marilyn Monroe, recording her moods, beauty, talent and spirits.
During their four years together, Greene photographed Monroe in 52 photographic sessions including the famous “Black” sitting.
more
source:
I was thrilled to receive a copy of the new Insight Guide to Romania - where several of my photos have been published! Hanging out Flickr has really helped me improve my skills. Thanks to all my Flickr friends for your comments and encouragement!
Published on Nov 17, 2019
video youtu.be/zdAwkT7MPG8
18 Sept, 19:44 actividad inusual de anomalías se observan sobre el lado Este" de la ciudad capital , Flares , Orb (extraños orbitales luminosos ) y Flashes anómalos ( con patrones Random en su destellos ) tubieron un pico de actividad , mirando hacia y sobre Aquario , la mas llamativa la de destellos Random , se desplazaba tanto erraticamente , hacia el Norte " se pudo constatar dicha actividad inusual y registrar en infrarrojo .
20 Sept 2019, 19:42 otra Anomalía es registrada, esta vez flota casi fija en al vertical de la ciudad de Bs.as, al principio produce grandes destellos de -1 Mag y parece Estacionaria " en el Cielo, luego Sinuosides
y comienza un lento desplazamiento hacia el Este" .
22-10-2019 21:07 Una Intromision anómala de gran magnitud , sobrevolo el Cielo de buenos aires , por debajo de la zona celeste de Capricornio a unos 40° Alt - NNO" , aparecio cerca de la estrella Altair 0.8 Mag ( en el mismo momento habia vuelos activos hacia ese sector ) en la capital de Argentina , la misteriosa anomalía ( Flash Light ) genero varias descargas luminicas de " - 1 Mag " ( muy visibles a simple vista) y se desplazo de NNO" hacia el ESTE" , pero a los pocos minutos desaparecio , se logro un registro en infrarrojo, en la foto estatica del video, se lo ve pasando próxima a las estrellas, Eps Del de Mag 4.0, Iot Del de Mag5.4 y Kap Del de Mag 5.2 . Saludos amigos y amigas www.glaucoart.com.ar
El 11-10-2019 mientras se fotografia la Luna con Telescopio 114/900 a 13 Megapixel, una de las fotos muestra una anormal Lenticula oscura y bien definida, sobre el centro del disco Lunar y no pudo identificarse , mas que como un O.v.n.i ( muy parecido o casi identico , a la extraordinaria sequencia registrada en Rusia este año 2019 con un equipo de alta prestación astronomica Nikon P 900 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zQX_Huidzk
para analizar la Fotografia a 13Mp con su EXIF original pueden entrar a los bancos del taller glaucoart en
www.flickr.com/photos/glaucoa...
Caso actualizado ( Febrero 2019) del registro de un ROD en su video original tomado con Telescopio114/900 y S4 y detenido cuadro por cuadro . No esta Identificado " es completamente inusual a este nivel de definición y aumento optico .
Caso del ROD mas emblematico registrado por el taller glaucoart el 16-10-1999 en el evento de la Flotilla Ovni , evento analizado oficialmente" en fundaciones y luego difundido/informado en varias web especializadas en la tematica . Son " 6" cuadros recuperados de diferentes soportes y generaciones ( Mpg - Vhs - Dvd )
Registro Edición y Música: Ricardo Enrique D'angelo Gentilini .
Published in Haute Doll Magazine.
Francie owns the local organic garden and flower shop in town. She works closely with Charity Farms to provide fresh organic produce to central Florida’s homeless, impoverished and elderly. One hundred percent donation to Charity Farms.
Vintage Francie model 1170 circa 1965
Vintage Francie fashion Bells #1275 circa 1967
Vintage hand painted furniture circa 1950
Handmade miniatures
Fleet Squadron :
-1 Heavy Landing Bomber
-2 Fast Landing Corvette
-5 Fast Landing Interceptor
Minifigs For 1 Bomber :
- 1 sniper with rifle, precision visual binocular, communication device and jet pack
- 1 soldier with pistol and energy shield
- 1 Laser Gunner
- 1 Demolisher with double heavy gatling and laser designator
- 2 Soldiers in reinforced armor, with jet pack, pistol and rifle
- 4 battle droids
- 1 Soldier with double laser gun
- 1 rocket launch with perforating load with serving, pistol and communicator
- 1 flame-thrower
- 1 tactician of battle drones
- 3 Pilots
Total = 14 commandos + 3 pilots
Minifigs For 1 Corvette :
-3 Officers on the Bridge
-2 Pilots in the cockpit
-3 Heavy Battle droids
-6 Space Commandos
Minifigs For 1 Interceptor :
-1 Pilots in the cockpit
-2 Scout Battle droids
-4 Space Commandos
Create with the Official Lego Digital Designer software : ldd.us.lego.com/en-us/
3D pictures (or 3D rendering) generate with special software.
Building Instructions LDD :
-HEAVY LANDING BOMBER : ldd.us.lego.com/en-us/gallery/e8a10495-4f6d-4d32-8ace-e91...
-FAST LANDING CORVETTE : wwwsecure.us.lego.com/en-us/gallery/88a7a77f-a959-4bb7-bd...
-FAST LANDING INTERCEPTOR : ldd.us.lego.com/en-us/gallery/68c67a70-738e-43b1-8256-2a5...
The Postcard
A postally unused postkarte that was published by Ottmar Zieher of Munich. The card has a divided back.
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner, who was born on the 22nd. May 1813, was a German composer, theatre 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 revolutionised 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 the drama.
He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Richard's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration. He also used leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements.
His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music.
Richard's Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.
Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. Bayreuth is a town on the Red Main river in Bavaria. At its center is the Richard Wagner Museum in the composer's former home, Villa Wahnfried.
The Ring and Parsifal were premiered at the Festspielhaus, and Wagner's most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants.
Richard's thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors.
His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment – particularly since the late 20th. century, where they express antisemitic sentiments.
The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th. century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.
Richard Wagner - The Early Years
Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, who lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in the Jewish quarter on the 22nd. May 1813.
He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine (née Paetz), the daughter of a baker.
Wagner's father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard's birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl's friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers.
Johanna and her family moved to Geyer's residence in Dresden, and until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.
Geyer's love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben, Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel.
In late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received piano instruction from his Latin teacher. However Richard struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard, and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear.
Following Geyer's death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer's brother.
At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct.
During this period, Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was at school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe.
Wagner was determined to set it to music, and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.
By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with Christian Gottlieb Müller.
In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th. Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th. Symphony. Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th. Symphony.
Richard was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem.
Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.
In 1829 Richard saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote:
"When I look back across my entire life
I find no event to place beside this in
the impression it produced on me.
The profoundly human and ecstatic
performance of this incomparable artist
kindled in me an almost demonic fire."
In 1831, Wagner enrolled at Leipzig University, where he became a member of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig.
Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons. He arranged for his pupil's Piano Sonata in B-flat major (which was consequently dedicated to him) to be published as Wagner's Op. 1.
A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833.
He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which he never completed.
Richard Wagner's Early Career and Marriage (1833–1842)
In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the theatre in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
This work, which imitated the style of Weber, went unproduced until half a century later, when it premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.
Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
The work was staged at Magdeburg in 1836, but closed before the second performance. This, together with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left Richard bankrupt.
Wagner had fallen for one of the leading ladies at Magdeburg, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer, and after the disaster of Das Liebesverbot he followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to get an engagement at the theatre.
They married in Tragheim Church on the 24th. November 1836, although In May 1837, Minna left Wagner for another man. This was however only the first débâcle of a tempestuous marriage.
In June 1837, Wagner moved to Riga (then part of the Russian Empire), where he became music director of the local opera; having in this capacity engaged Minna's sister Amalie (also a singer) for the theatre, he resumed relations with Minna during 1838.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. In fact, debts plagued Wagner for most of his life.
Initially they took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine.
The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839 and stayed there until 1842. Wagner made a scant living by writing articles and short novelettes such as A pilgrimage to Beethoven, which sketched his growing concept of "music drama", and An end in Paris, where he depicts his own miseries as a German musician in the French metropolis.
Richard also provided arrangements of operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house. During this stay he completed his third and fourth operas Rienzi and Der Fliegende Holländer.
Richard Wagner in Dresden (1842–1849)
Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. With the strong support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre (Hofoper) in the Kingdom of Saxony.
In 1842, Wagner moved to Dresden. His relief at returning to Germany was recorded in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of 1842, where he wrote that, en route from Paris:
"For the first time I saw the Rhine—
with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor
artist, swore eternal fidelity to my
German fatherland."
Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim on the 20th. October 1842.
Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he staged there Der Fliegende Holländer (2nd. January 1843) and Tannhäuser (19th. October 1845), the first two of his three middle-period operas.
Wagner also mixed with artistic circles in Dresden, including the composer Ferdinand Hiller and the architect Gottfried Semper.
Wagner's involvement in left-wing politics abruptly ended his welcome in Dresden. Wagner was active among socialist German nationalists there, regularly receiving such guests as the conductor and radical editor August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Richard was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach. Widespread discontent came to a head in 1849, when the unsuccessful May Uprising in Dresden broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role.
A warrant for the arrest of Richard Wagner was issued on the 16th. May 1849, along with warrants for other revolutionaries.
Wagner had to flee, first visiting Paris and then settling in Zürich where he at first took refuge with a friend, Alexander Müller.
Richard Wagner In Exile: Switzerland (1849–1858)
Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile from Germany. He had completed Lohengrin, the last of his middle-period operas, before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.
Wagner was in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any regular income. In 1850, Julie, the wife of his friend Karl Ritter, began to pay him a small pension which she maintained until 1859.
With help from her friend Jessie Laussot, this was to have been augmented to an annual sum of 3,000 thalers per year, but the plan was abandoned when Wagner began an affair with Mme. Laussot.
Wagner even plotted an elopement with her in 1850, which her husband prevented. Meanwhile, Wagner's wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Wagner fell victim to ill-health, according to Ernest Newman "Largely a matter of overwrought nerves", which made it difficult for him to continue writing.
Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was a set of essays. In "The Artwork of the Future" (1849), he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), in which music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft were unified.
"Judaism in Music" (1850) was the first of Wagner's writings to feature antisemitic views. In this polemic Wagner argued, frequently using traditional antisemitic abuse, that Jews had no connection to the German spirit, and were thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial music.
According to him, they composed music to achieve popularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to creating genuine works of art.
In "Opera and Drama" (1851), Wagner described the aesthetics of music drama that he was using to create the Ring cycle. Before leaving Dresden, Wagner had drafted a scenario that eventually became Der Ring des Nibelungen.
He initially wrote the libretto for a single opera, Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried's Death), in 1848. After arriving in Zürich, he expanded the story with Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), which explored the hero's background.
He completed the text of the cycle by writing the libretti for Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) and Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) and revising the other libretti to conform to his new concept, completing them in 1852.
The concept of opera expressed in "Opera and Drama" and in other essays effectively renounced all the operas he had previously written through Lohengrin. Partly in an attempt to explain his change of views, Wagner published in 1851 the autobiographical "A Communication to My Friends".
This included his first public announcement of what was to become the Ring cycle:
"I shall never write an Opera more. As I have
no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works,
I will call them Dramas ... I propose to produce
my myth in three complete dramas, preceded
by a lengthy Prelude (Vorspiel).
At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose,
at some future time, to produce those three
Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of
three days and a fore-evening."
Wagner began composing the music for Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, following it immediately with Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856).
He began work on the third Ring drama, which he now called simply Siegfried, probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the first two acts.
He decided to put the work aside in order to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story Tristan and Iseult.
One source of inspiration for Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his The World as Will and Representation, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend Georg Herwegh.
Wagner later called this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition. He remained an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life.
One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the arts as a direct expression of the world's essence, namely, blind, impulsive will.
This doctrine contradicted Wagner's view, expressed in "Opera and Drama", that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner scholars have argued that Schopenhauer's influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose.
Aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.
A second source of inspiration was Wagner's infatuation with the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks, who were both great admirers of his music, in Zürich in 1852.
From May 1853 onwards Wesendonck made several loans to Wagner to finance his household expenses in Zürich, and in 1857 placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal, which became known as the Asyl ("asylum" or "place of rest").
During this period, Wagner's growing passion for his patron's wife inspired him to put aside work on the Ring cycle (which was not resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan.
While planning the opera, Wagner composed the Wesendonck Lieder, five songs for voice and piano, setting poems by Mathilde. Two of these settings are explicitly subtitled by Wagner as "Studies for Tristan und Isolde".
Among the conducting engagements that Wagner undertook for revenue during this period, he gave several concerts in 1855 with the Philharmonic Society of London, including one before Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed his Tannhäuser overture and spoke with Wagner after the concert, writing in her diary that:
"Wagner was short, very quiet, wears
spectacles & has a very finely-developed
forehead, a hooked nose & projecting
chin."
Richard Wagner in Exile: Venice and Paris (1858–1862)
Wagner's uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter to Mathilde from him. After the resulting confrontation with Minna, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice, where he rented an apartment in the Palazzo Giustinian, while Minna returned to Germany.
Wagner's attitude to Minna had changed; the editor of his correspondence with her, John Burk, has said that:
"She was to him an invalid, to be treated
with kindness and consideration, but,
except at a distance, was a menace to
his peace of mind."
Wagner continued his correspondence with Mathilde and his friendship with her husband Otto, who maintained his financial support. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde, Wagner wrote, half-satirically, of Tristan:
"Child! This Tristan is turning into something
terrible. This final act!!!—I fear the opera will
be banned ... only mediocre performances
can save me!
Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive
people mad."
In November 1859, Wagner once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess Pauline von Metternich, whose husband was the Austrian ambassador in Paris.
The performances of the Paris Tannhäuser in 1861 were a notable fiasco. This was partly a consequence of the conservative tastes of the Jockey Club, which organised demonstrations in the theatre to protest at the presentation of the ballet feature in act 1 (instead of its traditional location in the second act).
The opportunity was also exploited by those who wanted to use the occasion as a veiled political protest against the pro-Austrian policies of Napoleon III. It was during this visit that Wagner met the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote an appreciative brochure, "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris".
The opera was withdrawn after the third performance, and Wagner left Paris soon after. He had sought a reconciliation with Minna during this Paris visit, and although she joined him there, the reunion was not successful, and they again parted from each other when Wagner left.
Richard Wagner's Return and Resurgence (1862–1871)
The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in Germany after he had fled Dresden was fully lifted in 1862. The composer settled in Biebrich, on the Rhine near Wiesbaden.
Here Minna visited him for the last time: they parted irrevocably, though Wagner continued to give financial support to her while she lived in Dresden until her death in 1866.
In Biebrich, Wagner at last began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only mature comedy. Wagner wrote a first draft of the libretto in 1845, and he had resolved to develop it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by Titian's painting The Assumption of the Virgin.
Throughout this period (1862–1864) Wagner sought to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna. Despite many rehearsals, the opera remained unperformed, and gained a reputation as being "impossible" to sing, which added to Wagner's financial problems.
Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas, had the composer brought to Munich.
The King, who was homosexual, expressed in his correspondence a passionate personal adoration for the composer, and Wagner in his responses had no scruples about feigning reciprocal feelings.
Ludwig settled Wagner's considerable debts, and proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned.
Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben, at the King's request. Wagner noted that his rescue by Ludwig coincided with news of the death of his earlier mentor (but later supposed enemy) Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote:
"I regretted that this operatic master,
who had done me so much harm,
should not have lived to see this day."
After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered at the National Theatre Munich on the 10th. June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost 15 years. (The premiere had been scheduled for the 15th. May, but was delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.)
The conductor of this premiere was Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth in April that year to a daughter, named Isolde, a child not of Bülow but of Wagner.
Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner and was herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt.
Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though nevertheless, the two men were friends. The indiscreet affair scandalised Munich, and Wagner also fell into disfavour with many leading members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King.
In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.
Ludwig installed Wagner at the Villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die Meistersinger was completed at Tribschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on the 21st. June the following year.
At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the Ring, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich in 1869 and 1870. However Wagner retained his dream, first expressed in "A Communication to My Friends", of presenting the first complete cycle at a special festival in a new, dedicated, opera house.
Not everyone was impressed by Wagner's work at the time; on the cover of the 18th. April 1869 edition of L'Éclipse, André Gill suggested that Wagner's music was ear-splitting. He produced a cartoon showing a misshapen figure of a man with a tiny body below a head with prominent nose and chin standing on the lobe of a human ear. The figure is hammering the sharp end of a crochet symbol into the inner part of the ear as blood pours out.
Minna died of a heart attack on the 25th. January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Following Minna's death Cosima wrote to Hans von Bülow several times asking him to grant her a divorce, but Bülow refused to concede this.
He consented only after she had two more children with Wagner; another daughter, named Eva, after the heroine of Meistersinger, and a son Siegfried, named for the hero of the Ring.
The divorce was finally sanctioned, after delays in the legal process, by a Berlin court on the 18th. July 1870. Richard and Cosima's wedding took place on the 25th. August 1870.
On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner arranged a surprise performance (its premiere) of the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.
Wagner, settled into his new-found domesticity, turned his energies towards completing the Ring cycle. However he had not abandoned polemics: he republished his 1850 pamphlet "Judaism in Music", originally issued under a pseudonym, under his own name in 1869.
He extended the introduction, and wrote a lengthy additional final section. The publication led to several public protests at early performances of Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim.
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1871–1876)
In 1871, Wagner decided to move to Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. The town council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—as a site for the theatre.
The Wagners moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theatre") was laid.
Wagner initially announced the first Bayreuth Festival, at which for the first time the Ring cycle would be presented complete, for 1873, but since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building was delayed, and the proposed date for the festival was deferred.
To raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner began touring Germany conducting concerts. By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig were initially ignored, but early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, the King relented and provided a loan.
The full building programme included the family home, "Wahnfried", into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, moved from their temporary accommodation on the 18th. April 1874. Wagner was ultimately laid to rest in the Wahnfried garden; in 1977 Cosima's ashes were placed alongside Wagner's body. The grave is shown in the photograph.
The theatre was completed in 1875, and the festival scheduled for the following year. Commenting on the struggle to finish the building, Wagner remarked to Cosima:
"Each stone is red with
my blood and yours".
For the design of the Festspielhaus, Wagner appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had previously solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich.
Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these included darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.
The Festspielhaus finally opened on the 13th. August 1876 with Das Rheingold, at last taking its place as the first evening of the complete Ring cycle. The 1876 Bayreuth Festival therefore saw the premiere of the complete cycle, performed as a sequence as the composer had intended.
The 1876 Festival consisted of three full Ring cycles (under the baton of Hans Richter). At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper Le Figaro, which called the music "The dream of a lunatic".
The disillusioned included Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his Untimely Meditations, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time.
The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later, his attitude towards the productions was:
"Never again, never again!"
Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks. The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought further sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the Centennial March for America, for which he received $5000.
Richard Wagner - The Final Years (1876–1883)
Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, much of which Wagner spent in Italy for health reasons.
From 1876 to 1878 Wagner also embarked on the last of his documented emotional liaisons, this time with Judith Gautier, whom he had met at the 1876 Festival.
Wagner was also much troubled by problems of financing Parsifal, and by the prospect of the work being performed by other theatres than Bayreuth. He was once again assisted by the liberality of King Ludwig, but was still forced by his personal financial situation in 1877 to sell the rights of several of his unpublished works (including the Siegfried Idyll) to the publisher Schott.
Wagner wrote several articles in his later years, often on political topics, and often reactionary in tone, repudiating some of his earlier, more liberal, views.
These include "Religion and Art" (1880) and "Heroism and Christianity" (1881), which were printed in the journal Bayreuther Blätter, published by his supporter Hans von Wolzogen.
Wagner's sudden interest in Christianity at this period, which infuses Parsifal, was contemporary with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, "the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history", so as to represent, for example, the Ring as a work reflecting Christian ideals.
Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860's), repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations.
Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on the 26th. May.
Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe angina attacks.
During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on the 29th. August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.
After the festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. Wagner died of a heart attack at the age of 69 on the 13th. February 1883 at Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th.-century palazzo on the Grand Canal.
The legend that the attack was prompted by argument with Cosima over Wagner's supposedly amorous interest in the singer Carrie Pringle, who had been a Flower-maiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth, is without credible evidence.
After a funerary gondola bore Wagner's remains across the Grand Canal, his body was taken to Germany where it was buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried.
Richard Wagner's Works
Wagner's musical output is listed by the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV) as comprising 113 works, including fragments and projects.
The first complete scholarly edition of his musical works in print was commenced in 1970 under the aegis of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz, and is presently (2023) under the editorship of Egon Voss.
It will consist of 21 volumes (57 books) of music and 10 volumes (13 books) of relevant documents and texts.
Richard Wagner's Early Works (to 1842)
Wagner's earliest attempts at opera were often uncompleted. Abandoned works include a pastoral opera based on Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten (The Infatuated Lover's Caprice), written at the age of 17, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), on which Wagner worked in 1832, and the singspiel Männerlist Größer als Frauenlist (Men are More Cunning than Women, 1837–1838).
Die Feen (The Fairies, 1833) was not performed in the composer's lifetime and Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1836) was withdrawn after its first performance.
Rienzi (1842) was Wagner's first opera to be successfully staged.
The compositional style of these early works was conventional— the relatively more sophisticated Rienzi showing the clear influence of Grand Opera à la Spontini and Meyerbeer — and did not exhibit the innovations that would mark Wagner's place in musical history.
Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these works to be part of his oeuvre; and they have been performed only rarely in the last hundred years, although the overture to Rienzi is an occasional concert-hall piece.
Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi were performed at both Leipzig and Bayreuth in 2013 to mark the composer's bicentenary.
Richard Wagner's Romantic Operas (1843–1851)
Wagner's middle stage output began with Der Fliegende Holländer (1843), followed by Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850).
These three operas are referred to as Wagner's "romantic operas". They reinforced the reputation, among the public in Germany and beyond, that Wagner had begun to establish with Rienzi.
Although distancing himself from the style of these operas from 1849 onwards, he nevertheless reworked both Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser on several occasions.
The three operas are considered to represent a significant developmental stage in Wagner's musical and operatic maturity as regards thematic handling, portrayal of emotions and orchestration.
They are the earliest works included in the Bayreuth canon, the mature operas that Cosima staged at the Bayreuth Festival after Wagner's death in accordance with his wishes.
All three (including the differing versions of Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser) continue to be regularly performed throughout the world, and have been frequently recorded.
They were also the operas by which his fame spread during his lifetime.
Richard Wagner's Music Dramas (1851–1882)
Wagner's late dramas are considered his masterpieces. Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as the Ring or "Ring Cycle", is a set of four operas based loosely on figures and elements of Germanic mythology—particularly from the later Norse mythology—notably the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Volsunga Saga, and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.
Wagner specifically developed the libretti for these operas according to his interpretation of Stabreim, highly alliterative rhyming verse-pairs used in old Germanic poetry.
They were also influenced by Wagner's concepts of ancient Greek drama, in which tetralogies were a component of Athenian festivals, and which he had amply discussed in his essay "Oper und Drama".
The first two components of the Ring cycle were Das Rheingold, which was completed in 1854, and Die Walküre, which was finished in 1856.
In Das Rheingold, with its "relentlessly talky 'realism' and the absence of lyrical 'numbers'", Wagner came very close to the musical ideals of his 1849–1851 essays.
Die Walküre, which contains what is virtually a traditional aria (Siegmund's Winterstürme in the first act), and the quasi-choral appearance of the Valkyries themselves, shows more "operatic" traits, but has been assessed by Barry Millington as:
"The music drama that most satisfactorily
embodies the theoretical principles of
'Oper und Drama'... A thoroughgoing
synthesis of poetry and music is achieved
without any notable sacrifice in musical
expression."
While composing the opera Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle, Wagner interrupted work on it, and between 1857 and 1864 wrote the tragic love story Tristan und Isolde and his only mature comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, two works that are also part of the regular operatic canon.
Tristan is often granted a special place in musical history; many see it as the beginning of the move away from conventional harmony and tonality, and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical music in the 20th. century.
Wagner felt that his musico-dramatical theories were most perfectly realised in this work with its use of "the art of transition" between dramatic elements and the balance achieved between vocal and orchestral lines. Completed in 1859, the work was given its first performance in Munich, conducted by Bülow, in June 1865.
Die Meistersinger was originally conceived by Wagner in 1845 as a sort of comic pendant to Tannhäuser. Like Tristan, it was premiered in Munich under the baton of Bülow, on the 21st. June 1868, and became an immediate success.
Millington describes Meistersinger as:
"A rich, perceptive music drama
widely admired for its warm
humanity."
However its strong German nationalist overtones have led some to cite it as an example of Wagner's reactionary politics and antisemitism.
Completing the Ring
When Wagner returned to writing the music for the last act of Siegfried and for Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), as the final part of the Ring, his style had changed once more to something more recognisable as "operatic" than the aural world of Rheingold and Walküre, though it was still thoroughly stamped with his own originality as a composer and suffused with leitmotifs.
This was in part because the libretti of the four Ring operas had been written in reverse order, so that the book for Götterdämmerung was conceived more "traditionally" than that of Rheingold; still, the self-imposed strictures of the Gesamtkunstwerk had become relaxed.
The differences also result from Wagner's development as a composer during the period in which he wrote Tristan, Meistersinger and the Paris version of Tannhäuser. From act 3 of Siegfried onwards, the Ring becomes more chromatic melodically, more complex harmonically, and more developmental in its treatment of leitmotifs.
Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed Götterdämmerung in 1874.
The Ring takes about 15 hours to perform, and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world's stages.
Parsifal
Wagner's final opera, Parsifal (1882), which was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and which is described in the score as a "Bühnenweihfestspiel" ("Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage"), has a storyline suggested by elements of the legend of the Holy Grail.
It also carries elements of Buddhist renunciation suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer. Wagner described it to Cosima as his "last card".
Parsifal remains controversial because of its treatment of Christianity, its eroticism, and its expression, as perceived by some commentators, of German nationalism and antisemitism.
Despite the composer's own description of the opera to King Ludwig as "this most Christian of works", Ulrike Kienzle has commented that:
"Wagner's turn to Christian mythology,
upon which the imagery and spiritual
contents of Parsifal rest, is idiosyncratic,
and contradicts Christian dogma in
many ways."
Musically, the opera has been held to represent a continuing development of the composer's style, and Millington describes it as:
"A diaphanous score of unearthly
beauty and refinement".
Richard Wagner's Non-Operatic Music
Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music. These include a symphony in C major (written at the age of 19), the Faust Overture (the only completed part of an intended symphony on the subject), some concert overtures, and choral and piano pieces.
Richard's most commonly performed work that is not an extract from an opera is the Siegfried Idyll for chamber orchestra, which has several motifs in common with the Ring cycle.
The Wesendonck Lieder are also often performed, either in the original piano version, or with orchestral accompaniment.
More rarely performed are the American Centennial March (1876), and Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (The Love Feast of the Apostles), a piece for male choruses and orchestra composed in 1843 for the city of Dresden.
After completing Parsifal, Wagner expressed his intention to turn to the writing of symphonies, and several sketches dating from the late 1870's and early 1880's have been identified as work towards this end.
The overtures and certain orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces. For most of these, Wagner wrote or re-wrote short passages to ensure musical coherence.
The "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin is frequently played as the bride's processional wedding march in English-speaking countries.
Richard Wagner's Prose Writings
Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring many books, poems, and articles, as well as voluminous correspondence. His writings covered a wide range of topics, including autobiography, politics, philosophy, and detailed analyses of his own operas.
Wagner planned for a collected edition of his publications as early as 1865; he believed that such a work would help the world to understand his intellectual development and artistic aims.
The first such edition was published between 1871 and 1883, but was doctored to suppress or alter articles that were an embarrassment to him (e.g. those praising Meyerbeer), or by altering dates on some articles to reinforce Wagner's own account of his progress.
Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben was originally published for close friends only in a very small edition (15–18 copies per volume) in four volumes between 1870 and 1880.
The first public edition (with many passages suppressed by Cosima) appeared in 1911; the first attempt at a full edition (in German) appeared in 1963.
There have been modern complete or partial editions of Wagner's writings, including a centennial edition in German edited by Dieter Borchmeyer (which, however, omitted the essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" and Mein Leben).
The English translations of Wagner's prose in eight volumes by William Ashton Ellis (1892–1899) are still in print, and commonly used, despite their deficiencies.
The first complete historical and critical edition of Wagner's prose works was launched in 2013 at the Institute for Music Research at the University of Würzburg; this will result in at least eight volumes of text and several volumes of commentary, totalling over 5,000 pages.
It was originally anticipated that the Würzburg project will be completed by 2030, although this time frame may need to be extended.
A complete edition of Wagner's correspondence, estimated to amount to between 10,000 and 12,000 items, is under way under the supervision of the University of Würzburg. As of January 2021, 25 volumes have appeared, covering the period up to 1873.
Richard Wagner's Influence on Music
Wagner's later musical style introduced new ideas in harmony, melodic process (leitmotif) and operatic structure.
Notably from Tristan und Isolde onwards, he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, which gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th. century.
Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical music to the first notes of Tristan, which include the so-called Tristan chord.
Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and many others.
Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music; at the age of 15, he sought Wagner out on his 1875 visit to Vienna. Mahler became a renowned Wagner conductor, and Richard Taruskin has claimed that:
"Mahler's compositions extend
Wagner's maximalization of the
temporal and the sonorous in
music to the world of the
symphony."
The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal.
The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.
Wagner also made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay "About Conducting" (1869) advanced Hector Berlioz's technique of conducting, and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison.
He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Felix Mendelssohn; in Wagner's view this also justified practices that would today be frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores.
Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).
Among those claiming inspiration from Wagner's music are the German band Rammstein, Jim Steinman, who wrote songs for Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler, Air Supply, Celine Dion and others.
Wagner also influenced the electronic composer Klaus Schulze, whose 1975 album Timewind consists of two 30-minute tracks, Bayreuth Return and Wahnfried 1883.
Joey DeMaio of the band Manowar has described Wagner as:
"The father of heavy metal".
The Slovenian group Laibach created the 2009 suite VolksWagner, using material from Wagner's operas.
Phil Spector's Wall of Sound recording technique was, it has been claimed, heavily influenced by Wagner.
Richard Wagner's Influence on Literature, Philosophy and the Visual Arts
Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is significant. Millington has commented:
"Wagner's protean abundance meant that
he could inspire the use of literary motif in
many a novel employing interior monologue;
the Symbolists saw him as a mystic hierophant;
the Decadents found many a frisson in his work."
Friedrich Nietzsche was a member of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870's, and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian "rebirth" of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist "decadence".
Nietzsche however broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties, and a surrender to the new German Reich.
Nietzsche expressed his displeasure with the later Wagner in "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche Contra Wagner".
The poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner.
Édouard Dujardin, whose influential novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés is in the form of an interior monologue inspired by Wagnerian music, founded a journal dedicated to Wagner, La Revue Wagnérienne.
In a list of major cultural figures influenced by Wagner, Bryan Magee includes D. H. Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley, Romain Rolland, Gérard de Nerval, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rainer Maria Rilke and several others.
In the 20th century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner:
"Perhaps the greatest
genius that ever lived."
Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him, and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is also discussed in some of the works of James Joyce, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois, who featured Lohengrin in The Souls of Black Folk.
Wagnerian themes inhabit T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, and Verlaine's poem on Parsifal.
Many of Wagner's concepts, including his speculation about dreams, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud. Wagner had publicly analysed the Oedipus myth before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the relationship between sexuality and anxiety. Georg Groddeck considered the Ring as the first manual of psychoanalysis.
Richard Wagner's Influence on the Cinema
Wagner's concept of the use of leitmotifs and the integrated musical expression which they can enable has influenced many 20th. and 21st. century film scores.
The critic Theodor Adorno has noted that:
"The Wagnerian leitmotif leads directly to
cinema music where the sole function of
the leitmotif is to announce heroes or
situations so as to allow the audience to
orient itself more easily".
Film scores citing Wagnerian themes include Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which features a version of the Ride of the Valkyries, Trevor Jones's soundtrack to John Boorman's film Excalibur, and the 2011 films A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg) and Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier).
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 1977 film Hitler has a visual style and set design that are strongly inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen, musical excerpts from which are frequently used in the film's soundtrack.
Richard Wagner's Opponents and Supporters
Not all reaction to Wagner was positive. For a time, German musical life divided into two factions, supporters of Wagner and supporters of Johannes Brahms; the latter, with the support of the powerful critic Eduard Hanslick (of whom Beckmesser in Meistersinger is in part a caricature) championed traditional forms, and led the conservative front against Wagnerian innovations.
They were supported by the conservative leanings of some German music schools, including the conservatories at Leipzig under Ignaz Moscheles and at Cologne under the direction of Ferdinand Hiller.
Another Wagner detractor was the French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, who wrote to Hiller after attending Wagner's Paris concert on the 25th. January 1860. At this concert Wagner conducted the overtures to Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, the preludes to Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde, and six other extracts from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.
Alkan noted:
"I had imagined that I was going
to meet music of an innovative
kind, but was astonished to find
a pale imitation of Berlioz.
I do not like all the music of Berlioz
while appreciating his marvellous
understanding of certain instrumental
effects ... but here he was imitated
and caricatured ... Wagner is not a
musician, he is a disease."
Even those who, like Debussy, opposed Wagner ("this old poisoner") could not deny his influence. Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was so unmistakable and overwhelming.
"Golliwogg's Cakewalk" from Debussy's Children's Corner piano suite contains a deliberately tongue-in-cheek quotation from the opening bars of Tristan.
Others who proved resistant to Wagner's operas included Gioachino Rossini, who said:
"Wagner has wonderful moments,
and dreadful quarters of an hour."
In the 20th. century Wagner's music was parodied by Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler, among others.
Wagner's followers (known as Wagnerians or Wagnerites) have formed many societies dedicated to Wagner's life and work.
Film and Stage Portrayals of Richard Wagner
Wagner has been the subject of many biographical films. The earliest was a silent film made by Carl Froelich in 1913. It featured in the title role the composer Giuseppe Becce, who also wrote the score for the film (as Wagner's music, still in copyright, was not available).
Other film portrayals of Wagner include:
-- Richard Burton in Wagner (1983).
-- Paul Nicholas in Lisztomania (1975)
-- Trevor Howard in Ludwig (1972)
-- Lyndon Brook in Song Without End (1960)
-- Alan Badel in Magic Fire (1955)
Jonathan Harvey's opera Wagner Dream (2007) intertwines the events surrounding Wagner's death with the story of Wagner's uncompleted opera outline Die Sieger (The Victors).
The Bayreuth Festival
Since Wagner's death, the Bayreuth Festival, which has become an annual event, has been successively directed by his widow, his son Siegfried, the latter's widow Winifred Wagner, their two sons Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, and, presently, two of the composer's great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner.
Since 1973, the festival has been overseen by the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung (Richard Wagner Foundation), the members of which include some of Wagner's descendants.
Controversies Associated With Richard Wagner
Wagner's operas, writings, politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime.
Following his death, debate about his ideas and their interpretation, particularly in Germany during the 20th. century, has continued.
Racism and Antisemitism
A caricature of Wagner by Karl Clic was published in 1873 in the Viennese satirical magazine, Humoristische Blätter. It shows a cartoon figure holding a baton, standing next to a music stand in front of some musicians.
The figure has a large nose and prominent forehead. His sideburns turn into a wispy beard under his chin. The exaggerated features refer to rumours of Wagner's Jewish ancestry.
Wagner's hostile writings on Jews, including Jewishness in Music, correspond to some existing trends of thought in Germany during the 19th century.
Despite his very public views on this topic, throughout his life Wagner had Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters. There have been frequent suggestions that antisemitic stereotypes are represented in Wagner's operas. The characters of Alberich and Mime in the Ring, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal are sometimes claimed as Jewish representations, though they are not identified as such in the librettos of these operas.
The topic is further complicated by claims, which may have been credited by Wagner, that he himself was of Jewish ancestry, via his supposed father Geyer. However, there is no evidence that Geyer had Jewish ancestors.
Some biographers have noted that Wagner in his final years developed interest in the racialist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau, notably Gobineau's belief that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races.
According to Robert Gutman, this theme is reflected in the opera Parsifal.
Other biographers however (including Lucy Beckett) believe that this is not true, as the original drafts of the story date back to 1857 and Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal by 1877, but he displayed no significant interest in Gobineau until 1880.
Other Interpretations
Wagner's ideas are amenable to socialist interpretations; many of his ideas on art were being formulated at the time of his revolutionary inclinations in the 1840's. Thus, for example, George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883):
"Wagner's picture of Niblunghome under the
reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated
industrial capitalism as it was made known in
Germany in the middle of the 19th. century by
Engels's book 'The Condition of the Working
Class in England."
Left-wing interpretations of Wagner also inform the writings of Theodor Adorno among other Wagner critics.
Walter Benjamin gave Wagner as an example of "bourgeois false consciousness", alienating art from its social context.
György Lukács contended that the ideas of the early Wagner represented the ideology of the "true socialists" (wahre Sozialisten), a movement referenced in Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" as belonging to the left-wing of German bourgeois radicalism.
Anatoly Lunacharsky said about the later Wagner:
"The circle is complete. The revolutionary
has become a reactionary. The rebellious
petty bourgeois now kisses the slipper of
the Pope, the keeper of order."
The writer Robert Donington has produced a detailed, if controversial, Jungian interpretation of the Ring cycle, described as "an approach to Wagner by way of his symbols", which, for example, sees the character of the goddess Fricka as part of her husband Wotan's "inner femininity".
Millington notes that Jean-Jacques Nattiez has also applied psychoanalytical techniques in an evaluation of Wagner's life and works.
Nazi Appropriation of Richard Wagner's Work
Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's music, and saw in his operas an embodiment of his own vision of the German nation; in a 1922 speech he claimed that:
"Wagner's works glorify the heroic
Teutonic nature ... Greatness lies in
the heroic."
Hitler visited Bayreuth frequently from 1923 onwards, and attended productions at the theatre.
There continues to be debate about the extent to which Wagner's views might have influenced Nazi thinking. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), who married Wagner's daughter Eva in 1908 but never met Wagner, was the author of the racist book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, approved by the Nazi movement.
Chamberlain met Hitler several times between 1923 and 1927 in Bayreuth, but cannot credibly be regarded as a conduit of Wagner's own views.
The Nazis used those parts of Wagner's thought that were useful for propaganda, and ignored or suppressed the rest.
While Bayreuth presented a useful front for Nazi culture, and Wagner's music was used at many Nazi events, the Nazi hierarchy as a whole did not share Hitler's enthusiasm for Wagner's operas, and resented attending these lengthy epics at Hitler's insistence.
Guido Fackler has researched evidence that indicates that it is possible that Wagner's music was used at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933–1934 to "re-educate" political prisoners by exposure to "national music".
There has been no evidence to support claims, sometimes made, that his music was played at Nazi death camps during the Second World War, and Pamela Potter has noted that Wagner's music was explicitly off-limits in the camps.
Because of the associations of Wagner with antisemitism and Nazism, the performance of his music in the State of Israel has been a source of controversy.
This is a loose representation of a Willowbrook-bodied Bedford VAM bought new in 1971 by Cooper Bros of South Kirby for its share of the United Services operations. There are some minor differences to the actual vehicle, which was to a very basic specification without much of the bright trim normally fitted to this body style. Willowbrook was owned by Duple from 1958 and by its management from 1971 until closure in 1983. Its bodywork was a popular choice for independent operators, particularly on lighter chassis such as Bedford and Ford (23-Sep-25).
This image is protected by copyright law and it would be an offence to publish it elsewhere without prior written permission. Follow the link below for additional information about my Flickr images, including an explanation of the terms 'fiction', 'digital representation' and 'digitally-coloured':
Habakuka is famous now that she's one of the cats in the (Amazon) book (published 8 Jan. 2013) Cute Cats From Around The World [Kindle Edition] by Alex Rosel
www.freeads.co.uk/uk/freestuff/buy__sell/pets/cats/non-pe...
Text:
Name of owner - Zeev Barkan
Sex of cat - Female
Breed or type of cat - Street cat
Home town or district where your cat lives - Jerusalem Israel
How I originally got my cat - I don't like cats or pets. Habacuca was my son's cat, but when he left home she stayed with me, and now it is hard to imagine my life without her. She is the boss, and she orders me when to wake up, what to eat, and which door to open. She tries to stay close to me as long as possible because life is less dangerous when a human being is your bodyguard.
You may credit me as the photographer and cat owner.
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Watch her on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvyvxVASH_g&feature=youtube_g...
Published in the 1950's and early 1960's by Starrucca Valley Publications of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, 'Steam Locomotive' and 'Steam Locomotive & Railroad Tradition' magazines were produced bi-monthly in glorious black & white.
The October 1959 'Steam Locomotive' is the first one and features an article on Canadian Pacific's last 4-4-0 engines from the 1880's, a few of which survived to at least the end of 1959 in New Brunswick because of their route availability. I have issues #1 - 5
On the right, 'Steam Locomotive & Railroad Tradition' was an amalgamation of "Steam Locomotive' and 'Short-Line Railroader' (see comment below) magazines beginning quarterly with this edition at the end off 1960; I have issues 6 to 13-14 (May 1963) .
From the collection of the late John D. Henderson.
Epson V500 scans of original magazine covers
Published by Moore Harness LTD - UK.
UK Horror & supernatural comic!
Reprints various 1950's USA 'Stanley Comic' strips!
In the mid-1950s the Stanley Morse companies published over 30 comic titles, numbering close to 200 individual issues. Most of the popular and longer-running titles were horror/suspense, including SHOCK, MISTER MYSTERY and WEIRD MYSTERIES. Like many companies of the time, Stanley Morse gave up on comics in 1956, concentrating instead of a more successful line of Men's Magazines. In 1970 someone st Stanley decided to ressurrect the comic line by pulling out some of those 1950s stories and reprinting them as B&W titles. GHOUL TALES has new covers, but all the stories are some of those exicitng tales from the 1950s, brought forward 15-20 years (and now another 50 years on top of that!) for another shot at comic immortality. This is your chance to experience some comic history and enjoy great stories, at the more eocnomical B&W price. We are confident that even those stories unattributed to source are reprinted from 1950s comics, but with new titles it has surely been a challenge to sort out where they came from.
1 - Terror On TV!
2 - Destiny's Double Deal!
3 - The Chase!
4 - Hen Pecked!
5 - The Bogeyman
6 - Voice Of Doom
7 - Living Clay!
8 - The Night People
Besides here, I publish different stuff in Instagram and Facebook, so you may want to follow me there too:
Instagram: www.instagram.com/tefocoto/
And Facebook: www.facebook.com/PerfectPixel.es/
PLEASE
• Do not post animated gifs or pictures in your comments. Especially the "awards". These will simply be deleted and the poster blocked. Unless it's an interesting other picture, for comparison or reference.
• No invitations to groups where one must comment and/or invite and/or give award and no group icon without any comment. These will simply be deleted and the poster blocked.
Nothing personal here, I simply don't see the usefulness of such actions. On the other hand I encourage you to critic my work as I believe that is the best way to improve my photography. Thank you!
POR FAVOR
-No pongas gifs animados, logos o premios (awards) en tu comentario. A no ser que la imagen que incluyas esté para compararla con la mía o para ilustrar un punto de vista borraré esos comentarios y bloquearé al que lo pone.
-No me envíes invitaciones a grupos donde exista la obligación de comentar o premiar fotos, ni a aquellos donde existe un comentario preformateado con el logo del grupo. Borraré esos comentarios y bloquearé al que lo pone.
Nada personal, es solo que no le veo el sentido a ese tipo de comportamientos. A cambio te animo a que me critiques sin piedad, pero con respeto, mi trabajo, porque solo así puedo seguir avanzando como fotógrafo. Gracias!
Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator and painter. He published comic illustrated cautionary tales from 1859, achieving his most notable works in the 1870s. Busch's illustrations used wood engraving, and later, zincography.
Busch drew on contemporary parochial and city life, satirizing Catholicism, Philistinism, strict religious morality and bigotry. His comic text was colourful and entertaining, using onomatopoeia, neologisms and other figures of speech, and led to some work being banned by the authorities.
Busch was influential in both poetry and illustration, and became a source for future generations of comic artists. The Katzenjammer Kids was inspired by Busch's Max and Moritz, one of a number of imitations produced in Germany and the United States. The Wilhelm Busch Prize and the Wilhelm Busch Museum help maintain his legacy. His 175th anniversary in 2007 was celebrated throughout Germany. Busch remains one of the most influential poets and artists in Western Europe
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Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch war einer der einflussreichsten humoristischen Dichter und Zeichner Deutschlands.
Seine ersten Bildergeschichten erschienen ab 1859 als Einblattdrucke. In Buchform wurden sie erstmals 1864 unter dem Titel „Bilderpossen“ veröffentlicht. Schon seit den 1870er Jahren in ganz Deutschland berühmt, galt er bei seinem Tod dank seiner äußerst volkstümlichen Bildergeschichten als „Klassiker des deutschen Humors“. Als Pionier des Comics schuf er u. a. Max und Moritz, Die fromme Helene, Plisch und Plum, Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe, die Knopp-Trilogie und weitere, bis heute populäre Werke. Oft griff er darin satirisch die Eigenschaften bestimmter Typen oder Gesellschaftsgruppen auf, etwa die Selbstzufriedenheit und Doppelmoral des Spießbürgers oder die Frömmelei von Geistlichen und Laien. Viele seiner Zweizeiler sind im Deutschen zu festen Redewendungen geworden, z. B. „Vater werden ist nicht schwer, Vater sein dagegen sehr“ oder „Dieses war der erste Streich, doch der zweite folgt sogleich“.