Artist: Napoleão Figueiredo

 

Published by Abril, Brazil 1988

My remote chapel photo was used in a bookcover:

 

www.ddstone.com/home/sub02.php?mid=25&uid=429

 

I don't understand Korean, but I think it is a collection of Bible verses...

 

Original photo: www.flickr.com/photos/markop/8066040054

 

On Getty Images: gty.im/155306810

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.

Published in: Album von Philippinen-typen ... / Hrsg. von Dr. A.B. Meyer .... Dresden, Wilhelm Hoffman, 1885-1904. 3 v. Plate 30, titled "Kiangan in Sapao Valley".

 

Creator Meyer, Adolf Bernard, 1840-1911

Otley Beyer collection of photographs

 

Condition: fading along edges and pigment loss at top.

Title devised by cataloguer based on information from file NLA/16269.

 

National Library of Australia

 

Beta Ray Bill is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

The most important part of this character is the head, the horse face head, and it was quite a challenge to make it. I used for the base of his head, a small Kinder Surprise animal head, that had exactly the cheeks that a horse has, but only that part, because it wasn't a horse head, so everything else, it was added by me, especially because I wanted his mouth to be open.

The process of adding his helmet was quite difficult, because the piece that I used for the base of the head, was way too short, so at the end I used a connection similar to a minifig head and drilled very small holes for the jaw and tongue.

The boots are from Thanos, helmet and the hammer I have them from Thor minifig.

I have a couple of Thor, torso pieces , that it was easier to use, but I wanted something else, so I created the armor, and on top I added the plastic red cape. I don't know why, but I like more plastic or rubber capes, instead of those made of fabric.

What I don't like about Bill character, is the fact that he has too many colors: silver helmet, white gloves, blue clothes, silver bracelets, golden boots and golden hammer...I decided to change this, (the beauty of making customs :) so no more white gloves, and also for the Stormbreaker and armor I wanted silver, to go better with his helmet. I never understood the point of Bill having a golden Stormbreaker anyway.

This in my take on a character, trying to keep it close to the original, but adding things to make it more personal and unique.

I hope you like it.

Stay tuned, more will come :)

All the best!

A former RAF Helicopter pilot instructor who is now an author, is soon to publish a follow-up book to "A Day Above Yorkshire", with another book entitled "A Day Above The Lake District". Both depicting a day in the life of an Air Ambulance pilot, with £5 from each sale going to the Great Northern Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS).

 

The books also are to generate awareness of various Mountain Rescue Teams. The author, John Nowell, has selected a couple of my Red Arrows photos (to add a contrast of shots from the ground) to be included in the book. This shot of the RED ARROWS at Windermere Air Show is one of my photos he's chosen.

 

ALSO, he's starting on another new book entitled ..... "HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH FLYING MACHINES" .... and I've been given a double page spread to display some of my pics and some space for descriptive text . So pleased that this shot is to be included in the book as it's one I'm proud of.!

The third Ida Rentoul Outhwaite Children's Library Stained Glass Window features the excerpt from a poem; "While underneath in phantom shells, the fairy sailors go, and shining o'er the silent dells, the fairy beacons glow". It, and the painted panel above come from "Fairy Islands" from "Elves and Fairies" published by Thomas Lothian in Melbourne in 1910. The book illustration, much more Art Nouveau in influence than any of the others, is rich with night time blues. Yet the stained glass panel featuring six faeries riding down a river in nautilus shells beneath a silvery full moon, has highlights of pink and golden yellow. The girl faeries all wear Edwardian empire line dancing dresses, such as Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova wore, with belts of trailing yellow flowers. Whilst the water looks tranquil enough, the faeries are obviously moving swiftly down the river as their hair and dresses blow in the breeze, and the pink heath sprigs they carry all bend to the wind. The silhouettes of narrow gum trees stand against a full moon glimpsed between two steep banks.

 

In 1923 with Fitzroy still very much a working class area of Melbourne with pockets of poverty, the parish of St. Mark the Evangelist decided to address the need of the poor in the inner Melbourne suburb. Architects Gawler and Drummond were commissioned to design a two storey red brick Social Settlement Building. It was opened in 1926 by the Vicar of St. Mark the Evangelist, the Reverend Robert G. Nichols (known affectionately amongst the parish as Brother Bill). Known today as the Community Centre, the St. Mark the Evangelist Social Settlements Building looks out onto George Street and also across the St. Mark the Evangelist's forecourt. When it opened, the Social Settlement Building's facilities included a gymnasium, club rooms and children's library.

 

Opened in 1926, the children's library, which was situated in the corner room of the Social Settlements Building, is believed to be the first known free dedicated children's library in Victoria. The library was given to the children of Fitzroy by Mrs. T. Hackett, in memory of her late husband. The library contained over 3,000 books, as well as children's magazines and even comics. The Social Settlements Building was only erected because Brother Bill organised the commitment of £1,000.00 each from various wealthy businessmen and philanthropists around Melbourne. Mrs Hackett's contribution was the library of £1,000.00 worth of books. Another internationally famous resident of the neighbourhood, Australian children's book illustrator Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, then at the zenith of her career, was engaged by the relentless Brother Bill to create something for the library. Ida donated four stained glass windows each with a hand-painted panel executed by her, based upon illustrations from her books, most notably "Elves and Fairies" which was published to great acclaim in Australia and sold internationally in 1916 and "Fairyland" which had been published earlier that year. These four hand painted stained glass windows were equated to the value of £1,000.00, but are priceless today, as they are the only public works of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite ever commissioned that have been executed in this medium. Ida Rentoul Outhwaite was only ever commissioned to create one other public work; a series of four panels executed in watercolour with pencil underdrawing in 1910 for the Prince Henry Hospital's children's wards in Melbourne (now demolished). Of her panels, only two are believed still to be in existence, buried within the hospital archives. The four Ida Rentoul Outhwaite stained glass windows each depict faeries, pixies, Australian native animals and children, taken from her book illustrations. At the time of photographing, the windows - three overlooking George Street and one St. Mark the Evangelist's forecourt - were located in the community lounge, which served as a drop-in lounge and kitchen for Fitzroy's homeless and marginalised citizens. Today the space has been re-purposed as offices for the Anglicare staff who run the St. Mark's Community Centre, possibly as a way to protect the precious windows from coming to any harm. The only down-side to this is that they are not as easily accessed or viewed as when I photographed them, making my original visit to St. Mark the Evangalist in 2009 extremely fortuitous.

 

The Ida Rentoul Outhwaite Children's Library Stained Glass Windows are one of Australia's greatest hidden treasures, which seems apt when you consider that the pixies and faeries they depict are also often in hiding when we read about them in children's books and the faerie tales of our childhood. The fact that they are hidden, because it is necessary to enter a little-known and undistinguished building in order to see them, ensures their protection and survival. The windows are unique, not only because they are the only stained glass windows designed and hand-painted by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, but because they are the earliest and only examples of stained glass art in Australia that deals with theme of childhood.

 

I am indebted to Peter Bourke who ran the St. Mark's Community Centre in 2009 for giving me the privilege of seeing these beautiful and rare windows created by one of my favourite children's book artists on a hot November afternoon, without me having made prior arrangements. I also appreciate him allowing me the opportunity to photograph them in great detail. I will always be grateful to him for such a wonderful and moving experience.

 

Ida Sherbourne Outhwaite (1888 - 1960) was an Australian children's book illustrator. She was born on the 9th of June 1888 in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton. She was the daughter of the of Presbyterian Reverend John Laurence Rentoul and his wife Annie Isobel. Her family was both literary and artistic, and as such, gifted Ida was encouraged from an early age to embrace her talent of drawing. Her elder sister, Annie Rattray Rentoul (1882 - 1978), was likewise encouraged to write, and both would later form a successful partnership. In 1903 six fairy stories written by Annie and illustrated by Ida were published in the ladies' journal "New Idea". The following year the Rentoul sisters collaborated on a book called "Mollie's Bunyip" which was received with instant success because it combined the idea of European faeries, witches and elves and the Australian bush. "Mollie's Staircase" followed in 1906. In 1908 the Rentoul sisters published their first substantial story book, "The Lady of the Blue Beads". On 9 December 1909 Ida married Arthur Grenbry Outhwaite (1875-1938), manager of the Perpetual Executors and Trustees Association of Australia Ltd. (Annie remained unmarried her entire life). After her marriage, Ida was known as Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, but did not publish anything substantial as she established her family and household until part way through the Great War. In 1916 she brought out her first coloured work; "Elves and Fairies", a de luxe edition produced entirely in Australia by Thomas Lothian. The success of the book, with its delicate watercolour plates, was due both to Ida's artistic talent and to the business acumen of her husband, who provided a £400.00 subsidy to ensure a high-quality production and consigned royalties to the Red Cross, thereby encouraging vice-regal patronage. "Elves and Fairies" is still her best known and loved work. Encouraged by her latest success, Ida travelled to Europe after hostilities ended and in 1920 exhibited in Paris and London. The critics compared her to other artists of the golden years of children's illustration such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, thus sealing her international success. She signed a contract with British book publishers A. & C. Black who published five books for her over the next decade, including "The Enchanted Forest" (1921), with text by her husband, and, probably the most popular of all the Rentoul sisters' collaborations, "The Little Green Road to Fairyland" (1922). "The Fairyland of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite" (1926), another sumptuous volume, with text by her husband and sister, was less successful. A. & C. Black also produced a number of postcard series using her illustrations from "Elves and Fairies" as well as her other books published by them. In 1930 the last of her books published by A. & C. Black was released, but already times were changing, and the interest in Ida's work was rapidly fading. Angus & Robertson brought out two more books in 1933 and 1935 but they received relatively little attention. Her last two exhibitions, which between 1916 and 1928 were almost annual events, were held in 1933. The Second World War changed the world, and Ida and Annie's work was relegated to a bygone era, shunned and forgotten. Ida suffered the loss of both of her sons during the war, and she spent her last years sharing a flat in Caulfield with her sister, where, survived by her two daughters, she died on 25 June 1960. She did not live to see the resurgence of interest in her work some twenty-five years later, when in 1985, her picture of "The Little Witch" from "Elves and Fairies" was published on an Australian stamp, opening the fairy world of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite to a whole new generation of children and adults alike.

  

Published by DCist and Prince of Petworth.

Published by O Globo, Brazil 1953

©All photographs on this site are copyright: ©DESPITE STRAIGHT LINES (Paul Williams) 2011 – 2021 & GETTY IMAGES ®

  

No license is given nor granted in respect of the use of any copyrighted material on this site other than with the express written agreement of ©DESPITE STRAIGHT LINES (Paul Williams). No image may be used as source material for paintings, drawings, sculptures, or any other art form without permission and/or compensation to ©DESPITE STRAIGHT LINES (Paul Williams)

  

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AN IN DEPTH LOOK AT CORVUS CORONE

  

LEGEND AND MYTHOLOGY

  

Crows appear in the Bible where Noah uses one to search for dry land and to check on the recession of the flood. Crows supposedly saved the prophet, Elijah, from famine and are an Inuit deity. Legend has it that England and its monarchy will end when there are no more crows in the Tower of London. And some believe that the crows went to the Tower attracted by the regular corpses following executions with written accounts of their presence at the executions of Anne Boleyn and Jane Gray.

  

In Welsh mythology, unfortunately Crows are seen as symbolic of evilness and black magic thanks to many references to witches transforming into crows or ravens and escaping. Indian legend tells of Kakabhusandi, a crow who sits on the branches of a wish-fulfilling tree called Kalpataru and a crow in Ramayana where Lord Rama blessed the crow with the power to foresee future events and communicate with the souls.

  

In Native American first nation legend the crow is sometimes considered to be something of a trickster, though they are also viewed positively by some tribes as messengers between this world and the next where they carry messages from the living to those deceased, and even carry healing medicines between both worlds. There is a belief that crows can foresee the future. The Klamath tribe in Oregon believe that when we die, we fly up to heaven as a crow. The Crow can also signify wisdom to some tribes who believe crows had the power to talk and were therefore considered to be one of the wisest of birds. Tribes with Crow Clans include the Chippewa (whose Crow Clan and its totem are called Aandeg), the Hopi (whose Crow Clan is called Angwusngyam or Ungwish-wungwa), the Menominee, the Caddo, the Tlingit, and the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico.

  

The crow features in the Nanissáanah (Ghost dance), popularized by Jerome Crow Dog, a Brulé Lakota sub-chief and warrior born at Horse Stealing Creek in Montana Territory in 1833, the crow symbolizing wisdom and the past, when the crow had became a guide and acted as a pathfinder during hunting. The Ghost dance movement was originally created in 1870 by Wodziwob, or Gray Hair, a prophet and medicine man of the Paiute tribe in an area that became known as Nevada. Ghost dancers wore crow and eagle feathers in their clothes and hair, and the fact that the Crow could talk placed it as one of the sages of the animal kingdom. The five day dances seeking trance,prophecy and exhortations would eventually play a major part in the pathway towards the white man's broken treaties, the infamous battle at Wounded knee and the surrender of Matȟó Wanáȟtaka (Kicking Bear), after officials began to fear the ghost dancers and rituals which seemed to occur prior to battle.

  

Historically the Vikings are the group who made so many references to the crow, and Ragnarr Loðbrók and his sons used this species in his banner as well as appearances in many flags and coats of arms. Also, it had some kind of association with Odin, one of their main deities. Norse legend tells us that Odin is accompanied by two crows. Hugin, who symbolizes thought, and Munin, who represents a memory. These two crows were sent out each dawn to fly the entire world, returning at breakfast where they informed the Lord of the Nordic gods of everything that went on in their kingdoms. Odin was also referred to as Rafnagud (raven-god). The raven appears in almost every skaldic poem describing warfare.Coins dating back to 940's minted by Olaf Cuaran depict the Viking war standard, the Raven and Viking war banners (Gonfalon) depicted the bird also.

  

In Scandinavian legends, crows are a representative of the Goddess of Death, known as Valkyrie (from old Norse 'Valkyrja'), one of the group of maidens who served the Norse deity Odin, visiting battlefields and sending him the souls of the slain worthy of a place in Valhalla. Odin ( also called Wodan, Woden, or Wotan), preferred that heroes be killed in battle and that the most valiant of souls be taken to Valhöll, the hall of slain warriors. It is the crow that provides the Valkyries with important information on who should go. In Hindu ceremonies that are associated to ancestors, the crow has an important place in Vedic rituals. They are seen as messengers of death in Indian culture too.

  

In Germanic legend, Crows are seen as psychonomes, meaning the act of guiding spirits to their final destination, and that the feathers of a crow could cure a victim who had been cursed. And yet, a lone black crow could symbolize impending death, whilst a group symbolizes a lucky omen! Vikings also saw good omens in the crow and would leave offerings of meat as a token.

  

The crow also has sacred and prophetic meaning within the Celtic civilization, where it stood for flesh ripped off due to combat and Morrighan, the warrior goddess, often appears in Celtic mythology as a raven or crow, or else is found to be in the company of the birds. Crow is sacred to Lugdnum, the Celtic god of creation who gave his name to the city of Lug

  

In Greek mythology according to Appolodorus, Apollo is supposedly responsible for the black feathers of the crow, turning them forever black from their pristine white original plumage as a punishment after they brought news that Κορωνις (Coronis) a princess of the Thessalian kingdom of Phlegyantis, Apollo's pregnant lover had left him to marry a mortal, Ischys. In one legend, Apollo burned the crows feathers and then burned Coronis to death, in another Coronis herself was turned into a black crow, and another that she was slain by the arrows of Αρτεμις (Artemis - twin to Apollo). Koronis was later set amongst the stars as the constellation Corvus ("the Crow"). Her name means "Curved One" from the Greek word korônis or "Crow" from the word korônê.A similar Muslim legend allegedly tells of Muhammad, founder of Islam and the last prophet sent by God to Earth, who's secret location was given away by a white crow to his seekers, as he hid in caves. The crow shouted 'Ghar Ghar' (Cave, cave) and thus as punishment, Muhammad turned the crow black and cursed it for eternity to utter only one phrase, 'Ghar, ghar). Native Indian legend where the once rainbow coloured crows became forever black after shedding their colourful plumage over the other animals of the world.

  

In China the Crow is represented in art as a three legged bird on a solar disk, being a creature that helps the sun in its journey. In Japan there are myths of Crow Tengu who were priests who became vain, and turned into this spirit to serve as messengers until they learn the lesson of humility as well as a great Crow who takes part in Shinto creation stories.

  

In animal spirit guides there are general perceptions of what sightings of numbers of crows actually mean:

  

1 Crow Meaning: To carry a message from your near one who died recently.

 

2 Crows Meaning: Two crows sitting near your home signifies some good news is on your way.

 

3 Crows Meaning: An upcoming wedding in your family.

 

4 Crows Meaning: Symbolizes wealth and prosperity.

 

5 Crows Meaning: Diseases or pain.

 

6 Crows Meaning: A theft in your house!

 

7 Crows Meaning: Denotes travel or moving from your house.

 

8 Crows Meaning: Sorrowful events

  

Crows are generally seen as the symbolism when alive for doom bringing, misfortune and bad omens, and yet a dead crow symbolises potentially bringing good news and positive change to those who see it. This wonderful bird certainly gets a mixed bag of contradictory mythology and legend over the centuries and in modern days is often seen as a bit of a nuisance, attacking and killing the babies of other birds such as Starlings, Pigeons and House Sparrows as well as plucking the eyes out of lambs in the field, being loud and noisy and violently attacking poor victims in a 'crow court'....

  

There is even a classic horror film called 'THE CROW' released in 1994 by Miramax Films, directed by Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee in his final film appearance as Eric Draven, who is revived by a Crow tapping on his gravestone a year after he and his fiancée are murdered in Detroit by a street gang. The crow becomes his guide as he sets out to avenge the murders. The only son of martial arts expert Bruce Lee, Brandon lee suffered fatal injuries on the set of the film when the crew failed to remove the primer from a cartridge that hit Lee in the abdomen with the same force as a normal bullet. Lee died that day, March 31st 1993 aged 28.

  

The symbolism of the Crow resurrecting the dead star and accompanying him on his quest for revenge was powerful, and in some part based on the history of the carrion crow itself and the original film grossed more than $94 Million dollars with three subsequent sequels following.

  

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK

  

So let's move away from legend, mythology and stories passed down from our parents and grandparents and look at these amazing birds in isolation.

  

Carrion crow are passerines in the family Corvidae a group of Oscine passerine birds including Crows, Ravens, Rooks, Jackdaws, Jays, Magpies, Treepies, Choughs and Nutcrackers. Technically they are classed as Corvids, and the largest of passerine birds. Carrion crows are medium to large in size with rictal bristles and a single moult per year (most passerines moult twice). Carrion crow was one of the many species originally described by Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (Carl Von Linne after his ennoblement) in his 1758 and 1759 editions of 'SYSTEMA NATURAE', and it still bears its original name of Corvus corone, derived from the Latin of Corvus, meaning Raven and the Greek κορώνη (korōnē), meaning crow.

  

Carrion crow are of the Animalia kingdom Phylum: Chordata Class: Aves Order: Passeriformes Family: Corvidae Genus: Corvus and Species: Corvus corone

  

Corvus corone can reach 45-47cm in length with a 93-104cm wingspan and weigh between 370-650g. They are protected under The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 in the United Kingdom with a Green UK conservation status which means they are of least concern with more than 1,000,000 territories. Breeding occurs in April with fledging of the chicks taking around twenty nine days following an incubation period of around twenty days with 3 to 4 eggs being the average norm. They are abundant in the UK apart from Northwest Scotland and Ireland where the Hooded crow (Corvus cornix) was considered the same species until 2002. They have a lifespan of around four years, whilst Crow species can live to the age of Twenty years old, and the oldest known American crow in the wild was almost Thirty years old. The oldest documented captive crow died at age Fifty nine. They are smaller and have a shorter lifespan than the Raven, which again is used as a symbol in history to live life to the full and not waste a moment!

  

They are often mistaken for the Rook (Corvus frugilegus), a similar bird, though in the UK, the Rook is actually technically smaller than the Carrion crow averaging 44-46cm in length, 81-99cm wingspan and weighing up to 340g. Rooks have white beaks compared to the black beaks of Carrion crow, a more steeply raked ratio from head to beak, and longer straighter beaks as well as a different plumage pattern. There are documented cases in the UK of singular and grouped Rooks attacking and killing Carrion crows in their territory. Rooks nest in colonies unlike Carrion crows. Carrion crows have only a few natural enemies including powerful raptors such as the northern goshawk, the peregrine falcon, the Eurasian eagle-owl and the golden eagle which will all readily hunt them.

  

Regarded as one of the most intelligent birds, indeed creatures on the planet, studies suggest that Corvids cognitive abilities can rival that of primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas and even provide clues to understanding human intelligence. Crows have relatively large brains for their body size, compared to other animals. Their encephalization quotient (EQ) a ratio of brain to body size, adjusted for size because there isn’t a linear relationship is 4.1. That is remarkably close to chimps at 4.2 whilst humans are 8.1. Corvids also have a very high neuronal density, the number of neurons per gram of brain, factoring in the number of cortical neurons, neuron packing density, interneuronal distance and axonal conduction velocity shows that Corvids score high on this measure as well, with humans scoring the highest.

  

A corvid's pallium is packed with more neurons than a great ape's. Corvids have demonstrated the ability to use a combination of mental tools such as imagination, and anticipation of future events. They can craft tools from twigs and branches to hook grubs from deep recesses, they can solve puzzles and intricate methods of gaining access to food set by humans., and have even bent pieces of wire into hooks to obtain food. They have been proven to have a higher cognitive ability level than seven year old humans. Communications wise, their repertoire of wraw-wraw's is not fully understood, but the intensity, rhythm, and duration of caws seems to form the basis of a possible language. They also remember the faces of humans who have hindered or hurt them and pass that information on to their offspring.

  

Aesop's fable of 'The Crow and the Pitcher, tells of a thirsty crow which drops stones into a water pitcher to raise the water level and enable it to take a drink. Scientists have conducted tests to see whether crows really are this intelligent. They placed floating treats in a deep tube and observed the crows indeed dropping dense objects carefully selected into the water until the treat floated within reach. They had the intelligence to pick up, weigh and discount objects that would float in the water, they also did not select ones that were too large for the container.

  

Pet crows develop a unique call for their owners, in effect actually naming them. They also know to sunbathe for a dose of vitamin D, regularly settling on wooden garden fences, opening their mouths and wings and raising their heads to the sun. In groups they warn of danger and communicate vocally. They store a cache of food for later if in abundance and are clever enough to move it if they feel it has been discovered. They leave markers for their cache. They have even learned to place walnuts and similar hard food items under car tyres at traffic lights as a means of cracking them!

  

Crows regularly gather around a dead fellow corvid, almost like a funeral, and it is thought they somehow learn from each death. They can even remember human faces for decades.Crows group together to attack larger predators and even steal their food, and they have different dialects in different areas, with the ability to mimic the dialect of the alpha males when they enter their territory!

  

They have a twenty year life span, the oldest on record reaching the age of Fifty nine. Crows can leave gifts for those who feed them such as buttons or bright shiny objects as a thank you, and they even kiss and make up after an argument, having mated for life.

  

In mythology they are associated with good and bad luck, being the bringers of omens and even witchcraft and are generally reviled for their attacks on baby birds and small mammals. They have an attack method of to stunning smaller birds before consuming them, tearing violently at smaller, less aggressive birds, which is simply down to the fact that they are so highly intelligent, and also the top of the food chain. Their diet includes over a thousand different items: Dead animals (as their name suggests), invertebrates, grain, as well as stealing eggs and chicks from other birds' nests, worms, insects, fruit, seeds, kitchen scraps. They are highly adaptable when food sources grow scarce. I absolutely love them, they are magnificent, bold, beautiful and incredibly interesting to watch and though at times it is hard to witness attacks made by them, I cannot help but adore them for so many other and more important reasons.

  

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PAIR IN MY GARDEN

  

Crows have been in the area for a while, but rarely had strayed into my garden, leaving the Magpies to own the territory. Things changed towards the end of May when a beautiful female Carrion crow appeared and began to take some of the food that I put down for the other birds. Within a few days she began to appear regularly, on occasions stocking up on food, whilst other times placing pieces in the birdbath to soften them. She would stand on the birdbath and eat and drink and come back over the course of the day to eat the softened food.

  

Shortly afterwards she brought along her mate, a tall and handsome fella, much larger than her who was also very vocal if he felt she was getting a little too close to me. By now I had moved from a seated position from the patio as an observer, to laying on a mat just five feet from the birdbath with my Nikon so that I could photograph the pair as they landed, scavenged and fed. She was now confident enough to let me be very close, and she even tolerated and recognized the clicking of the camera. At first I used silent mode to reduce the noise but this only allowed two shooting frame rates of single frame or continuous low frame which meant I was missing shots. I reverted back to normal continuous high frames and she soon got used to the whirring of the mechanisms as the mirror slapped back and forth.

  

The big fella would bark orders at her from the safety of the fence or the rear of the garden, whilst she rarely made a sound. That was until one day when in the sweltering heat she kept opening her beak and sunning on the grass, panting slightly in the heat. I placed the circular water sprayer nearby and had it rotating so that the birdbath and grass was bathed in gentle water droplets and she soon came back, landed and seemed to really like the cooling effect on offer. She then climbed onto the birdbath and opened her wings slightly and made some gentle purring, cooing noises....

  

I swear she was expressing happiness, joy....

  

On another blisteringly hot day when the sprayer was on, she came down, walked towards it and opened her wings up running into the water spray. Not once, but many times.

  

A further revelation into the unseen sides to these beautiful birds came with the male and female on the rear garden fence. They sat together, locked beaks like a kiss and then the male took his time gently preening her head feathers and the back of her neck as she made tiny happy sounds. They stayed together like that for several minutes, showing a gentle, softer side to their nature and demonstrating the deep bond between them. Into July and the pair started to bring their three youngsters to my garden, the nippers learning to use the birdbath for bathing and dipping food, the parents attentive as ever. Two of the youngsters headed off once large enough and strong enough.

  

I was privileged to be in close attendance as the last juvenile was brought down by the pair, taught to take food and then on a night in July, to soar and fly with it's mother in the evening sky as the light faded. She would swoop and twirl, and at regular intervals just touch the juvenile in flight with her wing tip feathers, as if to reassure it that she was close in attendance. What an amazing experience to view. A few days later, the juvenile, though now gaining independence and more than capable of tackling food scraps in the garden, was still on occasions demand feeding from it's mother who was now teaching him to take chicken breast, hotdogs or digestive biscuits and bury them in the garden beds for later delectation. The juvenile also liked to gather up peanuts and bury them in the grass. On one occasion I witnessed a pair of rambunctious Pica Pica (Magpies), chasing the young crow on rooftops, leaping at him no matter how hard he tried to get away. He defended himself well and survived the attacks, much to my relief.

  

Into August and the last youngster remained with the adults, though now was very independent even though he still spent time with his parents on rooftops, and shared food gathering duties with his mum.Hotdog sausages were their favourite choice, followed by fish fingers and digestive biscuits which the adult male would gather up three at a time. In October, the three Crows were still kings of the area, but my time observing them was pretty much over as I will only put food out now for the birds in the winter months.

  

Corvus Corone.... magnificently misunderstood by some!

  

Paul Williams June 4th 2021

  

I would like to say a huge and heartfelt 'THANK YOU' to GETTY IMAGES, and the 40.396+ Million visitors to my FLICKR site.

  

***** Selected for sale in the GETTY IMAGES COLLECTION on June 11th 2021

  

CREATIVE RF gty.im/1322825199 MOMENT ROYALTY FREE COLLECTION**

  

This photograph became my 5,301st frame to be selected for sale in the Getty Images collection and I am very grateful to them for this wonderful opportunity.

  

©DESPITE STRAIGHT LINES (Paul Williams)

  

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Photograph taken at an altitude of Fifty three metres at 15:25pm on a summer afternoon on Tuesday 8th June 2021, of an adult Carrion crow (Corvus corone), standing beside some ground covering Geranium macrorrhizum off Hythe Avenue and Chessington Avenue in Bexleyheath, Kent.

    

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Nikon D850 Focal length 460mm Shutter speed: 1/800s Aperture f/7.1 iso250 Hand held with Tamron VC Vibration control set to ON in position 1 14 Bit uncompressed RAW NEF file size L (8256 x 5504 pixels) FX (36 x 24) Focus mode: AF-C AF-Area mode: 3D-tracking AF-C Priority Selection: Release. Nikon Back button focusing enabled 3D Tracking watch area: Normal 55 Tracking points Exposure mode: Manual exposure mode Metering mode: Matrix metering White balance on: Auto1 (4600k) Colour space: RGB Picture control: Neutral (Sharpening +2)

  

Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD G2. Nikon GP-1 GPS module. Lee SW150 MKII filter holder. Lee SW150 95mm screw in adapter ring. Lee SW150 circular polariser glass filter.Lee SW150 Filters field pouch. Hoodman HEYENRG round eyepiece oversized eyecup.Mcoplus professional MB-D850 multi function battery grip 6960.Two Nikon EN-EL15a batteries (Priority to battery in Battery grip). Black Rapid Curve Breathe strap. My Memory 128GB Class 10 SDXC 80MB/s card. Lowepro Flipside 400 AW camera bag.

    

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LATITUDE: N 51d 28m 28.35s

LONGITUDE: E 0d 8m 10.48s

ALTITUDE: 54.0m

  

RAW (TIFF) FILE: 130.00MB NEF FILE: 90.80MB

PROCESSED (JPeg) FILE: 41.40MB

    

PROCESSING POWER:

  

Nikon D850 Firmware versions C 1.10 (9/05/2019) LD Distortion Data 2.018 (18/02/20) LF 1.00

  

HP 110-352na Desktop PC with AMD Quad-Core A6-5200 APU 64Bit processor. Radeon HD8400 graphics. 8 GB DDR3 Memory with 1TB Data storage. 64-bit Windows 10. Verbatim USB 2.0 1TB desktop hard drive. WD My Passport Ultra 1tb USB3 Portable hard drive. Nikon ViewNX-1 64bit Version 1.4.1 (18/02/2020). Nikon Capture NX-D 64bit Version 1.6.2 (18/02/2020). Nikon Picture Control Utility 2 (Version 2.4.5 (18/02/2020). Nikon Transfer 2 Version 2.13.5. Adobe photoshop Elements 8 Version 8.0 64bit.

   

Published: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 on VOGUE

 

Cheers :))

Published Lighthouse pictures

published in Diva annual issue, 2009

This is a Motion Photo — watch the video

This is a Motion Photo — watch the video

Published in GMARO Magazine

Published Lighthouse pictures

PLEASE, NO invitations or self promotions, THEY WILL BE DELETED. My photos are FREE to use, just give me credit and it would be nice if you let me know, thanks.

Published in 1983, this book by Von Arx, teaching alongside Wolfgang Weingart and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of design, instructs on the use of design in film.

silkscreened leporello

published and printed by L‘appât

 

*fear of happiness

 

available here: boris-pramatarov.blogspot.be/

— met Galerie E-carré.

Note: this photo was published in an undated (May 2010) EveryBlock NYC Zipcodes blog, with the title 10025. It was also published in an undated (May 2010) EveryBlock NYC Neighborhoods blog titled "Upper West Side."

 

Moving into 2012, the photo was published in an undated (mid-Oct 2012) blog titled "Unusual things to do in New York City for under $100."

 

Moving into 2014, the photo was published in a Jul 23, 2014 blog titled "How brands make the man, and the woman – literally." It was also published in an Oct 20, 2014 blog titled "New York Is The Snobbiest City In America."

 

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This is a continuation of a Flickr set that I started in the summer of 2009. As I noted in that earlier collection of photos, I still have many parts of New York City left to explore -- but I've also realized that I don't always have to go looking elsewhere for interesting photographs. Some of it is available just outside my front door.

 

I live on a street corner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where there's an express stop on the IRT subway line (with a new space-age subway station scheduled to be completed by fall 2010), as well as a crosstown bus stop, an entrance to the West Side Highway, and the usual range of banks, delis, grocery stores, fast-food shops, mobile-phone stores, drug-stores, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, Subway, and other commercial enterprises. As a result, there are lots of interesting people moving past my apartment building, all day and all night long.

 

It's easy to find an unobtrusive spot on the edge of the median strip separating the east side of Broadway from the west side; nobody pays any attention to me as they cross the street from east to west, and nobody even looks in my direction as they cross from north to south (or vice versa). In rainy weather, sometimes I huddle under an awning of the T-Mobile phone store on the corner, so I can take pictures of people under their umbrellas, without getting my camera and myself soaking wet...

 

So, these are some of the people I thought were photo-worthy during the past few weeks and month; I'll add more to the collection as the year progresses ... unless, of course, other parts of New York City turn out to be more compelling from time to time.

Reflections of the bridge and Opera House off the angles glass walls of the opera house.

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 .

www.glaucoart.com.ar

Published in Theory and Simulations of Gels, Nanogels, and Nanoparticle Assemblies

Prateek Kumar Jha, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University

May 16, 2012. www-personal.umich.edu/~prateekj/download/defense.pdf Colors are beautiful, it is ZEN when held in hand and ran thru fingers.

Polymer Gel, the material contact lenses are manufactured from. Size of .090 inch in crystal form, when water is added, they expand to .500 inch. (expansion time ~6 hrs.)

You can also find me on Instagram: tekapa_pictures

...

 

#Frankfurt#Germany#City#urban#cityphotography#urbanphotography#cityexplorer#exploringthecity#urbanexplorer#street#streetphotography#streetshot#blackandwhitephotography#blackandwhite#bw#bnw#blacknwhite#blackandwhitephoto#bwlover#bwlovers#tekapapics

   

[Published by] H. B. [Hutson Brothers] Ltd., London E.C. 1. Entire British Production

Franked but not postmarked; possibly never mailed. Addressed to Mr. Emile Stern at 1359 Broadway, New York City.

Message: “Here several days and am also celebrating the Jubilee of King & Queen. Weather beautiful & warm, and London is very lively. Sailing to morrow. Regards [signed] Dan Strauss”

 

Found "in the wild" in the www ...

 

The original photo.

All Rights Reserved !!!!!

No parts of this material can be published, copied, downloaded or sold without a permission from me. PLEASE ask me before you post this material in a blog or on your page ! Please respect these rules !!!!

Found this Fototrove photo "in the wild" www ...

 

The original photo.

You can also find me on Instagram: tekapa_pictures

...

 

#Frankfurt#Germany#City#urban#cityphotography#urbanphotography#cityexplorer#exploringthecity#urbanexplorer#street#streetphotography#streetshot#blackandwhitephotography#blackandwhite#bw#bnw#blacknwhite#blackandwhitephoto#bwlover#bwlovers#tekapapics

   

Found "in the wild" in the www ...

 

The original photo.

*Published Canadian Geographic’s Ontario 2017 calendar

 

The white-tailed deer is the most common of all of North America’s large mammals. It is also the most widely distributed. A deer's home range is usually less the a square mile. Deer collect in family groups of a mother and her fawns. When a doe has no fawns, she is usually solitary. Male bucks may live in groups consisting of three or four individuals, except in mating season, when they are solitary. White-tailed deer mate in November and the female has one to three fawns after about six months after mating.

 

To read more about white-tailed deer please read my stories here

One Foggy Morning and here The Ottawa Rut

 

To purchase prints, cards, mugs, photos, shirts and more you can visit my Redbubble site

  

I've self published a book of my 100 strangers. It follows the format you can see here for each of the strangers. At the moment I've just ordered this one draft copy. I'm going through it to correct spelling, colours, layout and sizing issues.

 

The final book will be available soon. I'll be making it available for purchase from the publisher's site (blurb.com) at cost price. If you would like to be notified when the book is available for purchase send me a flickr mail or drop a comment on this picture.

 

Also I've been featured on the flickr blog at blog.flickr.net/en/2011/08/26/100-strangers-100-personali... . It's very validating to have my work shown in this way. I hope the blog post attracts more tallent to the project.

Published in 'The Saturday Evening Post - October 1, 1960

 

This scan was originally posted by another Flickr user that has since deleted his account. I have posted it here solely so it can continue to be enjoyed and shared.

originally published on SALYSÉ Magazine

Photographer Simone Chiappinelli

Models Serena Debianchi/Le Scapigliate

MUA Valentina Cappelletti & Beatrice Roggero

Styling Alessandro Crivellaro

 

Instagram: www.instagram.com/lord_orph/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/SimoneChiappinelliSC

Steller: steller.co/lord_orph/

Website: www.simonechiappinelli.com/

Published by Golden Books from 1961 to 1965, this is one of four books in a slip-cover set designed to excite families about the joys that awaited them in the World of Walt Disney.

 

The books included: Fantasyland, Nature, America, and Stories from Other Lands. I found this copy of the Fantasyland book for $4 at my Friends of the Library Bookstore. Boxed sets on eBay run about $30 on the lower end.

 

I like the old-school feel of the illustrations--this is the Disney I grew up with.

Some news for you - The Cornwall Tourist Board have chosen two of my photos to use in the 2008 Cornwall Destination Guide.

Got my copy hot of the press yesterday!

This is my picture of Portreath on the front cover.

To be found in TICs all around the country :)

 

www.visitcornwall.com

This photos has been published!

You'll find this photo on this website.

 

view large

The most fascinating part of any salvation/damnation image is Hell. Dante’s great Divine Comedy may well owe part of its inception to these images here in the Baptistry in Florence.

  

The Devil in Hell is not a subtle image. Its power to compel is with us today, by fear or by force.

  

To see the 3-D, use red/cyan glasses.

  

To read the QR code in the picture, use your smart phone and a scanner app. To find out more about QR codes, go to www.fredtruck.com, choose the Articles menu item, and select the Seals option.

______________________________________

  

Also, check out my video on YouTube, Milk Bottle Reliquary. You will find it here:

  

www.fredtruck.com/reliquary/

  

This just in! I’ve just published an article detailing what my method of making Anaglyphs might mean in art and information science.

   

The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette Daily Telegraph published a full report on the tragedy, and the inquest into the deaths in its edition of 6th September 1882.

 

We reported a few days ago a sad bathing occurrence at Croyde, North Devon, by which three young gentlemen lost their lives.

They were visitors to the place, and belonged to a school of lads in London.

On Sunday last, a week after the occurrence - two of the bodies were picked up, and yesterday J. H. Toiler, Esq., held an inquest on them at the King's Arms Inn, Georgeham.

Thomas Heddon, a lodging-house-keeper, of Croyde, in the parish of Georgeham, said he had that day seen a body and identified it as that of Havelock McGeorge, a lad thirteen years of age, who had been staying with him, in charge of Miss Hardie. Deceased resided at No.5, Lansdowne Road, Wimbledon.

On Sunday morning last, between seven and eight o'clock, he went out on the beach to see if he could find any bodies. He saw something on the shore at high water, and on going to the spot found it was the body of Havelock McGeorge. The body was in the water, and was quite naked. He took charge of the body and took it to the mortuary with the assistance of two other men. He should say the deceased came to his death by drowning.

On Monday, the 28th August, the morning when the lads bathed, there was a heavy ground sea on.

Thomas Staddon, a labourer, of Croyde, said he had that morning seen the body of a lad whom be recognised as that of Herbert Maconaghey. He was about thirteen years of age he had heard, but he looked fifteen.

On Sunday evening last, about half-past five o'clock, he went out to look for the bodies. He was in company with James Lovering, and they saw a body, in a deep gully on the shore, which he afterwards recognized as that of Herbert Maconaghey.

He had it removed to the mortuary.

Death, he should say, was caused by drowning.

Mary Ellen Hardie said she resided at 5, Lansdowne-road, Wimbledon, and was governess to Miss Palmer

The deceased were staying with her at Croyde, and she last saw them alive on Monday, 28th August, about quarter-past ten in the morning.

They were leaving the house to go upon the sands. Seven of them went out together, but only four came back again. She thought they were going out to play. Besides the two whose bodies were found, that of Charles Binney was missing.

They had bathed every morning during the six weeks they had been at Croyde.

Mr. Flinch, who represented the friends of the deceased, said that where the lads bathed was not dangerous, but the ground sea took them to Glover's Pool, and there they were drowned.

He hoped the jury would make a recommendation to have a board placed near Glover's Pool.

He further stated that he should have wished the eldest of the seven boys (Cornford) to have been present, but he was too unwell to attend.

He would have told them that Maconoghey was in no danger, and that he lost his life while trying to save one of the deceased. He called out to Cornford, "You save one boy, and I'll save another."

The Coroner advised the jury as to their verdict, which was that the deceased met with their death accidentally while bathing, and they recommended a board to be placed on the sands, warning visitors only to bathe at half-tide.

The three unfortunate lads were not brothers, as has been stated, nor were they related to each other in any way.

Messrs. Symons and Son, of Barnstaple, made two coffins for the deceased lads, whose bodies will he interred in Georgeham Cemetery,Devon. The three friends were buried together.

 

1900 was when Postman's Park became the location for George Frederic Watts's Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a memorial to ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others and who might otherwise be forgotten.

This takes the form of a loggia and long wall housing ceramic memorial tablets.

The Heroic act by Herbert took place 138 years ago & is a good reminder of all the people who are making sacrifices at present.

Published: deutsch.radio.cz/tschechien-startet-zentralen-kauf-von-at...

www.psymag.de/14286/die-welt-hustet-psychosomatik-coronav...

www.thenewhumanitarian.org/photo/coronavirus-emergency-ai...

andrewliptak.substack.com/p/reading-list-plague-edition

 

Frankfurt Hanauer Landstr.

Hornbach construction market