My Life - Volume 2 of 4 (Picked for You) - Hardcover

Richard Wagner

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798259512061

Publisher: Clearview Editions, 2026

About this title

About the Author

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is canonical as a composer rather than as a prose writer: the creator of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and one of the most consequential figures in the history of Western music, whose harmonic innovations reshaped opera and influenced composers for generations after him. My Life (Mein Leben), his autobiography, is a different kind of document - not a musical score but Wagner's own account of his formation, dictated in the 1860s to Cosima von Bülow (later his wife) and originally printed only in a small private edition for friends and patrons before its public release. This Clearview edition covers his early life, the years before the operas that made him famous. A library shelving Wagner honestly cannot set his biography aside from his antisemitism, which is extensively documented in his own essays (notably "Das Judenthum in der Musik") and which later made him a figure claimed and distorted by the Nazi regime, decades after his death. That history does not appear at length in this excerpt of his early memoirs, but any collection holding Wagner's own account of himself should hold it alongside that context, not in place of it - an autobiography is precisely the kind of text where an author's self-presentation and the documented record need to be read together. For readers of music history, My Life is primary-source testimony from inside one of the most transformative careers in opera: apprenticeships, debts, failed productions, and the slow emergence of an artistic vision, told in Wagner's own often self-mythologizing voice, useful to read critically rather than credulously. This Clearview Editions large-print printing - 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, ragged-right, undivided words - makes that primary source accessible to low-vision readers and researchers who would otherwise need a magnifier for a standard edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clearview Editions
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798259512061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 346