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Wagner's Sublime Effects: Bells, Cannon and the Perception of Heavy Sound

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Book chapter

Change log

Authors

Trippett, DJ 

Abstract

For the purposes of crime and punishment, Richard Wagner’s involvement in the violent uprising in Dresden during May 1849 is a matter of historical record. He obtained hand grenades and hunting rifles, had coercive placards printed asking Saxon soldiers ‘Are you with us against the foreign troops?’, liaised daily with the provisional government and spent several days and one night atop the Kreuzkirche as lookout. That Wagner valued the aesthetic experience of the tower, with its elevated audiovisual panorama, is clear from comments in his third autobiography, Mein Leben (My Life), and by the fact that he returned there twice and – in an early form of data sonification – almost certainly used the great bell overhead to signal troop movements to comrades below. Figure 10.1 shows the neoclassical tower in 1788 and the dome in which Wagner resided.

Description

Title

Wagner's Sublime Effects: Bells, Cannon and the Perception of Heavy Sound

Keywords

sonic warfare, richard wagner, Dresden uprising, deafness, Bells

Is Part Of

Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680-1880

Book type

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN

9781108486590
Sponsorship
European Research Council (638241)
Leverhulme Trust (PLP-2014-336)