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

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.