Scholars devoted to analysis of Richard Wagners operas and music-dramas have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our systematic understanding of his art. Following Heises allegorical interpretation of Wagners Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this second installment of the authors lifelong Wagner project will examine Wagners mature music-dramas Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal in light of their relationship to the Ring as understood through Heises allegorical interpretation. It will demonstrate how Wagners Ring is a master-myth which can make sense of these other mature music-dramas as never before.
Paul Brian Heise has studied the works of Richard Wagner since 1971. While pursuing graduate studies in anthropology at Southern Illinois University, he developed an argument that Wagner's works could be understood as an allegory and withdrew from formal studies to devote his life to discovering and sharing his wholesale reassessment of the meaning of Wagner's dramas and their music. Heise has published extensively on Wagner, including The Wound That Will Never Heal: An Allegorical Interpretation of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung (Academica Press, 2021), and, with the support of the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, the website www.wagnerheim.com, an online compendium of Heise's thoughts about Wagner.
