My Life
A German Romantic Autobiography of Opera Reform, Political Exile, Artistic Ambition, and the Birth of Music DramaBy Richard Wagner
Length38h 33m
About this audiobook
Richard Wagner's *My Life* is an expansive, highly self-conscious autobiography tracing the composer's development from his childhood and early theatrical ambitions through the creation of his major operatic projects and the political upheavals surrounding the 1849 Dresden uprising. More than a chronological record, it is a work of artistic self-fashioning: Wagner interprets personal experience as the necessary prehistory of his revolutionary ideas about music drama, while presenting friendships, rivalries, and romantic attachments through a dramatic, often polemical narrative voice. Dictated to Cosima Wagner and shaped by retrospective justification, the book belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of Künstlerroman and confessional autobiography, though its grand claims and selective omissions demand critical reading. Wagner wrote the memoir in the later decades of his life, when his reputation, financial circumstances, and cultural influence had become inseparable from the mythology surrounding Bayreuth. His recollections illuminate the intellectual and emotional sources of his aesthetic theories, his encounters with figures such as Liszt, and the ideological environment that informed his nationalism and antisemitism. The text consequently reveals both genuine artistic reflection and calculated self-exoneration. This volume is indispensable for readers of Wagner, opera, Romanticism, and modern cultural history. It offers vivid insight into the making of a monumental artistic persona, provided it is read alongside historical scholarship and with attention to its biases, silences, and theatricality.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.1 (287)
Includes Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon, StoryGraph
GenreBiography and Memoir
Length38 hrs 33 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 11, 2025
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Enchantment of the Opera: 10 Classic Books on Its Rich Legacy
10PART II 1842-1850 (pt. 4)
2PART I 1813-1842 (pt. 1)
11PART II 1842-1850 (pt. 5)
3PART I 1813-1842 (pt. 2)
12PART III 1850-1861 (pt. 1)
4PART I 1813-1842 (pt. 3)
13PART III 1850-1861 (pt. 2)
5PART I 1813-1842 (pt. 4)
14PART III 1850-1861 (pt. 3)
Show all chaptersShow less
6PART I 1813-1842 (pt. 5)
15PART III 1850-1861 (pt. 4)
7PART II 1842-1850 (pt. 1)
16PART III 1850-1861 (pt. 5)
8PART II 1842-1850 (pt. 2)
17PART IV 1861-1864 (pt. 1)
9PART II 1842-1850 (pt. 3)
18PART IV 1861-1864 (pt. 2)
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