The stuff that operas are made of (Der Stoff, aus dem die Opern sind)

• Hardcover
• with bookmark
• 992 pages
• book jacket
• 53 Essays

978-3-86638-422-4

32.00 €           

Norbert Abels concludes his grand opera trilogy with this comprehensive collection of essays. He began in 2010 with the 80 essays of OHRENTHEATER / Scenes from an Opera History, continuing in 2021 with another 70 essays from NOTENLESE / The Languages of Opera. His TONFABELN now reflect on the aesthetics of the art form, question its future, and deal with the relationship between words and sound. Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner dominate the second part of the book, which concludes in Part 3 with a look at various works, including some that have been forgotten. Norbert Abels takes a critical look at the legacy and future of opera and at the "stuff that operas are made of," as he subtitles his observations:

Musical theater seems to be showing its age. Its popularity is waning. Its supposedly indispensable power of suggestion is groaning under the weight of an inexorable historical mildew that is covering it. Added to this is skepticism about the increasingly obvious anachronism of the material repertoire ... Are opera houses, then, the stone shrines and resting places of a bourgeoisie covered in historical verdigris, themselves already resembling museums?

It is certainly exciting to see Norbert Abels answer these questions through his 53 new trains of thought on stage music – a fireworks display of ideas, observations, descriptions, and background information that he spreads out on old and new opera productions. If his renewed enthusiasm for opera were anything to go by, musical theater would be guaranteed never-ending prosperity! (Hier Inhaltsverzeichnis abrufbar etc.) Thanks to Solveig Müller, Oslo, for proofreading.

Essay on Ernst Mach (Essay über Ernst Mach)

• Softcover
• with flap brochure
• 56 pages
• with 2 pictures

978-3-86638-431-6

18.00 €           

Ernst Mach was not only one of the most influential scientists in overcoming classical physics, but also one of the most impressive philosophical minds of modern times.

Norbert Abels examines Mach’s theorem of the irretrievability of the self against the backdrop of Friedrich Nietzsche’s language- and value-critical perspectivism.

Ludwig van Beethoven's songs based on poems by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Op. 48 – a secular approach

• Softcover
• 64 pages

978-3-86638-430-9

18.00 €           

Between 1798 and 1802, during a period of his life marked by serious worries and thoughts of death, Ludwig van Beethoven composed six songs for voice and piano.

Norbert Abels traces the origins of Beethoven’s Six Songs for voice and piano based on poems by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. The composer, who was already suffering from hearing loss, was inspired by the widely read spiritual poetry of the Enlightenment poet and moral philosopher, who died in 1769, twelve months before Beethoven’s birth. Abels allows us to view two great personalities against the backdrop of their eras in a new light, based on the selection of verses set to music, the particular religious attitude of the poet Gellert, and the details of Beethoven’s musical adaptation.

The volume contains both Beethoven’s sheet music and Gellert’s complete poems.

Art and Conspiracy Case Studies in Words and Sound (Kunst und Verschwörung Fallbeispiele aus Wort und Ton)

• Series »16pages«
• hand bound
• 40 pages

978-3-86638-321-0

10.00 €           

Kafka’s nightmare of a disposition to lie that has become the world order now reveals its global relevance:

Who was responsible for the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? The multitude of conspiracy theories surrounding the composer’s demise is almost impossible to fathom. Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri, set to music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, is just one example. Büchner’s Woyzeck believes that the Freemasons are undermining the earth like moles. And Gioachino Rossini even composed a conspiracy and character assassination aria. Wagner saw German identity threatened by foreign powers. Conspiracy theories have always existed.

They are often a phenomenon of crisis and flourish in times of great uncertainty, constantly developing threat scenarios and enemy stereotypes. This volume draws on the vast pool of conspiracy myths to highlight exemplary cases. Their fictional constructions are an attractive motif for literature per se, but can also be found in the musical sphere.

Literary Expressionism – an Introduction

• Series »16pages«
• 40 pages
• hand bound
• with illustrations

978-3-86638-336-4

9.00 €           

In course of his diverse and extensive lecture activities, Expressionism has repeatedly been a core moment in the cultural history of modernism for Norbert Abels. In this respect, he has compiled here a concise introduction to literary expressionism that, despite ist brevity, is mighty powerful.

The expressionism (lat. expression – expression), according to its word meaning, aimed to exemplify the inner worlds, the dark landscape of the soul, to the so-called "unconscious", the nameless fears and the shapeless inner spaces of the psyche and to give them plasticity and contour.

That is how the small but very dense volume begins and it takes a close look at the most important topoi and „leaders“ of literary expressionism, including for example, Franz Werfel: An den Leser – Franz Kafka: Gib’s auf – Gottfried Benn: Mann und Frau – Hugo Ball: gadji beri bimba

Miniature to Literary World

• a beautifully made softcover
• 400 pages

978-3-86638-295-4

20.00 €           

The linen tester, as Norbert Abels explains to us in his preliminary remarks, often mounted on a brass stand, is a special, highly intensifying form of magnifying glass. All kinds of objects can be made more clearly visible with this wonderful instrument. […] The linen tester serves me as metaphor for illustration, for the illumination of invisible or overlooked details, for the more delicate observation of opaque, encoded peculiarities, as well as for the avoidance of perceptual barriers, the maximization of focal length and angle of view, or the discovery of aberrations.

From such an effort for clarification resulted my modest attempts to look at the texts again—but differently—in their now more changed reductions.

Folkwang Symposium 2013

• hardcover with bookmark
• 14 lectures
• 304 pages

978-3-86983-013-1

36.00 €           

In 1813, the year of the Battle of the Nations, Verdi and Wagner were born. They never met personally.

Occasionally, they were brought together but without recognizing each other. Wagner, the son of a police writer coming from a humble background, and Verdi, son of a north-italian restaurant owner: They revolutionized the art form of musical theater fundamentally, in completely different ways with programmatical distance to each other.

14 well-known cultural scientists and musicologists talk about these giants of musical history. All lectures pay attention to BOTH composers at the same time. They enlighten musical, historical, literary historical, sociological and media studies aspects and thus offer brandnew insights in the work of two outstanding artist.

Language Music

• 600 pages
• 66 Essays
• hardcover

978-3-86638-332-6

28.00 €           

Norbert Abels gives us 66 essays on the relations between music and language, and vice versa: by showing cooperation between righters and musicians, between composers and poets.

A book full of explorations in our Thinking and Feelings!

in purple linnen

• original title paper
• signed by the author

978-3-86638-008-Vorzug

48.00 €           

Richard Wagner's Parsifal

• 120 pages
• Series Label (Reihe ETIKETT)

978-3-86638-159-9

9.00 €           

Wagner’s Opera »Parsifal« for the first time in a church – the textbook (libretto), additionally a prose version and one essay each by Norbert Abels and Peter Steinacker, supplemented by historical annotations for the developement and its background.

The tremendousness, after Johann Jeseph Görres emerging »Gralskonjunktur« was also noticed by Richard Wagner. Because of this first ideas for a work based on the matter increasingly appeared since the middle of the 1860s. Meyerbeer’s incorporation of the lutheran choral »Eine feste Burg« as well as the in 1836 for the first time sounding Paulus-Oratorium, which is garnished with protestant choral traditions, by Mendelssohn Barholdy, who mWagner got to know in the same year. Those two might have given him musical impulses for the later churchmusical interpolation of Parsifal. Only about a decade after the in many aspects important year of initiantions 1836, grew, during a stay at a healt resort in Marienbad, the plan for a work about an interpretations of the matter of »The Holy Grail«. Wagner mystified the moment of his inspiration as as usual in this autobiography as a divine conception, and took liberties with time and place. For him imaginations had the same claim of reality as empirical facts. It is important, that the more and more accumulating material for association put him under a magical spell as proved for the next 40 years to be a ­– using the words of Novalis –  it did not deal less with the long hike of atoneartistic anchorite thorugh the desert of the mind than with the way of integration between art and religion to form the sounding »Hügelpredigt« (hill sermon) in Bayreuth. – This horizon is illuminated by the book »Welterlösung«.

Scenes of a history of opera

• 81 essays
• 848 pages
• Series Main Works (Reihe Die Hauptwerke)
• There is a small advantage edition...

978-3-86638-212-1

22.00 €           

About Ohrentheater

The opera as musical form, as stageexperience and medium accuires new fascination.  Abels, leader of dramaturgy  at the opera Frankfurt, promotes this enthusiasm is along special developements  of the opera in the last 400 years.

Why choose componists to employ  hunchbacks and disabled persons in thier œuvres? In which ways does the great gesture of an operretta differ from the kitch of a musical- or is it vice versa? What has the opera discovered from love and marriagedrama?  Has it invented new mental states? Which fanctions have letters and messangers on stage, and what kind of messanger does the spactator need to be able to receive the massage of the opera? –

Norbert Abels alludes to over 70 different operas  and draws form them the scenes of his history of the opera.

Oppositions - skepsis and revolt of jewish authors

• 160 pages
• Series Main Works (Reihe Die Hauptwerke)
• 10 essays
• with bookmark

978-3-86638-009-7

20.00 €           

Norbert Abels is dealing with a selection of jewish writers, who have one thing in common: they are said to be stubborn, debating admonishers and clear sighted writers of history and stories. They give oppositions assiduously.

Scholem Alejchem, Lion Feutchwanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Stafan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Edgar Hilsenrath, Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Bruno Schulz, Willy Haas, Manès Sperber are the voices, who are asked to speak and are being newly read.

3 Essays to Celebrate his 200. Birthday

• 48 pages
• Series »16pages«
• hand bound

978-3-86638-173-5

9.00 €           

The »brutish rationality« (Woyzeck) has it’s own semantics  which does not plumb in the end.

It is no cooincidence that its counterpart »reason« is often associated with terms of violence. Büchner spoke of the »fortress of reason« (Danton’s Death). The madness is functionalised to portray matirial misery. His intention to shield himself from the scandal of his strangeness through fighting with his rationality. He is not able to stay different, the munition of the »canon of truth« (Danton’s Death) is hunting him, just like it has Büchner .

Richard Wagner in Frankfurt

• 554 pages
• Hardcover with bookmark

978-3-86638-025-7

25.00 €           

A collection to celebrate Wagner’s 200. Birthday in 2013

You maye also be interested in the NTA: Neue Text-Ausgabe (new text edition) Richard Wagner in 12 volumes.

Edited by N. Abels and Bernd Loebe, Opera Frankfurt.

The book on hand follows alsong the tracks of Richard Wagner at the birthplace of the german Democracy. Through 99 articles with different points of view on Richard Wagner and his works, the connections between Wagner and Frankfurt am Main will be illuminated.

In Frankfurt, where Wagner conducted his »Lohengrin« for the first time and nearly with out abbreviations in the Stadttheater  in september 1862 and despite many mistakes of the orchestra – especially the wind section – was acclaimed. At the same time he kept a close relationship to the actress Friederike Meyer, the lover of the theatre manager Franz Georg Cal von Guaita, who had invited him to conduct – one of the numerous love triangles in his live. Furthermore in the late summer of the same year an according to his live’s history not unimportant incident takes place: Wagner, as frequently in a frolic eccentric mood, offers the three months pregnant Cosmia to drive her himself in his handcart to the hotel »Zum Schwan«. Astonished by her approval he histates. The whole procedure is watched by her husband Hans von Bülow and has consequences  ...

To honour Wagner pompous and expensive concerts are organised in Frakfurt, which are acknowledged by the componist not without mockery: »Yes, yes, I understand, you have to produce animal heat trhough the music.« – Wagners own disctinctiveness also catch the Frankfurter’s eyes, which are proven by many articles of contemporaries and following generations. Additionally to authentic sources of muicipal archives and libraries, scattered articles in Frankfurter magazines and some exerpts from books, the in more than a half century published publicatins of the Frankfurt opera, from their inventory , of which the main part of this volume is made up. Those traces point far beyond the town at the Main and are without doubt for all the reader of interest, for whom the »case Wagner« is not closed yet.