My life with Wagner - Christian Thielemann

Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. My Life with Wagner chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood.

Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner - from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. The book combines reminiscence and analysis with revealing insights drawn from Thielemann's many years of experience as a Wagner conductor. Taking each opera in turn, his appraisal is illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure.

My Life with Wagner is a richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.

Christian Thielemann was born in 1959. In 1988 he became Germany's youngest general music director with his appointment at Nuremberg, before returning to the Deutsche Oper in his hometown of Berlin in 1997. More recently he led the Munich Philharmonic from 2004 to 2011. In addition to his current position in Dresden, Thielemann was appointed artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2013. His work has taken him to many of the finest opera houses around the globe and he is a regular guest of world-class orchestras such as the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics.

In 2000 he made his critically lauded debut at the Bayreuth Festival, to which he has returned year after year. He was appointed music director in July 2015.

My Life with Wagner is a professional's manual for approaching Wagner ... Thielemann's musical explorations ... are wonderful ... [His] writing also achieves something notoriously difficult, the evocation of music in prose ...
In the end, My Life with Wagner has that peculiar, confidential value of a work written not by an academic, but by an artist submerged in the music.
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH - Jonathan McAloon

[E]xceedingly valuable ... Thielemann is fascinating on the thought processes and working practices of a musician coming to terms with Wagner ... this is a book with flashes of great insight, in which connoisseurs of the unsaid will find a good deal to ponder.
SPECTATOR - Philip Hensher

Thielemann is a passionate advocate for the music of Wagner, which has obsessed him since childhood. Where this book really works is in its focus on the minutiae of performance. It viscerally exposes the levels of perfectionism required in the virtuoso. Without alienating the lay reader ... it gets across the complexity of a Wagner score and the infinite interpretation possibilities out of which the conductor has to produce a narrative.
INDEPENDENT - Lucasta Miller

[Thielemann's] book is an act of homage, part revealing autobiography ... and part informative guide to the Wagner oeuvre, describing the plots and performances of all the operas ... His enthusiasm breathes life into them.
ECONOMIST

The most rewarding and intimate section of the book concerns Thielemann's life as acolyte at Bayreuth - a place that Thielemann describes a 'temple, a workshop and a place of pilgrimage'.
THE TIMES - Neil Fisher

A sensitive and revealing book, worth reading as a document of how Western art reflects on itself, its achievements and its anxieties[.] This is the book to buy if you are going to see Wagner or listen to him at home ... It's idiosyncratic, humorous, enlightening and written by one of the finest conductors alive[.] Every aspiring conductor should read this book ... Every aspiring singer should read it too[.]
LITERARY REVIEW - Gulliver Ralston

In one broad but illuminating sweep, Mr Thielemann surveys everything from Wagner's distinctive use of orchestration to the schemas of his operas: from the approach of different conductors to the Wagnerian Walhalla of Bayreuth ... Mr Thielemann's skill lies in conveying the
power of music in words.
COUNTRY LIFE - Teresa Levonian Cole

Thielemann's insights into Wagner's operas, together with his career narrative, including the personalities he has met along the way, deepen our fascination with his My Life with Wagner.
WAGNER NOTES, THE WAGNER SOCIETY OF NY - Ira Lieberman