7 research outputs found
Wagner's Sublime Effects: Bells, Cannon and the Perception of Heavy Sound
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