The Reception of Wagner’s Operas Since the May Fourth Movement

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_146How to use a DOI?

Keywords

reception theory; Richard Wagner; opera

Abstract

The so-called music Reception Theory, to be precise, refers to the relationship and development between musical works and recipients. Due to the non-semantic nature of music, different recipients will have very different understandings of the same work. Audience reception is subjective. Moreover, due to the influence of factors such as changes in time and space, changes in thought trends, and differences in the knowledge structure and aesthetic taste of the aesthetic subject, the aesthetic experience of the same object will inevitably be different. Wagner is a representative composer who experienced the decline and climax of European Romanticism. Wagner has won numerous praises in Western countries, but in the past 100 years in China, Wagner’s music reception has been very tortuous.

After the May Fourth Movement (May 4, 1919), Chinese people gradually realised that China’s future independence and influence depended upon adaptation to the trend of the times. It needed to be fundamentally changed by creating new ideas, culture, morals, ethics, and a related social and political system. After that, China’s openness to new ideas and culture led the Chinese to explore western culture more. This essay will explore and analyse the different status of Wagner after the May Fourth Movement and explain to a certain extent why Wagner’s operas didn’t spread well in China. Hand, the operas require large venues and skilled performers (Wagner’s operas are very long and require performers to have high singing skills); on the other hand, the changes in the Chinese political system have a certain impact on Wagner’s spread.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jingwei Hu
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - The Reception of Wagner’s Operas Since the May Fourth Movement
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1146
EP  - 1154
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_146
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_146
ID  - Hu2023
ER  -