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Elektra was the fourth of fifteen operas by Strauss and opened his successful partnership with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is one of the most important operas of the early twentieth century and it solidified Strauss's status as the leading German opera-composer of his day. Bryan Gilliam's study of this major work examines its musical-historical context and also provides a detailed analysis of some of its musical features. He establishes a chronology of the evolution of the opera and places it in the larger framework of German opera of the time. His detailed examination of the sketch-books enables him to offer fresh insight into Strauss's use of motifs and overall tonal structure. In so doing he shows how the work's arresting dissonance and chromaticism has hidden its similarities to his later, seemingly more tonally conservative opera, Der Rosenkavalier - not only does Strauss in both operas exploit a variety of musical styles to express irony, parody, and other emotions, but both are in fact thoroughly tonal.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Structural outline of "Das Rheingold"
• preliminaries
• the documentary sources
• the forging of the text
• analytical positions
• the opera as a whole
• "creation ex nihilo" - the prelude
• scene one
• first transformation and scene two
• second transformation and scene three
• third transformation and scene four. Appendices: transcriptions from Wagner's complete draft
• works cited.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold is a milestone in the composer's outlput and in the history of music in general. It marked Wagner's return to operatic composition after a hiatus of five years, and signified his definitive break with earlier operatic conventions. it also represents a reconsideration of the whole question of dramatic-musical form, and the role of tonality in articulating this form. Warren Darcy traces here the genesis of Das Rheingold through the various textual and musical sketches and drafts to the full score, and also develops a theoretical framework within which the opera may be meaningfully analysed. Using Wagner's manuscripts as a point of departure, Darcy discusses the formal, harmonic, and linear structure of the work. In so doing, he challenges a number of contemporary views about the opera, including those of Curt von Westernhagen and Carl Dahlhaus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

France and the Nazi Menace examines the French response to the challenge posed by National Socialist Germany in the years 1933-1939. It focuses on the relationship between the intelligence on German intentions and capabilities and the evolution of French national policy from the rise of Hitler in 1933 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Based on extensive archival research, it considers the nature of the intelligence process and the place of intelligence within the French policy making establishment during the inter-war period. The central argument in the book is that the German threat was far from the only challenge facing French national leaders in an era of economic depression and profound ideological discord. Only after the national humiliation at the Munich Conference did the threat from Nazi Germany take precedence over France's internal problems in the making of policy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)