Amazon UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Being-Wagner-T ... 0008105693
Guardian review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... low-review
This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s “demiurgic personality”. Wagner was a man without boundaries, a “man connected to his ‘inner infant’”; a master dramatist of his life and an actor of astounding gifts (“more an actor than a composer,” Nietzsche thought); a man who, for better or worse, imposed himself and his work on the world as perhaps no other artist in history had done.
Is it possible Welles's mother, an opera enthusiast, was dressing him up as Wagner for this photo?
Here's another, less enthusiastic Guardian review of the new book by another Welles author, Peter Conrad:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... o-trousers
Callow describes Wagner’s mannerisms – the mad monologues he delivered with bulging eyes and bursts of fiendish laughter, the nervous frenzies caused by his raw, inflamed skin, the drooling endearments he lavished on his pet dogs – and pays careful attention to his wardrobe: velvet cloaks, floppy bohemian berets, and frou-frou undies confected in pink silk by a Viennese milliner. But the portrayal remains superficial, content with exaggerated mockery of the man’s quirks.
Though Callow rightly deplores Wagner’s antisemitic bigotry, it’s a cheap shot to deploy a Third Reich slogan as his subtitle, given his awareness that Wagner, “loathing both militarism and imperialism”, would have “despised” the Nazis.
Guardian review of Conrad's own 2011 book on Wagner:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/ ... rad-review
...this is a valuable work, not just because of Conrad's musical insights, but because of his grasp of historical context, which is really his stronger suit.
In 1982, Orson Welles read passages from Wagner's diary for the short film "Wagner in Venice":