Uwe Faerber

Uwe Faerber (born May 4, 1924 - December 18, 2017 in Berlin ) was a German musicologist .

Career

Faerber was a long-time professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin and from 1977 to 2000 chairman of the German Richard Wagner Society, which emerged from the action group for the work of Richard Wagner

In his scientific work, which was mainly about the works of Richard Wagner, he became a staunch advocate of their - in the sense of the score - fair reproduction of the - in his opinion - unsuccessful productions of the director's theater, which change the meaning of each work and use it for foreign purposes abuse. His first writing became known, in which he critically examined the so-called “ Ring of the Century ” at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976 and pointed out numerous distortions in his work.

Primarily, however, he was concerned with fundamental musical questions, especially in his 2003 book Acts of Music Became Visible, Musical Expressions in Wagner's "Ring" . (See subsequent overview of works).

For more than 50 years he dealt with the works of Richard Wagner - preferably with the expressive content of his music, which he tries to determine with increasing accuracy in numerous lectures and publications. His conceptual approach was based on the fundamental findings of the musicologist Ernst Kurth , who defined the fundamental nature of music as "tension events". For Faerber, this results in the expressiveness of the art of music from its "movement in time and space" or from the chronological sequence of its pitches. The perception of the same triggers images in the listener that precede the real view of the stage processes (designed by Wagner). Again and again, reference is made to Wagner himself because he would have liked to describe his works as "deeds of music that have become apparent". But that means: music as a heard cause for a visible scenic effect (action). Like “cause and effect”, therefore, “music and scene” are inseparable; they form a unit of expression, an indivisible whole.

As a convinced interpreter, Faerber turned against the - in his opinion - common division of music and scene in the failed productions of the director's theater (not only with Wagner). This splitting in the reproduction of the work was for him - regardless of the taste of the time - not only wrong, but downright fatal, because it destroys the very essence of the created works.

Works

• The anniversary ring in Bayreuth 1976. A critical examination of the new staging of the tetralogy for the centenary of the festival . Berlin 1976
• Contributions to the "ring" understanding . In: Wagner reception today, Vol. 2 (1994): Der Ring des Nibelungen
• On the unity of the audible and the visible . In: Wagner Reception Today, Vol. 3 (1997)
• Acts of music that have become apparent. Musical expressions in Wagner's "Ring" . Frankfurt a. M. 2003

Web links

• Literature by and about Uwe Faerber in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner P. Seiferth: Report of death: Professor Uwe Faerber † (in: Infos of the day (Thursday, January 4, 2017)). (No longer available online.) In: Online Merker. Archived from the original on January 24, 2018 ; accessed on January 5, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ^ Ernst Kurth: Romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagner's "Tristan" . Bern 1920.