My partner Robin, in honor of the bicentennial of the birth of her favorite composer, Richard Wagner, is doing a year-long blog, Wagner Tripping, about him.
Robin asked me to contribute two posts about Wagner’s influence on James Joyce, since I’m a great fan of the Irish
writer, and am part of a Finnegans Wake reading group
that meets twice-monthly at a local Irish pub to sip Guinness and
ponder Joyce’s encyclopedic romp through the history of everything.
Reading the Wake, it becomes
clear from the very first page (“Sir Tristram, violer d’amores,
fr’over the short sea”) that Joyce draws heavily from Wagner in
the work. But what I didn’t realize—until Robin started telling
me about it, and then I subsequently did the research for this
post—what just how much of an influence Wagner had on so
much of Joyce’s writing.
You can read the first of my two posts here.
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