Synopses & Reviews
"In a brilliant and original synthesis of developments in music, art, and literature,
German Modernism offers an important new reading of the years of transition between Romanticism and Modernism. Frisch's study is essential reading for anyone interested in why and how twentieth-century music developed as it did." and#151;Joseph Auner, editor of
A Schoenberg Reader"German Modernism is impressive for the author's wide-ranging historical treatment, which encompasses political, social, and cultural history with sovereign skill. With distinction, Walter Frisch reveals central aspects of the era between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which music historiography has increasingly ascribed a special profile as 'modern.' No less notable are the focused musical analyses that illuminate works from many different genres. In contrast to cultural history that remains ignorant of music, and musical analysis that pays no attention to social and historical context, this blend of interdisciplinary comprehensiveness and detailed musical analysis makes an exemplary impression."and#151;Hermann Danuser, Professor of Music, Humboldt University, Berlin
and#147;A masterful exploration of music, literature, and visual artsand#133;.Finally brings music into the discourse of modernism in a comprehensive, learned and sensitive manner. Provocative in the questions it raises, Frisch's study will become indispensable for further investigations into the nature of modernismand#8221; and#150;Pamela Potter, School of Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Review
“Tristan’s Shadow is an important, highly intelligent, and ambitious study. Rigorously researched, blissfully unencumbered by canonical narratives, and written with Adrian Daub’s signature verve, this book provides a new, and entirely compelling, account of German opera after Wagner. It will undoubtedly become standard reading in musicology and opera studies, in German studies and comparative literature, and in the history of sexuality.”
Review
“Boldly taking Wagnerism far beyond the usual suspects, Adrian Daub shows that the influence of
Tristan didn't end with chromaticism or even with metaphysics. In a brilliant flash of insight, Daub perceives that the opera’s eroticism is entwined with its dramatic aesthetics in ways that haunted and inspired later composers. Better than any recent book I can think of, this lucid and imaginative study shows why Wagner mattered—and continues to matter—enormously.”
Review
“In Tristans Shadow Adrian Daub does nothing less than rethink from the ground up the problem that Wagner's legacy posed for German opera composers through the first half of the twentieth century. Wagner himself emerges in a fresh light as Daub uncovers the surprisingly close connections between the erotics of Wagnerian opera and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The mixture, both intoxicating and toxic, sets goals for subsequent German opera that, as Daub shows in a series of richly textured readings, could neither be achieved nor evaded. Anyone still struggling with Wagner (and who, in the opera world, is not?) will find this book rewarding.”
Review
“Tristan’s Shadow maps sexuality onto Wagner’s concept of the total work of art, in order to show how the
Gesamtkunstwerk must take account of the body and the sexual. Through exciting readings of Strauss, Schreker, d’Albert and Siegfried Wagner and Kurt Weill, Adrian Daub shows opera to be attuned to—and discordant with—ugliness, sexual dissidence, crises of masculinity and decadence: he reads German post-Wagnerian opera as though it was an index to the cultural crises that produced Hitler’s Reich.”
Synopsis
In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker.
Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the pastand#151;the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.
Synopsis
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference.
Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.
About the Author
Adrian Daub is associate professor of German Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealismand Romanticism and of Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and the Making of Nineteenth Century Domestic Culture. He lives in San Francisco.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction · Tristans Shadow: The Fate of Sexual Difference in Opera
1 · Mother Mime: Wagner and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference
2 · Mimes Revenge: The Total Work of Art and the Ugly Detail
3 · Taceat Mulier in Theatro: Richard Strausss Guntram, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the Exorcism of the Voice
4 · Erotic Acoustics: The Natural History of the Theater and Der ferne Klang
5 · Congenital Blindness: Visions of Marriage in the Operas of Eugen dAlbert
6 · Occult Legacies: Eroticism and the Dynasty in Siegfried Wagners Operas
7 · The Power of the Verfluchte Lohe”: (Post-)Wagnerian Redheads in Das Rheingold, Fredegundis, and Irrelohe
Coda · Im a Stranger Here Myself ”
Notes
Index