Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
By shifting our attention from Wagner's politics to his erotics, Dreyfus enriches our understanding of all the major Wagner operas, as well as of the composer himself. This book will transform Wagner studies and the study of music and sexuality. Karol Berger, Stanford University
Review
Dreyfus's searching study of Wagner's sexuality - one with distinctively feminized and fetishistic qualities - penetrates to the core of both the man and the artist. His achievement is that he not only tells us more about the nature of Wagner's eroticism per se, but also makes clear how this substantively affected the music he wrote. An important contribution that brilliantly illuminates some crepuscular zones of the Wagner phenomenon. Barry Millington, Editor of the < i=""> Wagner Journal <>
Review
Laurence Dreyfus has written an immensely important book about the importance of the erotic in Wagner's life and work. The exploration of the fascinating and contradictory subject is both profound and witty. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Wagner's music. Vladimir Jurowski, Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Review
A fascinating study of a distinct dimension of Wagner's life and art. Larry Lipkis
Review
The Nazis have cast a long, retrospective shadow over Wagner, but as Laurence Dreyfus argues in Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, what scandalized (and delighted) 19th-century listeners to Wagner's music was not its politics but its unbridled sensuality. Dreyfus explores the aesthetic and biographical issues (including the composer's fondness for wearing women's silk lingerie) with admirable clarity, laying bare an aspect of the composer that is both central and often strangely ignored. Library Journal
Review
Even in this supposedly liberal era Wagner's detractors still wag fingers at his love-life...As this ground-breaking new study suggests, it's the erotic yearnings so central to his great works that remain arresting. Adam Lively - Sunday Times
Review
Revelatory. Michael Scott Rohan - BBC Music
Review
[Dreyfus] has produced a scholarly yet eminently readable volume that will bewitch any opera-lover. Like a benign magician--like Wagner himself, perhaps--Dreyfus conjures up a vivid array of characters and allows them to reveal their innermost thoughts through their own words and deeds. Nietzche and Schopenhauer are there, as are Baudelaire, Bulow, Heine, D'Annunzio, Thomas Mann, Krafft-Ebing and Henry James. Alex Ross - New Yorker
Review
At this point, the only good reason to add to the mountains of Wagner scholarship is to add another peak, which is precisely what Laurence Dreyfus has done in Wagner and the Erotic Impulse...The payoff for following him through his 250-page argument is that Wagner's music sounds deeper, richer and better than ever...Dreyfus' greatest achievement, a great deal of it pioneering, is in his investigation of Wagner's eroticism in the music itself. It's the hardest kind of work a writer about music can do, and Dreyfus does it with rare insight and imagination, and in language as accessible to the interested lay reader as it would be to fellow scholars...Wagner and the Erotic Impulse tears the roof off Wagner scholarship. The artistic cosmos it finds inside is a vastly more vital and compelling place. Daniel Snowman - Opera
Review
[Dreyfus's] persuasive contention is that this music is not only erotic to our ears and understanding, but that it was interpreted as such from the very start. Furthermore, he shows that the explicit connections of eroticism with music long predate the nineteenth century, going back at least as far as the terpsichorean tradition of the sixteenth century. Dreyfus impressively manages to argue that music can be interpreted as expressly erotic without getting himself entangled in the complexities of whether music can in general be assigned particular interpretation. Tim Pfaff - Bay Area Reporter
Review
Dreyfus' book is an excellent account of what is by any measure a crucial aspect of Wagner's extraordinary art. Bernard O ' Donoghue - Times Literary Supplement
Review
This is an altogether unusual portrait of the composer, one resting on a platform of brazen sexuality. Dreyfus posits Eros both as a prism through which to access Wagner's biography and oeuvre anew, and as the impulse driving the latter into existence...The hazards attendant on a study of Eros are offset by the strength of Dreyfus's argument. He elevates the erotic to a central paradigm for Wagner: its force is thematised in Tannhäuser, Tristan and Parsifal, documented throughout Wagner's writings, and substantiated by contemporary discourse, both passionate espousal and disgust. But as the author later explains, erotic impulse is also fundamental to the experience of music...Telling details are often the gems in any history, and this book is richly studded...Dreyfus's command of sources is impressive; all are newly translated, their contextual breadth forming a latter-day answer to Greenblatt's so-called new historicism...A rich study, saturated with insight, fresh perspective and delivered with panache. The virtuosity of Dreyfus's readings is often dazzling, if challenging to a more mainstream approach to Wagner...Yet Dreyfus's strategy of bringing historical voices to the fore allows him to open up broader hermeneutic horizons with ease...So thought-provoking is this study in its claims that it will surely give impetus to further scholarly work on erotics, as an historical nodal point both for Wagner reception, and perhaps for music more broadly. Bradley Winterton - Taipei Times
Review
Nietzsche's posthumous fragment [on the ardours of music for Tristan und Isolde] is one of many examples which Laurence Dreyfus cites in his book to prove that it wasn't Richard Wagner's broadsides against "Judaism" but rather his connection to eroticism and sexuality which enraged contemporaries. Dreyfus notes rightly that the relationships between what Nietzsche termed Wagner's "morbid sexuality," the treatment of Eros in his music dramas, and its reception at the time has thus far been treated only hesitantly in Wagner scholarship. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse tries to fill this gap, and Dreyfus, to come directly to the point, doesn't shy away from naming "the actual word for the ardours of the music in Tristan." That this musicologist (and virtuoso on the viola da gamba) who teaches at Magdalen College Oxford also exhibits a downright off-the-cuff and refreshingly irreverent handling of Wagner and the subject of eroticism is certainly surprising...That music should be able to simulate (or even stimulate) desire because it lacks an erotic object, and that by "purely musical" means should be able to represent tension, impulses, arousal and deliverance ought to enlighten every Wagner-listener. And how the tender love motive in the first scene of Die Walküre has risen to a wild mania at the end of the first act is conveyed to the listener, if not consciously, then certainly unconsciously. One can confidently subscribe to Dreyfus's conclusion that Wagner's erotics had decidedly more significant artistic consequences than did his anti-Semitism...[Dreyfus] must be credited with having treated a noteworthy theme without striking wrong notes. David Trippett - Cambridge Opera Journal
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
Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works,
Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner's obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as
Tannhäuser,
Die Walküre,
Tristan und Isolde, and
Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex.
Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer's "metaphysics of sexual love." A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner's achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed--as never before--how music could act on erotic impulse.
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