Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (review)

Anyone who doubts that Wagner's music is still controversial should have attended a performance of Das Rheingold in early November 2004 at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where protesters carried signs and attempted to distribute leaflets that promised to tell the "truth" about the composer. The source of this protest was the alleged anti-Semitism implicit in Wagner's operas, particularly the characterization of Alberich and the depiction of Nibelheim in Das Rheingold. It is hard not to be moved by such a public display, especially when those involved bring up the associations of Wagner's music with the Third Reich. While such issues were argued on the street in Chicago, the provocative and controversial aspects of Wagner's and Strauss's operas are also part of Lawrence Kramer's latest book, Opera and Modern Culture.

Although this book follows the line of inquiry Kramer has explored in volumes such as Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge and After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture, it is also possible to read Opera and Modern Culture independently of those studies. In seven interconnected essays, Kramer discusses social and sexual aspects of operas by Wagner and Richard Strauss to understand their works more clearly as vehicles for modernism. Rather than launching at once into his ideas about the nature of modernism as expressed through and influenced by opera, Kramer first explains how he arrived at the perspective that he shares in this book (pp. 2-8). He is sensitive to the phenomenon of opera, which he sometimes expressed by using the uppercase O, in contrast to the generic use of opera (with the lowercase o) as a musical form. For those familiar with music criticism, it should be no surprise that the emerging concept of "Opera" may be traced to Wagner, whose treatment of themes and portrayal of characters often challenged the traditions of the genre.

By its nature, modernism treats its subject matter differently, and new contexts are therefore part of the substance of modernist works. For Kramer "the defining moment of modernity for Wagner" (p. 119) occurs in the scene in Das Rheingold in which Wagner reverses the operatic convention of the deus ex machina when he introduces the goddess Erda to resolve the dilemma over the ransom for Freia. Establishing a price for Freia sets into play a chain of violence, starting with Fafner's murder of Fasolt later in the same scene. Erda's command to Wotan to give up the ring propels the tragedy that is depicted over the next three operas. In the Ring and his other operas, Wagner uses his librettos to create images that in the late nineteenth century stood in stark contrast with the memorable images found in operas from the latter part of the eighteenth century. The sentiments that may be found in Mozart's Da Ponte operas gave way to decadent figures; against the grain, as it were, Wagner ennobled the incestuous love of Sieglinde and Siegmund, whose offspring, Siegfried, is the long-awaited hero in the universe of the Ring.

Likewise, through his racial and politic tract, Das Judentum in der Musik, Wagner's own public image went counter to the established role of composers. As Kramer points out in his essay on Lohengrin, Wagner's sometimes vehement viewpoints became linked with the music of that opera, including the otherwise serene prelude, which can be viewed as emblematic of the composer's anti-Semitism (p. 64). Kramer's perspective is useful for understanding Gustav Mahler's decision to open his tenure at the Vienna Hofoper in 1897 with Lohengrin; by all accounts, it was a performance that involved a particularly intense reading of the prelude.

Kramer touches upon some provocative ideas that should spur further discussion. His reading of some works, such as Götterdämmerung, sometimes involve psychological interpretations that would escape the general public, such as his perspective on the "sexualized homosocial" nature of the relationship between Siegfried and Gunther (p...