Richard Wagner and the anti-Semitic imagination
By: Marc A. Weiner.
Series: Texts and contexts ;; v. 12
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 439
Subjects: Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883 -- Symbolism; Antisemitism; Body, Human, in literature
Description: This book addresses one of the most hotly contested debates in contemporary cultural life: the question of how anti-Semitism figures in the operas of Richard Wagner. Until now, scholars have generally acknowledged Wagner's anti-Semitism but have argued that it is irrelevant to the operas themselves. Marc A. Weiner challenges that traditional view by asserting that anti-Semitism is a crucial, pervasive feature in Wagner's operas.

Weiner argues that the operas exemplify and contribute to a vast collection of images that are patently anti-Semitic - and that were readily recognized as such by nineteenth-century German audiences. These images were associated particularly with the body.

Through a careful examination of Wagner's music, libretti, and stage directions, Weiner reconstructs iconographies of corporeal images - iconographies of the eye, voice, smell, gait, and sexuality - that were essential to the operas and were "associated with anti-Semitism and the longing for an imagined German community."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [393]-421) and index.