Title: Richard Wagner and the anti-Semitic imagination
First published: 1995
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."
Subjects: Symbolism, Antisemitism, Body, Human, in literature, Symboliek, Menselijk lichaam, Antisemitisme, Antisemitismus, Human body in literature, Opera's, Körpererfahrung <Motiv>, Antisemitism in music, Wagner, richard, 1813-1883
People: Richard Wagner (1813-1883)