Tristan’s Shadow : Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner

237 Pages·2014·1.14 MB·English

by  Adrian Daub

Tristan’s Shadow

Tristan’s Shadow
s e xua l i t y a n d t h e tota l wo r k o f
a rt a f t e r wag n e r
Adrian Daub
The University of Chicago Press chicago & london
adrian daub is assistant professor of German studies at Stanford University.
He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and
Romanticism and of Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and the Making of
Nineteenth Century Domestic Culture.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978–0-226–08213–4 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978–0-226–08227–1 (e-book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226082271.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daub, Adrian.
Tristan’s shadow : sexuality and the total work of art
after Wagner / Adrian Daub.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-08213-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-08227-1
(e-book) 1. Opera—19th century. 2. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883—Influence.
3. Sex in opera. I. Title.
ml1705.d383 2014
782.109'034—dc23
2013014689
a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction · Tristan’s Shadow: The Fate of Sexual Difference
in Opera 1
1 · Mother Mime: Wagner and the Metaphysics of
Sexual Difference 30
2 · Mime’s Revenge: The Total Work of Art and the Ugly Detail 56
3 · Taceat Mulier in Theatro: Richard Strauss’s Guntram,
Arthur Schopenhauer, and the Exorcism of the Voice 77
4 · Erotic Acoustics: The Natural History of
the Theater and Der ferne Klang 96
5 · Congenital Blindness: Visions of Marriage
in the Operas of Eugen d’Albert 127
6 · Occult Legacies: Eroticism and the Dynasty
in Siegfried Wagner’s Operas 151
7 · The Power of the “Verfluchte Lohe”: (Post-)Wagnerian Redheads
in Das Rheingold, Fredegundis, and Irrelohe 168
Coda · “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” 191
Notes 203
Index 223

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Although it is a book about the Gesamtkunstwerk, Tristan’s Shadow came
together in fits and starts, and as a result many forces, individuals, and institu-
tions shaped its development and growth.
Over the years, the manuscript has benefitted from a number of careful and
generous readers. Tom Grey and Stephen Hinton were instrumental in shap-
ing the ideas contained in this book. Their comments and encouragement
were essential to having the material assume the shape it has now. David Levin
and Ryan Minor were invaluable in first responding to some of the book’s
individual chapters and then guiding me through the process of tying them
all together.
Since this is a book about opera composers who have largely gone from
being celebrities to being entirely marginal in the opera canon, much valuable
insight into the overall shape of the project came from people outside music.
The members of the Junior Faculty Reading Group in the DLCL, Martón
Dornbach, Marisa Galvez, Héctor Hoyos, Nariman Skakov, Lisa Surwillo, and
Laura Wittman were essential in giving me an early sense why a general aca-
demic reader might care about this largely forgotten set of operas. Kara Levy
was not only a fantastic editor in the early going of the project, but she also
provided invaluable advice on how to make the book accessible to those not
steeped in the subject matter.
An internal faculty fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center gave me
the opportunity to heavily revise the final manuscript. I am indebted to the
other fellows at the center for many a valuable suggestion in the final stages of
composition.
viii  Acknowledgments
At the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell and Tim McGovern ex-
pertly steered the manuscript through the vicissitudes of the review process
and provided valuable guidance to reworking it. I am glad I was able to say
thank you to Doug by introducing him to the work of Alexander Zemlinsky.
Susan Karani copyedited the manuscript with great care and palpable enthu-
siasm for the subject matter.
Chapter 1 was previously published in Nineteenth Century Music 32, no. 2
(pp. 160–77), chapter 3 was previously published in Opera Quarterly 25, nos.
3–4 (pp. 230–46), parts of chapter 7 were published in Opera Quarterly 26,
no. 4 (pp. 526–51), and portions of chapter 5 appeared in Cambridge Opera
Journal and the Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by Rolf Goebel and
published by Camden House. I thank these publications for the permission to
reprint. This book is dedicated to my father, who introduced me to the world
of Richard Wagner.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Tristan’s Shadow: The Fate of
Sexual Difference in Opera
This book presents a story of aesthetics and opera. It will be about actual
operas, how they were written, composed, and performed, but its primary
concern will be what composers thought they were doing when composing
operas—what they imagined the opera form entailed, what problems it posed,
and what promises it held beyond the walls of the opera house. As a result,
the shadow it traces is not that cast by Wagner’s innovations in compositional
technique, or in new musical logics that emerged in his wake; it is the shadow
of a particular ideology of the operatic, what could be asked of the form, and
what needed to be asked of it. Tristan’s shadow persists at the border between
music and philosophy, between actual operas on the one hand and the more
theoretical demands and desiderata of operatic aesthetics on the other.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Tristan and Isolde constitutes the middle
point of this book’s narrative, even though all of these chapters consider works
written after its 1865 premiere. My argument is that Tristan was able to cast
the long shadow it did in operatic aesthetics because of the way it combined
earlier topoi, specifically theories about love and theories about the unification
of the arts. These constituted the powerful light source that enabled Tristan to
cast its shadow. Conversely, its legacy proved so troubling for the composers of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century because of contradictions and
misgivings that became fully explicit only in the 1920s, in the so-called opera
crisis (Opernkrise).
The following chapters connect three moments, each about a half century
apart, and argue that they together illuminate a peculiar, and peculiarly Ger-
man, path of operatic aesthetics. Significantly, the first of these three stages