Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss.(Book review)

Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss. By Lawrence Kramer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [257 p. ISBN 0-520-24173-8. $39.95.] Music examples, bibliographical notes, index.

On page 221 of this, his latest book, author Lawrence Kramer acknowledges the often slippery nature of his prose and defiantly states his intention to continue in that way for the few remaining pages of the epilogue: "The writing [in this book] has drawn no firm line between evocation and explanation, metaphor and theory. On the contrary: the lines have been crossed or effaced time and again. (Disgruntled parties take note: I know about this breakdown. 1 do it on purpose. I will do it again here.)" With only seven pages left to the body of Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss, that warning comes a bit late for anyone who picks up this book without knowing who Kramer is or his distinctive approach to music criticism. Such people, at least in the world of musicology, are rare if not non-existent, however, which is just another way of saying that no one reading this book should ever be surprised by what lies between its covers. In fact, followers of Kramer's writings may already know much of this volume, since four of its seven chapters have already appeared elsewhere in earlier versions going back as far as 1990 and a fifth is reprinted here without significant changes. Any of these chapters might be read independently of the others, although Kramer sees them as part of a larger project.

Their common topic, as the book's title says, is opera, which Kramer prefers to spell with a capital "O" to distinguish one of the genre's "ideal types," which in this case he defines as "the version of Opera inaugurated by Richard Wagner in the middle years of the nineteenth century and brought to its logical but also its fatal conclusion by Richard Strauss in the first years of the twentieth" (p, 2). For Kramer, of course, the subject is never just music, but rather music as a tool for addressing larger cultural issues. As he states, "The initiative [of this book] could be described as an attempt to 'think through Opera' in two overlapping senses: to think with some fullness about the phenomenon of Opera, and to think about matters of general worldly concern by means of Opera" (p. 2). Among the issues addressed by Kramer are the audibility of anti-Semitic content in the Prelude to Lohengrin, the intermingling of nationalism and sexual identity in Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the ways in which some later composers responded to Richard Wagner's music. The chapters on Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra, respectively, deal with feminist issues, while the remaining chapter investigates the intersection of Modernism and video reproductions.

Inevitably, Kramer turns to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and many others for the "small group of concepts" that underpin his arguments. Kramer also states his intention not to weigh down his prose with too much of the language typically associated with his brand of criticism, and to his credit, the argot of new musicology does not overwhelm this book. Nevertheless, there are many passages where the musical object under discussion is left behind for an extended detour into social, political, or theoretical matters. In fact, as Kramer notes, "The guiding concepts do most of their work from the background, taking on new forms and figurations to fit the needs of the discussion as it unfolds" (p. 3). Whether those concepts remain far enough in the background will depend upon one's interest in and enthusiasm for Kramer's approach. For those whose primary interest is the music, the answer will probably be "not enough," but even those who do not usually turn to Kramer for enlightenment should be able to find some things of value here.

Readers of all stripes might begin with Chapter 2, "Contesting Wagner: The Lohengrin Prelude and Anti-anti-Semitism," which is the most impressive piece of work in this book. This exegesis finds Kramer immersed in the correspondence between Liszt and Wagner, following the publication of ...