Overview

In this enlightening and entertaining book, one of the most original and sophisticated musicologists writing today turns his attention to music's most dramatic genre. Extending his ongoing project of clarifying music's various roles in Western society, Kramer brings to opera his distinctive and pioneering blend of historical concreteness and theoretical awareness. Opera is legendary for going to extremes, a tendency that has earned it a reputation for unreality. Opera and Modern Culture shows the reverse to be true. Kramer argues that for the past two centuries the preoccupation of a group of famous operas with the limits of supremacy and debasement has come to define a normality that is the very opposite of the operatic. Exemplified in a series of beloved examples, a certain idea of opera - a fiction of opera - has contributed in key ways to the modern era's characterizations of desire, identity, and social order. Opera and Modern Culture exposes this process at work in operas by Richard Wagner, who put modernity on the agenda in ways no one after him could ignore, and by the young Richard Strauss. The book continues the initiative of much recent writing in treating opera as a multimedia rather than a primarily musical form. From Lohengrin and The Ring of the Niebelung to Salome and Elektra, it traces the rich interplay of operatic visions and voices and their contexts in the birth pangs of modern life.

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9780520241732

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Reviews

Controversial... Paradoxical... The journey is unpredictable and often remarkable. --Music & Letters

Opera and Modern Culture is outstanding. Kramer's discourse is crystalline. The story is, simply stated, a page-turner. - Richard Leppert, editor of Theodor W. Adorno's Essays on Music; Opera and Modern Culture is remarkable both for its imaginative exploration of important issues and for the rich array of the author's engagements with other thinkers. In particular, by decentering without dismissing the composer (who could dismiss Wagner?), he makes works of reception - productions of Salome on video, uses of the Lohengrin Prelude by Charlie Chaplin and W. E. B. Du Bois - central texts in the process of understanding the phenomenon of opera, rather than footnotes to an idea that he really does dismiss: 'the work itself.' - James Parakilas, author of Piano Roles

Author Information

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University and coeditor of 19th-Century Music. His many books include Why Classical Music Still Matters (2007), Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (1995), After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (1997), and Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (2002), all from the University of California Press.

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