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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".
A basic tenet of literary studies is that aesthetic structures are politically significant because they represent an artist's response to the political implications of cultural codes with which the recipient of the modern work is also acquainted. This tenet provides the basis for the ideological associations attending the appearance of music in the modern German narrative. With his understanding of the arts as involved in often unacknowledged ideological forces within a culture, Marc Weiner's Undertones of Insurrection bridges the gap between the "New Musicology's" rewarding infusion of modern cultural and literary theory into the study of music, politically insightful examinations of narrat...
The chronological range covered by the individual essays is more than two hundred years, from the Classical Enlightenment to the early twenty-first century. Some of the studies encompassed by this volume undertake the analysis of one composer's settings of a particular poet's work - albeit with rather more critical rigour. Others trace the ways in which a literary text is modified and adapted before and as it develops as one of the principal components of an opera. Several share new insights into the complex relationships of individual works with the literary and musical traditions out of which they emerge (or which they transform and renew) - or set such works in the political contexts of t...
This family cookbook morphed into much more for me during the writing process. It began by contacting friends and family to collect recipes for what I thought would be a simple process. During those conversations and with my own memories, a flood of personal history evolved in my mind. What began as a repository of food recipes became much more to me, and I decided to collect the process in the form of this book, The Diary of a Mad Chef, to also include photos of those people and selected short stories. Food has always been the center of our family's common narrative thread, and I attempted to place the face and the stories of my friends and family with the recipes as I remember them. Along with the feedback and photos from my friends and family, it became a two-year-long effort to compile, edit, and publish this book. The journey has been a magnificent experience for me, and I am grateful to have had the time and opportunity to write this book.
A poignant love triangle between childhood sweethearts and their closest friend, set in Stuttgart, Germany, during the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, this tale takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster ride of pain, despair, and eventually, joy. Sweethearts, Marc and Lisbeth marry while their friend, Hans, who is a fugitive after joining Hitler’s aborted putsch in Munich, can only watch from afar as the object of his affection pledges her love to his friend. Later, the couple and their daughter move to Holland in an effort to avoid Hitler’s demoniac rule. Marc, on business in Switzerland during Germany’s conquest of Holland, learns his family has been swept up by the SS. Unable ...
Turn-of-the-century Vienna was the scene of tremendous social and artistic upheaval. Arthur Schnitzler's novel The Road to the Open brilliantly captures the complex world of Freud, Mahler, Strauss, and Klimt, dealing masterfully with the basic issues of Austian anti-Semitism, the Viennese intellectual community, post-Wagnerian music, and the psychology of Vienna's middle class.
In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style. Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intelle...
Investigates the intellectual affinities of Adorno and Nietzsche, culminating in a discussion of their readings of Wagner, who serves as a medium and supplement for their critiques of modern culture.
Richard Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" has been one of the most performed operas ever since its premier in 1868, as it epitomizes themes of Germanness. This volume examines the representation of German history in the opera and the way it has functioned in history through political appropriation and staging practice. in performance.