Eva Rieger . 2011 . Richard Wagner ’ s Women

The anniversary commemoration of great artistic figures would be incomplete without a survey of the scholarly landscape. So in the year of Richard Wagner's bicentenary, the publication of new books shows no sign of abating, and nor should it, when there is still so much to be said about this most controversial of composers. But many of the literary products that pass for Wagner scholarship are still beset by popular assumption, blind deference, and trite dismissal, imposing a dead weight that threatens to smother the critical spark that alone can do Wagner justice and demonstrate his startling relevance. It is in this spirit that the present article will individually review two recent publications on gender and sexuality in Wagner, and finally compare them and reflect on wider scholarly trends and possibilities. In Richard Wagner's Women, an English translation by Chris Walton of " Leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod " : Richard Wagners Bild der Frau im Spiegel seiner Musik (2009), Eva Rieger offers one of the first " feminist " studies of Wagner's life and work. Specifically, Rieger assesses the dramatic function and characterization of both women and, to a lesser extent, " feminized " men in Wagner's operas, from Das Liebesverbot to Parsifal. The original German–language publication was warmly praised in a review, " Role Play, " by Walton (2010), who evidently valued the study highly enough to bring it to a wider readership. Rieger's main contribution is to show, as few have done before, that Wagner portrayed women as sacrificial victims on the altar of men's salvation. As if to justify this terrible fate, Rieger argues, women are depicted as negative stereotypes (i.e., inferior to men, merely decorative, and so on), above all in musical representation. Richard Wagner's Women interweaves biography and creative output, but it is the stage works primarily that plot the course of the book, which proceeds through Wagner's oeuvre in chronological order according to the date of first performance. Chapter 1 provides an exposition of the book's methodology of musical semantics based on Affektenlehre as well as theories of instrumentation and tonal symbolism—techniques that (Rieger claims) influenced Wagner's own innovative " musical language " ; Chapter 2 (" From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer ") discusses Liebesverbot