Opera and Politics
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From Monteverdi to Henze
John Bokina
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To what extent do operas express the political and cultural ideas of their age? How do they reflect the composer's view of the changing relations among art, politics, and society? In this book John Bokina focuses on political aspects and meanings of operas from the baroque to the postmodern period, showing the varied ways that operas become sensuous vehicles for the articulation of political ideas.
Bokina begins with an analysis of Monteverdi's three extant operas, which address in an oblique way the political and ideological dualities of aristocratic rule in seventeenth-century Italy. He then moves to Mozart's Don Giovanni, which he views as a celebration of the demise of a predatory aristocracy. He presents Beethoven's Fidelio as an example of the political spirit of a revolution based on republican virtue, and Wagner's Parsifal as a utopian music drama that projects romantic anticapitalist ideals onto an imagined past. He shows that Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Erwartung transform the traditional operatic depiction of madness by reflecting the emerging Freudian psychoanalysis of that era. And he argues that operas by Pfitzner, Hindemith, and Schoenberg explore the political roles of art and the artist, each couching contemporary conditions in an allegory about the fate of art in a historical period of transition. Finally, Bokina offers a reappraisal of Henze's The Bassarids as a political opera that confronts the promise and limits of the sensual-sexual revolt of the twentieth century.
Publication Date: August 25, 1997
