"Alle Wege der Welt" : wandering in early 20th century German/Jewish opera
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This project traces the 20th century operatic afterlife of two intertwined 19th century wandering figures—the heroic, Romantic, German Wanderer and the cursed, undying Wandering Jew. After World War I, the subsequent depression, and the rise of the Nazi party made anti-Semitism increasingly prevalent, the previously intertwined figures of Romantic Wanderer and Wandering Jew separated in terms of their cultural representation. The four operas I consider, created by German-speaking Jewish artists in 1912, 1920, 1933, and 1937 respectively, chart this process of anti-assimilation and encompass a wide variety of themes: prostitution as a feminized form of wandering, Freudian-inflected undead walkers in the aftermath of the first world war, the wanderer as political poet whose movement inscribes the state of Israel, and wartime exiles attempting to defer the inevitability of death by wandering eternally. A complementary goal is to consider the nature of wandering forms, delving deeply into the meaning of wandering as an aesthetic metaphor in a variety of genres: in theater, music, or literature, what does it mean to be a wandering text? How do theatrical works engaging with the theme of wandering reimagine the nature of the wandering subject? How does wandering create theatrical, political, or musical spaces? In my examination of Franz Schreker's Der Ferne Klang, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron and Kurt Weill's The Eternal Road, I develop the following claims about the relationship between wandering, space, and form: 1) Operatic wandering is about traversing space and non-space. 2) The proliferation, superfluity, and superimposition of spaces in these texts makes possible a theorization of movement in which spaces wander around characters rather than vice versa. 3) These spatial formations and deformations point towards a definition of wandering that is discursively multiple. 4) Wandering in these operas is not a digression away from the point; wandering is the point.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kagen, Melissa |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of German Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Daub, Adrian |
| Thesis advisor | Daub, Adrian |
| Thesis advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Grey, Thomas C |
| Thesis advisor | Smith, Matthew Wilson |
| Advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Advisor | Grey, Thomas C |
| Advisor | Smith, Matthew Wilson |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Melissa Kagen. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of German Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Melissa Kagen
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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