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300 | GABRIELA CRUZ to specialists. For the former, the suggestions are an ideal initiation into ritual studies; for the latter, they are a valuable compendium of schol- arship in the ªeld. In sum, Muir has written a superlative study that surpasses previous work in the ªeld and constitutes the deªnitive intro- duction to the history of rituals and their place in early modern European popular culture. Steven G. Reinhardt University of Texas, Arlington Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze. By John Bokina (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) 368 pp. $59.95 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/30/2/300/1703882/jinh.1999.30.2.300.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Bokina’s Opera and Politics combines his academic expertise in politicalGABRIELA CRUZ theory and his lifelong interest in the “visual and aural spectacle of opera” in a series of elegantly written political exegeses of operatic texts (ix). He discusses the ideological elements of opera and traces the “trajectory of western politics; the ascendancy and demise of the aristocratic rule, the troubled reign of the commercial middle classes, the failed search for a radical alternative” in various works from Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) to Hans Werner Henze’s Bassarids (1966) (12). Bokina views opera as an ideologically reactive genre, absorbing and mirroring contemporary achievements in the realm of the ideas. Accordingly, he discusses Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Ulisse, and Poppea in light of the Niccolò Machievelli–inspired political values of absolutism; de- scribes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a celebratory text on the demise of absolutist ideology in the late eighteenth century; reads Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio as an operatic embodiment of the political morality of the French Revolution; explains Richard Wagner’s Parsifal as a political utopia, the product of the spirit of political disillu- sionment of the postrevolutionary era; and sees in Richard Strauss’ Elektra and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung an expression of the fascina- tion with hysteria of the new century, after the writings of Sigmund Freud. Bokina’s analysis of the twentieth century shifts in focus, as he recognizes that in Germany, the institution of opera became aware of its center-stage role in politics by the 1920s. He describes Hans Pªtzner’s reactionary defense of the artist as the trustee of a sacred national tradition in Palestrina, Paul Hindemith’s disquisitions on the apolitical nature of true artistry in Mathis der Maler, as well as Schoenberg’s modernist reºections on the strained relation between art and politics in Moses und Aron. Bokina concentrates mostly on libretti, avoiding the political di- mensions of artistic creation, reception, and performance. Consequently, his interpretations are sometimes at odds with the historical evidence that surrounds the creation and early reception of the pieces. For example, he views the character of Don Giovanni as an accomplished example of a “premodern life of pleasure and privilege” (61), dying as a martyr for “the tradition of his premodern aesthetic existence” (63). REVIEWS | 301 This reading entirely ignores that Giovanni became the hero and oper- atic obsession of the Romantics and was famously described by Hoffmann as an embodiment of romantic subjectivity, a soul continuously yearning for metaphysical liberation.1 Similarly, while he rightly recognizes that Parsifal is not truly a work of historical, and therefore political, repre- sentation, but rather a utopian view of a never-never-land of human relations, he does not mention that the context of its performance was politically charged from the beginning. By the end of the century, Parsifal had became a fundamental aesthetic icon to the emerging Chris- tian nationalisms sweeping through the European political landscape. In his analyses, Bokina portrays music as a mimetic force, underly- ing more or less subserviently the dramatic content of the libretti. He Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/30/2/300/1703882/jinh.1999.30.2.300.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 writes about Strauss’ Elektra: If Hofmannsthal’s drama and text internalize the politics of Sophocles Electra and give the story instead a highly charged psychological atmo- sphere, Strauss’s score intensiªes the transformation. His leitmotifs, chro- matic tonality and waltz rhythms heighten and clarify the psychology of the opera. The most intriguing and revealing element of Strauss’s score is his use of waltz tunes and rhythms. To the frenzied rhythms of an ever-quickening waltz, Elektra, the central ªgure in this aesthetic repre- sentation of Viennese psychological sensitivity, dances herself to death. (122–123) To Bokina, the orchestra delivers a coherent understanding of the drama, standing in for Strauss’ historically informed viewpoint on Elek- tra’s madness. However, he ignores that mad Elektra also serves as a narrator in the opera. The heroine claims to be the source of the music pouring from beyond the stage, and as Abbate has noted, the waltz tunes and rhythms, which to Bokima contain Strauss’ ironic portrayal of Elektra’s madness, actually originate in the character’s initial mono- logue—the moment in which, according to operatic convention, she authors the story.2 The fact that Elektra partially composes and choreo- graphs her own drama has important consequences for the listener’s experience. Since listeners hear with the heroine, rather than with an omniscient narrator, they have no access to the composer’s “ironic commentary on the spirit of the age” (123). With Elektra, opera opens itself to alternative narrative standpoints that disrupt the coherence of the modes of representation that Bokina assumes to be in place. The audience is no longer granted the privilege of narrative omniscience, and the Woman, that object of nineteenth-century operatic obsession, has begun to double as heroine and narrator. As such, Strauss’ opera is of more use to feminists than to Freudian analysts. Gabriela Cruz Princeton University 1 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, “Don Juan,” in Eduard Krisebach (ed.), Hoffmanns Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1922), I, 62–73. 2 Carolyn Abbate, “Music and Language in Elektra,” in Derrick Puffett (ed.), Richard Strauss: Elektra (Cambridge, 1989), 107–127..

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