Vocal Victories: Wagner's Female Characters from Senta to Kundry [Hardcover]

Vocal Victories is the first musicological comparison of all of Richard Wagner?s great female characters. It has long been customary to view them and other opera heroines as victims, because the women, as a rule, perish during the plot of the opera. A closer study of the music of the women reveals, however, that it is in the female characters that the new and groundbreaking musical material comes into being, and that the women are far more in command of the development of the works than a superficial view will show. The book claims that Wagner was far ahead of his time in terms of equality between the sexes, and the musicological analyses are supported by the composer?s own writings.

Nila Parlyis postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. She has also been trained as an opera singer at the musical academy Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Foreword
Introduction
    A snapshot
    Wagner on stage

Senta.Der fliegende Holländer
   Form Heine to Wagner
    The performative ballad
    Senta's song—germ of the opera
    Schröder-Devrient andFidelio
    Gender and female characters inDer fliegende Holländer
Elisabeth and Venus.Tannhäuser
   BetweenDer fliegende HolländerandLohengrin
    The progressive music of the Venusberg
    Song to Venus
    Elisabeth as active onlooker
    Venus as puppeteer
    Gender and female characters inTannhäuser
Elsa and Ortrud.Lohengrin
   Folktale and tragedy
    Elsa's dream and the forbidden question
    Ortrud the serpent
    Power of the body
    El