Critical Stages (Jun 2020)
Ideology and Machines in the Work of Richard Wagner
Abstract
A new production of a Richard Wagner work can in no way be compared to other stagings from the current repertoire in its demand of artistic, technical and financial capital. The aesthetic and ideological universe as envisaged by the composer is caught up in a profoundly bourgeois dialectics of regression and progress, which is played out through an intricate interrelationship between nature and machines. This paper investigates the signification of the machine as object and as metaphor in the works of Wagner, as well as in the cultural context from which his operas emerged, aiming to show how the mechanistic universe of the industrial nineteenth century is simultaneously upheld and subverted through Wagner’s reconstruction of nature and myth.
