Abstract The obvious debt that Strauss's operas owe to Wagner often led early critics to view their conspicuous lack of spiritual depth as an unintentional failure. Recent commentators such as Charles Youmans, Leon Botstein, and Michael Walter have rightly characterized this feature as a conscious Nietzschean strategy calculated to avoid or ironize metaphysical tropes. Following the critique of the concept of “secularization” by Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, however, I wish to complicate this newer interpretation by arguing that Strauss's operas do not represent the point in music history when German music threw off its pretentions to Kunstreligion, but mark yet another point of “re-sacralization”—a term I borrow from Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless (2012). The Wagner-indebted music in Arabella (1933)—an opera given much less critical attention than it deserves—certainly never gestures toward any transcendent truth beyond the physical confines of what is presented. Nevertheless, I argue, a sacred economy still operates in the opera whereby certain aspects of the immanent stage-world are figured as “sacred” and others as “profane.” It is possible to trace the influence of the operas Tannhäuser and Parsifal on Arabella, specifically in the harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral techniques Wagner used to mark certain suprahuman forces as possessing a transcendent aura. The music of Arabella uses moderated versions of these techniques to redistribute the same sacred status onto different aspects of material and psychological reality.
19th-Century Music publishes articles on all aspects of music having to do with the "long" nineteenth century. The period of coverage has no definite boundaries; it can extend well backward into the eighteenth century and well forward into the twentieth. The journal is open to studies of any musical or cultural development that affected nineteenth-century music and any such developments that nineteenth-century music subsequently affected. The topics are as diverse as the long century itself. They include music of any type or origin and include, but are not limited to, issues of composition, performance, social and cultural context, hermeneutics, aesthetics, music theory, analysis, documentation, gender, sexuality, history, and historiography.
Founded in 1893, University of California Press, Journals and Digital Publishing Division, disseminates scholarship of enduring value. One of the largest, most distinguished, and innovative of the university presses today, its collection of print and online journals spans topics in the humanities and social sciences, with concentrations in sociology, musicology, history, religion, cultural and area studies, ornithology, law, and literature. In addition to publishing its own journals, the division also provides traditional and digital publishing services to many client scholarly societies and associations.
This item is part of a JSTOR Collection.
For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions
© 2015 by the Regents of the University of California
Request Permissions
