¹ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Exeter, September 1992.Google Scholar

² Deathridge, John, ‘Wagner and the Post-Modem’, this journal, 4/2 (1992), 158.Google Scholar

³ Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagner's Musk Dramas, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1979); see 97–104 for a critical evaluation of Wagner's drafts and thoughts on the end of his tetralogy.Google Scholar

⁴ Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991). Abbate expounds this reading of Brünnhilde in the final chapter of her book.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ This study would have been Benjamin's magnum opus, but was incomplete at his death. Benjamin's notes and comments have been published (though they do not represent even a first draft) in his Gesammelte Schriften, V, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1982).Google ScholarReferences to the Arcades project, or Passagen-Werk, in the present paper frequently draw on Buck-Morss, Susan's The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). This book is part re-creation, part commentary and part development from Benjamin's surviving files for the project.Google Scholar

⁶ Trans. Buck-Morss (see n. 5), 110.Google Scholar

⁷ Adorno, Theodor, In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1981), 62.Google Scholar

⁸ Buck-Morss, (see n. 5), 116. The double quotation marks refer to Benjamin's words.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., 118.

¹⁰ Huyssen, Andreas also makes this point in ‘Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Indiana, 1986; London, 1988);CrossRefGoogle Scholarhe also notes that Adorno never undertook an analysis of nineteenth-century mass culture. However, the essay ‘Commodity Music Analysed’, in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modem Music, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1992), does consider light music from this era, and his Mahler essays do, of course, contemplate the roles of café and folk music.Google Scholar

¹¹ See Adorno, Theodor, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, trans. Hullot-Kentor, , Telos, 60 (Summer, 1984), 111–24.Google Scholar

¹² Marx, Karl, Capital, I, trans. Fowkes, Ben (London, 1976).Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid., 163.

¹⁴ Ibid., 163–4.

¹⁵ Ibid., 165. I have substituted ‘phantasmagoric’ for Fowkes's ‘fantastic’.

¹⁶ Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, Peggy (London, 1994), 149.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid, 153.

¹⁸ Ibid., 151.

¹⁹ Ibid., 162.

²⁰ Wagner, Richard, Art and Revolution, trans. Ellis, W.Ashton (Lincoln and London, 1993), 63.Google ScholarReprinted from Richard Wagner's Prose Works, I (London, 1895).Google Scholar

²¹ Adorno, Theodor, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, in Livingstone, Rodney, Anderson, Perry and Mulhern, Francis, eds., Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1977), 129.Google Scholar

²² The term ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt), adapted from Edmund Husserl by jürgen Habermas, refers to the socio-cultural systems by which people articulate their lives, in distinction from specialised economic and political systems.Google Scholar

²³ Adorno, (see n. 7), 98.Google Scholar

²⁴ Buck-Morss, (see n. 5), 188–90.Google Scholar

²⁵ Les Fleurs du mat, XXV; trans. Buck-Morss, , 190.Google Scholar

²⁶ Dahlhaus, (see n. 3), 87.Google Scholar

²⁷ Adorno, (see n. 7), 91.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 90.

²⁹ Derrick, (see n. 16), 151.Google Scholar

³⁰ Adorno, , Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (Chicago, 1992), 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ See Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, trans. Zohn, Harry in Illuminations (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

³² In a more general sense, Huyssen poses a similar question in his reading of Wagner in reverse (see n. 10).Google Scholar

³³ Adorno, , ‘Wagners Aktualitat’, Gesammelte Schriften, XVI (Frankfurt, 1978), 555.Google Scholar

³⁴ Adorno, (see n. 7), 94.Google Scholar

³⁵ Translation by Salter, Lionel in Welsh National Opera Programme, Parsifal (Cardiff, 1993), xiv. Eulenburg score, 203–4.Google Scholar

³⁶ Adorno, (see n. 7), 88.Google Scholar

³⁷ The spatial interleaving of the music is captured, perhaps at the expense of the tonal goal orientation intended, in Felix Salzer's neo-Schenkerian analysis of this passage in Structural Hearing: Tonal Conference in Music (New York, 1962), 2 vols. The graphs are given in vol. 2, 232–2; they are discussed in vol. 1, 216–18.Google Scholar

³⁸ Adorno, , ‘On the Score of Parsifal’, trans. Barone, Anthony, Music and Letters, 76/3 (1995), 386.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid., 385.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 384.

⁴¹ Barone, ibid., 393, also notes the derivation of these comments.

⁴² Adorno, (see n. 38), 387.Google Scholar

⁴³ Eulenberg score, 218–19.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Adorno, (see n. 7), 107.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Eisler, Hanns (and Adorno, Theodor), Composing for the Films (London, 1994). Chapters I, VI, IX and X of Versucb über Wagner had been published previously in 1939, as ‘Fragmente über Wagner’, before the film book appeared; but other chapters date from after the film study and were published in 1952, in the first edition of Versucb.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Adorno, (see n. 7), 89.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Adorno, (see n. 45), 121.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Miriam Hansen makes this point in ‘Introduction to Adorno: “Transparencies in Film”’, New German Critique, 25/5 (Fall/Winter, 1981–1982), 188.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Adorno, , ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. Levin, Thomas Y., New German Critique, 25–5 (Fall/Winter, 1981–1982), 199–205.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ibid., 201.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Ibid., 203.

⁵³ ‘Introduction to Adorno’, Ibid., 197.

⁵⁴ Adorno, (see n. 7 ), 109.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ For a commentary on mimesis in Adorno's aesthetics, see my New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, 1997, forthcoming), chapter 1.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Adorno, (see n. 49), 203–4. Hansen also notes the convergence with Benjamin's views here.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Adorno, (see n. 7), 99–100.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Kramer, Lawrence draws a distinction between music as ‘cultural trope’ and music as ‘disciplinary trope’ in his Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995), 61–6.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Taruskin, Richard, following Roger Sessions, makes the larger claim that music tracks our inner gestures in ‘She Do the Ring in Different Voices’, review of Abbate (see n. 4), this journal, 4/2 (1992), 196.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Adorno (see n. 7), 35.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Adorno (see n. 33), 562; trans. Huyssen (see n. 10), 36.Google Scholar

⁶² Huyssen (see n. 10).Google Scholar