(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

SONIC DREAMWORLDS
293
42
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” SW 4:318.
43
Adorno, “Naturgeschichte des Theaters,” 308.
44
Cosima Wagner, Tagebücher (Munich: Piper, 1976/77), 1:998.
45
Adorno, “Naturgeschichte des Theaters,” 309.
46
That this “crowd,” at least in Wagner, constitutes something of a racial community
is a disturbing possibility I will leave aside in this context. See Marc A.
Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1995).
47
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism — Theodor Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic
(London: Verso, 1990), 16.
48
Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1957), 30.
49
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony (1941),” in Essays on Music (Los
Angeles: U of California P, 2002), 257.
50
Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 82.
51
Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, GS 13:157.
52
Samuel Weber points out that Benjamin’s analysis of the status of “work”
in German tragic drama allows us to see this kind of self-reflexivity in Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk: Wagner’s tetralogy charts the construction and (necessary)
undoing of precisely the kind of “work” he himself is attempting. The very project
of self-enclosure and autarky that characterizes the Gesamtkunstwerk is thus
problematized in the opera’s plot (Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities, 287).
53
Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker, 1878–1934: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993), 176.
54
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Die Dialektik der Aufklärung
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 162.
55
Jameson, Late Marxism, 16.
56
On Wagner’s anticipation of Freud’s theory of the death drive, see Linda and
Michael Hutcheon, “Death Drive: Eros and Thanatos in Wagner’s Tristan and
Isolde,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 11/3 (1999): 267–93.
57
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1978).
58
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism, 16.
59
Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 58–71.
60
See Henry-Louis De La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, vol. 2 of Gustav
Mahler(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 59–61.