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

Vocal Victories is the first musicological comparison of all of Richard Wagner's great female characters, from Senta in The Flying Dutchman to Kundry in Parsifal. 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 - their singing and the orchestral voices that surround them - 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.

This book furthermore claims that Wagner was far ahead of his time in terms of equality between the sexes, and the musicological analyses are supported by quotations from the composers own writings - dealing with everything from politics and religion to aesthetics and philosophy - so that a picture of Wagner as a radical critic of the oppressive patriarchal society emerges clearly and unmistakably. While offering a fresh and innovative feminist approach to the material this volume also occasions new aesthetic and musical readings of the works, readings that break new ground in Wagnerian research.