Opera and the Culture of Fascism

Tambling draws on the insights of Adorno, Benjamin, Theweleit, Bataille, Kristeva, and others to read nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary form of high art. Examining over a dozen operas in detail, Tambling discovers an ideology with both reactionary and revolutionary potentials.