Vocal Victories

Book excerpt: 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 these and other opera heroines as victims, because these 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. Vocal Victories 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 composer's own writings, so that a picture of Wagner as a radical critic of the oppressive patriarchal society emerges clearly and unmistakably. The feminist approach to the material also provides an opportunity for new