Music, Culture and Society: Agnes Heller
8 March 2008
Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation of Opera
Agnes Heller
Opera, on stage, had been declared a “dead” bourgeois genre, in the fifties and sixties. Its resurrection and, recently, its growing attraction, grew out of the new idea of staging opera as a kind of “music drama”, as a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk”. This idea, again, was inspired by a new kind of hermeneutics, one that provoked radical and entirely unusual interpretations. The paper analyses some of these new kinds of interpretations, putting emphasis on the various new interpretations of Wagner’s Ring and of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It tells the story how the spirit of our times (the depreciation of violence, feminism, etc.) have contributed to a reversal in the evaluation of characters like Siegfried or Don Giovanni, and how this reversal illuminates their similarities.
Agnes Heller is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of over 40 books, including most recently Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life (2005), The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (2002), A Theory of Modernity (1999), The Concept of the Beautiful (1999), An Ethics of Personality (1996) and A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993). Awards for Agnes Heller’s intellectual achievements include the 2006 Sonning Prize, Denmark; Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Philosophy, Bremen , 1995; the Szechenyi National Prize in Hungary, 1995; the Lessing Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg for Philosophical Activity, 1981. She is a Correspondent-Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.