Dreaming of Utopia: Peter Franklin examines two studies of the lingering influence of Wagner

Reviews of David Huckvale, Visconti and the German Dream: Romanticism, Wagner and the Nazi Catastrophe in Film (McFarland and Company Inc, 2012); Kevin C. Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2013).

March 2015, Volume 9, Number 1, 62–7.

Two things link this pair of outwardly rather different books. Neither of their authors sets out to write specifically about Wagner (for both, the concern is more with his influence on later artists and media). Neither seems to have an aim that was sufficiently clearly formulated or theorised at the outset to ensure that what they produced did not take on a life of its own, moving in imperceptible stages away from what they had apparently intended. In the case of each, it will be helpful to begin at the end, where rhetorical ‘Epilogues’ are elaborated whose purpose seems to be to convince each writer, and his readers, that he might actually have achieved what he now recalls that he had originally intended. In both cases that intention seems to have been to contribute to the rather unoriginal ‘It-was-all-Wagner’s-fault’ school of historical analysis. That they actually did something else is in no way to the detriment of either book.