Barry Emslie, Sanna Pederson, Eva Rieger, Nicholas Vazsonyi, Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable

July 2015, Volume 9, Number 2, 4–18.

The idea for this roundtable emerged from the happy coincidence that at least three important books on the topics of gender, sexuality and love have appeared in the last few years. These are Barry Emslie, Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell & Brewer, 2010); Eva Rieger, Richard Wagner’s Women, translated Chris Walton (Boydell & Brewer, 2011); and Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Harvard University Press, 2012). Add to that, Sanna Pederson has been writing and speaking about Wagner and masculinity, especially in the composer’s essays and letters written around 1850, for a couple of years, and has an article forthcoming. So I wanted to invite these eminent Wagner scholars to talk a little bit about this complex of issues, to see how their thoughts resonate in active exchange with one another.