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For those unwilling to follow the erotic utopia of Tristan, a new answer had to be found to the political and ethical questions raised in the Ring. And this is precisely what Wagner provided in his last two projects. Die Meistersinger (1861-67) as an attempt, partly inspired by the nationalism of Fichte, to see whether something of the political optimism of the Ring might still be salvageable after the pessimistic discoveries of Tristan. The answer the opera gives to this question is affirmative, but the specific content of this answer is profoundly disturbing, a utopia of post-political aestheticized metapolitics pregnant with sinister implications for the future.

This paper explores the dramaturgy of vocality and corporeality in Alexander von Zemlinsky’s one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf, 1919-1921) via three distinct but interrelated scenes: first, the scene that Richard Wagner sets in his infamous essay “Judaism in Music” of 1850/1869. In Wagner’s pamphlet, the Jewish voice is inflected as monstrous, at once unintentionally comical and tragically deluded. We hear echoes of Wagner’s critique in the soundscape of Der Zwerg, which in turn revisits the famous Prize Song scene in Act Three of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. And beyond the vocal dramaturgy of Zemlinsky’s piece is a central scene of visuality: the dwarf recognizes his hideousness by apprehending his reflection in the mirror. That scene invites reference to the scene of traumatic recognition set by Jacques Lacan in his 1936 lecture on “The Mirror Stage." Lacan’s argument about the constitutive rivenness of the subject helps us to grasp the vocal and corporeal stakes of Der Zwerg. The spectacle of the dwarf’s corporeality figures the predicament of difference in the wake of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the role of the voice in rendering that predicament.

This chapter considers the work of an anomalous Secessionist, Gustav Klimt, whose principal concern was not social reform but psychological or spiritual transformation. It argues that some of Klimt's best-known works from his Secession years give voice to longing to still the effects of Schopenhauerian will within the psyche, and it suggests Klimt's source for such ideas was the work of Richard Wagner, and particularly Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In his Beethoven Frieze (1902), Klimt elaborated a psychological narrative etched with the imagery of Wagner's vision of transcendence. Soon, however Klimt split off his reflections on will from the rest of his painterly work. He glimpsed the will in its purest form in isolated erotic images, while creating other works that contain such eroticism within tapestries of inorganic geometries, or that envision utopian realms innocent of human habitation altogether.

The last chapter offers a reading of the Seventh from the perspective of its association with Wagner’s Meistersinger, which sounds loud and clear in the Finale, and in a more subtle way in other movements. While the Meistersinger reference has been duly noted, the question of the nature and function of this allusion at the core of the symphony has not been explored in depth. First, this chapter argues that Mahler’s clear gesture toward Meistersinger in the Finale prompts the listener to hear other elements throughout the whole symphony in relation to Wagner’s opera. Mahler’s use of quartal harmony in the first movement, for example, resonates with a particular passage in Meistersinger Act II. Second, the connections between these two works crystallize around the character of Beckmesser, the pedantic critic who initially claims to know what makes art meaningful, but whose own music is ultimately perceived as meaningless.

Chapter 1 retraces the reception history of the Seventh Symphony from its premiere in 1908 in order to determine when the work began to be considered as “problematic,” since early accounts report that it had been initially rather well received. Two aspects that are central in the negative perception of the work are then examined: the Seventh’s close relationship to the Sixth Symphony, and the noisy Finale, clearly alluding to Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The view of the Seventh as a problematic work is emphatically connected with its highly intertextual character, and as shown in the following chapters, Mahler’s preliminary sketches throw new light on the referential aspect of the work.

How do genesis, structure, and interpretation relate to each other? This chapter first examines the structure of the Seventh in five movements, beginning with an overview of its tonal trajectory, before outlining its inner connections. The five movements of the Seventh are not unified by a program, but the subtle links that relate these movements to each other challenge the idea that the work lacks coherence. These inner connections are counterbalanced by a centrifugal force, pointing toward other works, inside and outside the Mahlerian corpus (Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal). The second section presents the web of interpretive leads pursued in this study. It concludes with some reflections about what constitutes the genesis of a work and how the genetic history relates to issues of interpretation.