Discussing in detail over a dozen operas by Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Schreker, and others, this book reads opera in relation to the European culture that produced, not by accident, both fascism and the end of opera as a popular and contemporary art-form. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, and Julia Kristeva, Jeremy Tambling looks at the ideology of opera - its gender-politics, and both its reactionary and its revolutionary
potential.