The Ob-Scene of the Total EWork of Art: Wedekind and Strauss

In the late 1890s, both the playwright Frank Wedekind and the composer Richard Strauss found themselves stuck in their respective fields, and considered collaborating. Their efforts came to naught, but their resulting drafts gave rise to two very interesting works – the novel Mine Haha, Or the Bodily Education of Young Girls on the part of Wedekind and the opera Salomé on that of Strauss. This talk argues that these works are united by an ambivalent (and in a sense obscene) relationship to the work of Richard Wagner and his theory of the total work of art.

Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on German literature, philosophy and music in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Tristan’s Shadow: Sex and the Total Work of Art after Wagner (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and the Making of Nineteenth Century Domestic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).