Wagner and the Politics of Opera

In addition to his music, Wagner wrote scores of political pamphlets and participated in the Dresden Revolution of 1849. He was the author of a fierce anti-Semitic pamphlet, a classic in hate literature. Professor Mitchell Cohen, political scientist at Baruch College and the Graduate School of CUNY, will discuss Wagner’s various political ideas — anarchism, republicanism, nationalism, anti-Semitism — and address the question of whether or not they appear in his operas (or "music dramas").