"A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination. Richard Wagners operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagners Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagners environmental imagination came from, how it was received by audience members and reconceived by stage directors, and how it refracts his politics and shapes their legacies. By tracing ecological dimensions of the composers essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagners environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time. The book begins by examining the way Wagners political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagners essays and dramas invite a range of interpretations, for Paige, they point to an all-encompassing image of music drama-as-climate. The book then turns to the ways Wagnerian drama-and opera more generally-at once participates in the industrial-technological lineage of climate change and helps spectators grapple with the challenges of living in a warming world.

In providing the first close examination of Wagners artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagners Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability"-- Provided by publisher.