Richard Wagner's Political Ecology

A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination.

Richard Wagner's operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagner's Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagner's 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 composer's essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagner's environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time.

The book begins by examining the way Wagner's political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagner's 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 Wagner's artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagner's Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability.

About the author

Kirsten S. Paige is an associate teaching professor of musicology at North Carolina State University. From 2025-2026, Paige will be a fellow at Harvard University's research center, Dumbarton Oaks, supported by a major grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. This is her first book.

Product details

• Authors: Kirsten S Paige, Kirsten S. Paige
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 15.04.2026
• EAN: 9780226843537
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84353-7
• No. of pages: 224
• Weight: 454 g
• Illustrations: 12 halftones
• Series: Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performa; Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music history; Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, Germany, MUSIC / History & Criticism, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German, Literature: history & criticism, Music reviews & criticism, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Composers and songwriters, Music reviews and criticism, Literature: history and criticism