Professor Bokinaβs book is warmly felt, studiously researched, and sedulously written. It is also almost perfectly useless. Anyone who cares enough about opera to buy and read a book about it knows that politics enters into quite a few operas. So do eating, drinking, and hunting. But do we need volumes about them? An amusing and concise essay about any of them could hold its place in an anthology. For whom, however, is such a tome intended? Perhaps for less musically alert fellow political scientists; or, more likely, for oneself, as an attempt to wed oneβs vocation to oneβs avocation.
Bokina offers seven deadly earnest chapters starting with βThe Prince as Deity, Beast, and Tyrant: Monteverdiβs Orfeo, Ulisse, and Poppea,β where the title pretty much tells it all. Next, βThe Dialectic of Operatic Civilization: Mozartβs Don Giovanni,β about the conflict of aristocratic and bourgeois values, although even Bokina admits that other Mozart operas, by now unfortunately overanalyzed, would have served his purpose better. βOpera and Revolutionary Virtue: Beethovenβs Fidelioβ is a suitable choice, about which Bokina, however, has nothing new to say. βThe Utopian Vision of Romantic Anticapitalism: Wagnerβs Parsifalβ is far-fetched: the politics of the absence of politics, I suppose.
βThe Politics of Psychological Interiorization: Straussβs Elektra and Schoenbergβs Erwartungβ is utter nonsense, as Bokina all but admits when he writes that in the former βthe story is transformed from a political tale β¦ into a Freudian βfamily drama,ββ