Opera's second death

Opera is concerned with love, life and mortality, yet the form itself may have run its course. Commentators usually place the last great operas around 1900. Slavoj Žižek notes that this is also the year Freud is generally credited with founding psychoanalysis, and he asks whether the overlap is accidental. The book takes up that puzzle as a sustained investigation of opera as a genre, of its celebrated works, and of what death means.

Working with co-author Mladen Dolar, Žižek brings a wide range of theoretical tools to bear on the peculiar compulsions that seize characters in the operas of Mozart and Wagner. The authors also consider the pull of death within the audience, asking why we are drawn to the opera house at all. Along the way they examine Mozart's grasp of psychoanalytic ideas and the comic streak running through Wagner's work.

Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic known for applying Lacanian psychoanalysis to film, politics and popular culture, and Dolar is also a Slovenian philosopher. The result is a lengthy meditation on an art form the authors regard as anything but finished.