Abstract

The importance of politics in the fashioning of opera has hardly gone unnoticed among specialists of the genre and musicologists in general. In the works of Verdi and Wagner's Ring, politics has been analyzed to near exhaustion, and as John Bokina admits in his introduction, “he found that [he] had nothing new to say about these subjects” (p. 3). So why this book? First, because the author, an opera-loving, professional political scientist, wanted to write a book “that he had always wanted to read”; one that would uncover in opera the major classic concepts of political philosophy from Plato, to…