“Tristan’s Shadow is an important, highly intelligent, and ambitious study. Rigorously researched, blissfully unencumbered by canonical narratives, and written with Adrian Daub’s signature verve, this book provides a new, and entirely compelling, account of German opera after Wagner. It will undoubtedly become standard reading in musicology and opera studies, in German studies and comparative literature, and in the history of sexuality.”

Ryan Minor | author of Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany

“Boldly taking Wagnerism far beyond the usual suspects, Adrian Daub shows that the influence of Tristan didn’t end with chromaticism or even with metaphysics. In a brilliant flash of insight, Daub perceives that the opera’s eroticism is entwined with its dramatic aesthetics in ways that haunted and inspired later composers. Better than any recent book I can think of, this lucid and imaginative study shows why Wagner mattered—and continues to matter—enormously.”

Mary Ann Smart, University of California, Berkeley

“In Tristan’s Shadow Adrian Daub does nothing less than rethink from the ground up the problem that Wagner’s legacy posed for German opera composers through the first half of the twentieth century.  Wagner himself emerges in a fresh light as Daub uncovers the surprisingly close connections between the erotics of Wagnerian opera and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.  The mixture, both intoxicating and toxic, sets goals for subsequent German opera that, as Daub shows in a series of richly textured readings, could neither be achieved nor evaded.  Anyone still struggling with Wagner (and who, in the opera world, is not?) will find this book rewarding.”

Lawrence Kramer, author of Interpreting Music

“Tristan’s Shadow maps sexuality onto Wagner’s concept of the total work of art, in order to show how the Gesamtkunstwerk must take account of the body and the sexual. Through exciting readings of Strauss, Schreker, d’Albert and Siegfried Wagner and Kurt Weill, Adrian Daub shows opera to be attuned to—and discordant with—ugliness, sexual dissidence, crises of masculinity and decadence: he reads German post-Wagnerian opera as though it was an index to the cultural crises that produced Hitler’s Reich.”

Jeremy Tambling, author of Opera and the Culture of Fascism