Mitchell Cohen

Mitchell Cohen is emeritus professor in political science ; He taught at Bernard Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He was the co-editor of Dissent Magazine, one of the leading intellectual journals in the US, from 1991 to 2009 and is now Co-Editor Emeritus.  Besides scholarly publications, his articles amd reviews have appeared in the TLS, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Esprit, among others. He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.  His book, The Politics of Opera, won the Prose Award for Music of the American Society of Publishers, was named in the London Evening Standard as one of the best books of 2017, and was short listed for the Shannon Prize in European Studies. He has lectured at various universities in the US, Europe and Israel. He received his doctorate from Columbia University.

The project

Titles: The Political Passions of Richard Wagner

"It is Wagner’s post-revolution period that I am now researching, This is when he wrote "The Ring," "Tristan," "Meistersinger" and "Parsifal." My focus is on his uneasy relation to the French intellectual world. He had an ongoing hostility to France comparable (but not quite as fierce) to his anti-Semitism, but Paris remained the center of the operatic world.  His relation to France is complex, many faceted, and includes:

1. His quest for recognition in France and his attempts to have his works staged in Paris. He could not get them staged in most of Germany for an extensive time because he was a wanted man for over a decade. That changed when he lived later in Munich and Bayreuth;
2. The infamous controversy in 1861 over the Paris premiere of "Tannhäuser" at Napoleon III's request, which resulted in quasi-riots by “the Jockey Club.” Baudelaire wrote an important essay about the opera, defending Wagner.
3. The early promotion of Wagner’s work by Emile Ollivier, who became prime minister of France, 1870-71. Previously a republican and then a liberal imperial politician, Ollivier was married to Blandine Liszt (died 1857), whose parents were Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult; Blandine’s sister was Wagner’s second wife, Cosima Wagner;
4. I am particularly interested in the image of Wagner during the Franco-Prussian war, and French responses –especially among his proponents -- to Wagner’s anti-French play, “Kapitulation” (1870), about the siege of Paris. He described it alternately as a comedy “in the mode of Aristophanes” and as his personal “revenge” for his unhappy time in Paris three decades earlier;
5. Wagner’s relation to Arthur de Gobineau."

Selective Bibliography

• The Politics of Opera : A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton University Press, 2017/20).
• « Georg Lukacs’s Two Natures : The Centenary of History and Class Consciousness, » in the Los Angeles Review of Books, November 17, 2023
• « In Search of Lucien Goldmann, » in Eurozine and L’Espill, October 2024
• « Irving Howe : A Socialist Life » in Dissent,  Fall 2020 and Esprit, May 2021.
• As editor : Princeton Readings in Political Thought  (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition 2020).