NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Mitchell Cohen

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Mitchell Cohen, emeritus professor at Baruch College, CUNY, combines his scholarship in political science with broad interests in cultural history. His The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (2017) won the PROSE Award for Music of the Association of American Publishers. From 1991 to 2009 he co-edited the journal Dissent. He has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been an NEH Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and CUNY Writing Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Tell us about your research project.

I am researching a book tentatively entitled “The Political Passions of Richard Wagner.” The book explores politics and ideas in the life and music of the 19th-century German composer through deep contextualization, that is, situating Wagner within the political and intellectual worlds of his times. Wagner was at various stages of his life a humanist radical, an anarchist (of sorts), a fervent Jew-hater, and an extreme nationalist. Sometimes these passions merged. He took part in a violent uprising in Dresden in 1849 with Bakunin, one of anarchism’s central figures, and ended up as a political refugee. 

My effort is a kind of “unbiography.” While it moves chronologically along with Wagner’s life, it doesn’t simply interpret his politics in light of his copious published writings, his many letters, and, of course, his operas and what he called music dramas, but rather sinks them into 19th-century history and the history of ideas. Many treatments of Wagner are shaped by his afterlife—by the facts that he was Hitler’s favorite composer and that the festival he created for his own works in Bayreuth, Germany, was infamously implicated in the Third Reich. By contrast, my approach asks very different questions and I will end the story when Wagner ended. He died in 1883 and I want to situate him in his own times. 

When did you first get the idea for your research project?  

I have been working on this for a long time—Wagner’s life was a very big, controversial one—and I hope to finish within the next year. Years ago, I read what I thought were some unsatisfactory accounts of his politics and the relation between his politics and his stage works. The problem with them was that they either reduced his artistry to his often problematic politics or sought to avoid the discomforts and embarrassments of his politics by pretending they were not in his art. There are fierce debates about how much politics is found in his operas (a lot, in my view). 

What brought you to NYPL? 

I’m a native New Yorker and have known NYPL since I was a teenager. It is a wonderful place in which to do research, to read, and write. 

What's your favorite spot in the Library? 

The Wertheim Room. I also look forward to spending some time at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. 

Describe your research routine. 

It varies according to the chapter on which I am working and the type of research I am doing. Sometimes I first reread what I’ve written the day before and sometimes the day begins with reading a bundle of books and articles. I take notes, write my first drafts, and edit them by hand before moving to the computer.

What research tools could you not live without? 

Books and more books as well as recordings of different productions of operas.  

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research? 

It is less any particular item than a developing, deeper understanding of the political, cultural, and religious history of 19th-century Saxony and the extent to which Wagner internalized it. 

Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.  

I had best leave that to future readers of my book. But just a hint. There have been several turns, all tied to links I perceive between political languages in Wagner’s world and his artistic endeavors. The more I return to his stage works, the more I see and hear things in them that I hadn’t noticed before. 

How do you maintain your research momentum? 

The material itself gives me relentless momentum. 

What's your favorite distraction? 

Operas—and not only those with obvious political themes. I have the advantage of having to watch operas for work. But my other distractions are classical music and literature.  

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started? 

Be reflective about your own methodological biases. Don’t be too swept away by the latest methodological fad and let what you are researching speak to you. 

Who makes the best coffee in the neighborhood? 

I suppose either Ole & Steen or Le Pain Quotidien. 

Have we left anything out that you’d like to tell other researchers? 

Be alert to anachronism when you approach another era … or your own.