WagnerWorldWide: Conference Blog

This is my second trip within the www2013 project. In that sense: this is also my second trip ‘to’ Wagner, so to speak. I feel like not only travelling to the places but also to the cultural phenomenon within the places. Each time Wagner becomes something different: Wagner in China, and Wagner in Switzerland now, in November 2012.After China and WagnerWorldWide:Asia, I yesterday arrived in Bern for WagnerWorldWide:Europe organized by Arne Stollberg, Ivana Rentsch and Anselm Gerhard. This is exciting. Sure, this is the same globe (I am not on Mars…), but still: this seems like a whole different ‘world’ here. Bern is a very pretty, friendly and beautiful small town, and much calmer than Shanghai, the busy metropolis of the 21^st century; different people, different foods, different energy etc. I flew in yesterday from Berlin where I attended a conference on music in Prussia. That was a good prologue to the Bern conference and its topic: “Wagner and Opera between Nationalism and Globalisation”.Is it possible and does it make sense to talk of “Prussian” music? What does “Prussian” music sound like? I myself at the Berlin conference gave a talk on Gaspare Spontini and his opera “Agnes von Hohenstaufen”. This composer was born Italian, became French under Napoleon and started to engage himself with German national opera in the Prussian capital of the 1820s and 1830s. He was covering with his life quite a bit of the European world at that time as it can be considered a typical 19^th century bio of a composer. Richard Wagner was born in Saxony, tried to compose operas for Paris, where he failed. He went to Switzerland, and finally ended up in the upper Franconian province. Not quite as international as Spontini, but still also very European. Spontini’s opera “Agnes”, by the way, was not accepted to be a national opera. Culture in the 19^th century wants to construct identity, especially national identity. In that sense, Spontini and the official Prussian cultural politics of his King Friedrich Wilhelm III. also failed. Culture and opera tried to make people feel good to “be” something: either Prussian, Italian, French, German or even a combination of those. One major topic of the Bern conference is to ask, how aspects of national culture were constructed within different European spheres and how these relate to other concepts as globalisation or transnationalism. Not only the term national opera was used in the 19^th century but also – in a similar way – the term of world opera. Giuseppe Verdi for example was very proud that his Italian operas were performed – almost – all over the places. The national and the global met in the 19^th century. Jürgen Osterhammel introduced both categories in the first paper of this conference as instruments to analyze 19^th century culture, also asking: “Was ist Welt?” (“What is World”)? ‘World’ is also something being represented by its achievements. The Bavarian ‘world’ of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as Osterhammel showed, became global because of three phenomena (or ‘products’): that is BMW, that is Siemens and that is – last but not least – Richard Wagner. Wagner the ever changing cultural phenomenon may be looked at from two sides here, that is production and reception: As somebody who engaged himself with representing ideas with national impact as in “Die Meistersinger”; and as somebody who is still identified by his audiences as specific German (or Bavarian…). Identities may shift.Is Wagner – by now – part of a global culture?