WagnerWorldWide: Conference Blog

The conference was very well attended. All three days. Which was wonderful. Students and all kind of other people came to what was a very stimulating and intensive discourse on Wagner and other phenomena. Wagner audiences is a strange but fruitful topic on its own. The people attending a Wagner performance – or a Wagner conference – seem to be quite diverse coming from all kind of different cultural, ethnical, age or gender backgrounds; but then: a Wagner audience is not so diverse at all, because the composer asks for strong identification. They, we – the Wagner conference attendees –  are „Wagnerites“, „Wagnerianer“, real fans. I am one of them, I guess: wearing the nice T-shirt the USC-conference team came up with, with Wagner’s suggestive eyes on my chest and „WagnerWorldWide:America 2013“ on my back. You are either part of the circle of admirers (throwing into the conversation, where you confirm that you love Wagner, that this is the case despite the fact that he was a horrible guy...). Or one clearly distances him- or herself from Wagner, finding the person inacceptable, the music too long, the theater too complicated, and all of it too germanic. No in-betweens. What could be noted in the South of the US was the fact that the huge majority of the people attending the conference was white. Kind of not proving Alex Ross’ point of an African-American Wagnerism; at least not in Columbia 2013.
Other Wagner identities? Celia Applegate found out on „Women’s Wagner“ and highlighted the fact that women in the 19th and early 20th centuries were probably the most passionate admirers of Wagner’s work. While Hilan Warshaw’s documentary „Wagner’s Jews“ dealt both with the rejection of Wagner in Israel and the passionate fight of other people to make ‚Wagner happen’ in live performances. Wagner in the radio actually is not an issue. Is it the difference between public and private or the difference between live and mediatized? Hilan Warshaw’s film had its very well received world premiere in Columbia on Friday night. Being a co-production with the German broadcast station of WDR it will be shown on German television in May (on ARTE) and in November (on ARD). Check out our facebook site for exact dates and watch this fascinating view on Wagner 2013 by a filmmaker who – by the way – is also a musician. The question of how (!) we actually listen to Wagner and watch his operas is not only a major topic of discussion in that very special situation of reception history in Israel. How are we able to look at the ‚whole’ at a time where detachment and the consumption of clips and pieces (online and elsewhere) is becoming the normal and part of our everyday culture? Mediatized Wagner depictions were discussed at the conference, where stage productions are formatted to screening in film and TV. An experience which can never be compared to the ‚real thing’. This is just because of the fact that the spectator has to be following the film director’s decisions on close ups and cuts, where film creates its own rhythm. While, at the live performance, the spectator has all the pictures available at once: having the totality of the image. I thought about a solution, which would make the Wagner experience not only very private but also a game like interactive procedure. It popped into my mind that somebody could develop something what one could call an „I-Pad-Opera“. People would be using an interactive screen while watching Wagner’s „Siegfried“ for example. If I were interested in focussing on the moment where Siegfried finds the warrior aka Brünnhilde at the end of Act 3, I would be the one who – with that new charcateristic movement of fingers on screens – is deciding on detail. A little bit like using the „Opernglas“ in the old days at the theatre: as a lense for ‚eye-privacy’. 
As most kids in Germany growing up in the 1960s and 70s we were fascinated with everything coming from America. We knew abouth this country through television. Almost no movie we watched at that time where one of the characters would not go on a Greyhound bus on a long journey through the country. I came here a lot since the mid 1980s. But it is always a first time and I always wanted to do this. I boarded one of those busses going from Columbia to Charleston on Saturday. This is not the way everybody travels anymore in the US. I was the only white person on that bus. And: I am for sure bringing back home that question of African-American Wagnerism.