“Flat Bayreuth: Multimedial Challenges in Wagner’s 1876 Ring Production”

Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/635540058

A WSNC Zoom Webinar with Yale Professor Dr. Gundula Kreuzer. Professor Kreuzer recently published a book entitled “Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of the 19th Century”. In her talk Professor Kreuzer will take us from Wagner’s theatrical times to the high-tech era which features the Francesca Zambello Production of Wagner’s Ring in San Francisco. We are accommodating the Professor’s busy calendar by presenting on Sunday rather than our usual Saturday meetings.
Gundula Kreuzer studied musicology, philosophy, and modern history at the Universities of Münster (Westphalia) and Oxford, where she earned her Master of Studies and D.Phil. in musicology. She held a Junior Research (postdoctoral) Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, before joining the Yale Department of Music in 2005.

In both her writing and her teaching, Kreuzer approaches music from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, such as social, cultural, and political history as well as theories of technology and multimedia. Her award-winning first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), examines the changing impact of the popular Italian composer on German musical self-perception and national identity. Her second monograph, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press, 2018) addresses how composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly tried to control certain aspects of staging by embracing specific stage technologies. Focusing on the cultural resonances and hermeneutic potentials of the titular technologies of the curtain, the tam-tam, and steam before, in, and beyond Wagner, the book develops a deeply contextualized practical perspective on the nature and ephemerality of staged opera as well as its legacies in contemporary culture.