Soft Valkyrie with David Kanaga

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ARCHIVAL VIDEO OF THIS PROGRAM: https://youtu.be/fG_AiOQZYjE

HERE IS A LINK TO THE FULL FILM SOFT VALKYRIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Q_3bcdu8g&t=3553s

Writing to Brahms in 1875, Wagner described the Ring’s music as forming the invisible scenery of an imaginary stage:  “On occasion the charge has been made against me that my musical things were stage decorations: Rheingold will have to suffer mightily from that allegation. On the other hand, it might perhaps not be uninteresting to perceive, in following the subsequent scores of the Ring of the Nibelung, how I managed to construct all kinds of musical thematic material upon the stage which is here established.”

In this presentation, composer David Kanaga follows the above letter in suggesting that Wagner’s music itself be treated as an art of virtual staging.  Examples are drawn from Wagner’s own “stagings” of “musical things”, and in particular, the ways in which his tendency to allude to other music can be understood to function as restagings of the props/masks of predecessors. The resulting recontextualizations of Beethoven, Marschner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mendelssohn can be understood to anticipate the tradition of contextual estrangement in regieoper. Throughout the lecture, additional examples will be drawn from Kanaga’s unabridged arrangement of Die Walküre (Soft Valkyrie, Dutch National Opera et al, 2022), to show how this project’s “redecoration of the invisible stage” attempts to bring regieoper’s visual techniques back into the realm of sound.

David Kanaga is an award-winning composer and game designer. His interactive musical scores for video games such as Proteus, Dyad, and Panoramical won him acclaim in the art-gaming world. His interactive computer opera Oikospiel Book I (2017)  paved the way for his first live opera “Heat Cantata: from Oikospiel Book II”, which premiered at Amsterdam’s Holland Festival in 2018. In 2022, Holland Festival along with Dutch National Opera and Staatsoper Hanover commissioned and premiered Soft  , an unabridged electronic arrangement of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, with a full cast and Wagner’s original stage directions narrated by Stephen Fry. He continues to work in game development and is currently wrapping up a manuscript of a book called Endless Melusine: Mendelssohn’s Melody in Wagner’s Ring, concerning the opening Rhine motif of the Ring cycle.