WagnerWorldWide: Conference Blog

When I came up with my idea of WagnerWorldWide some years ago, I was not so sure, where this would take me. Now I know. Step no. 4 with our next conference took me to the town of Columbia, the captital of South Carolina. While we were suffering from snow in Germany, I landed on Wednesday at a small local airport after a long journey. And it was warm that night. Nice. Compared to the Franconian winter. Where did Wagner take me? Very generally speaking, www2013: took me to a good spot of academic investigation dealing with the anniversary culture in music and the arts. Again very interdisciplinary, here at the University of South Carolina. I think the project works out, basically. But I am also asking myself: what makes the difference of having that series of conferences instead of just one? It is probably the amount of approaches but also the fact how certain aspects – let’s say Wagner and Bismarck – are relating to each other from Bern to Columbia or vice versa. And how these aspects are looked at differently. The www2013:-books we are planning on will show this – hopefully. It is also interesting to see which topics are focused on at each place. The Columbia conference with its impressive programme WagnerWorldWide:America, put together by Nicholas Vazsonyi and Julie Hubbert, features a lot of talks on the Media topic as well as on the Gender topic, the last one being quite prominent also in all sections. The Northamerican scholars at the conference are in the majority, with people from the UK and from continental Europe. Different Wagner perspectives? Yes. Alex Ross, the very acclaimed music critic from the „New Yorker“, gave an impressive keynote and brought a complete new topic to Wagner Studies. As far as I can see. His talk was dealing with the African American Wagner connection, introducing the term of „African American Wagnerism“. Not only African American Bayreuth singers (L. Aldrige in great detail and Grace Bumbry very briefly) were discussed but also William Du Bois. The civil right advocat and writer went to Bayreuth in 1936; to be precise on August 19, 1936, he saw a performance of „Lohengrin“. About the same time, when Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin olympics. Two African Americans in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. With very different experiences.