Micaela Baranello

“Wagner’s Past, Germany’s Future: Staging History at the Bayreuth Festival.”

This talk will examine how the Bayreuth Wagner Festival has, in recent decades, engaged with German history and its own complicity in it. Considering several recent productions of Wagner’s works, I will discuss how they reckon with the festival’s legacy and destabilize its past. However, I argue, they also perpetuate Bayreuth’s infamous insularity and reveal hostility and resistance to Germany’s multicultural and multiracial present and future.

This event is open to the public and part of AIR.

Arts Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) is a holistic research center and forum for creative and scholarly research across the arts that includes cutting-edge colloquia, exploratory seminars, lecture demonstrations, launches of research publications and creative works, reading groups, faculty talks, and stand-alone conferences initiated by the faculty of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts.