Bard Music Festival 2009

Wagner and His World

The 20th annual Bard Music Festival takes stock of the pathbreaking composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), with orchestral concerts (including excerpts from all of his operas, including the first three, which are rarely performed), chamber and choral concerts, panels, and other events exploring his life and times. The festival aims to explore the sources that provided him with the tools for his brilliant self-invention. The exploration of Wagner is a fitting 20th-anniversary season for the festival, whose inaugural season was dedicated to Brahms.

Weekend Two: Engineering the Triumph of Wagnerism

• August 21-23, 2009

By the early 1870s, Wagner’s music, poetry, and prose had sparked an open conflict about the nature and future of music that would influence the discussion of art and culture until the outbreak of World War I. During the last three decades of his life, Wagner not only completed the Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal, but he also engineered the first modern marketing scheme on behalf of an artist and his work (the selling of the Bayreuth festival). By the time of his death, Wagner, his music, and his aesthetics became a near obsession for philosophers, painters, poets, politicians, and, above all, musicians in Europe and America, making him the most famous artist of his time. This weekend looks at the many controversies surrounding Wagner, including his relationship to Nietzsche; the opposition to his innovations, centered around the figure of Brahms; the creation of Bayreuth; the impact of his music on composers from Bruckner to Granados, Wolf, and Debussy; and the connection between the Wagnerian and late 19th-century racism and nationalism.