The Wagner and Adaptation organising team wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute, the Faculty of Music, the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Munk School of Global Affairs, and the German Department, and of the Canadian Company, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Consulate.

Special thanks are owed to Janice Gross Stein (Director, Munk School of Global Affairs), Don McLean (Dean, Faculty of Music), Robert Gibbs (Director, Jackman Humanities Institute), Alan Bewell (Chair, Department of English), Neil ten Kortenaar (Director, Centre for Comparative Literature), Brian Corman (Dean, School of Graduate Studies), John Zilcosky (Chair, German Department), Pia Kleber (Professor of Drama, Wagner and University College), Kim Yates (Associate Director, Jackman Humanities Institute), Gianmarco Segato (Canadian Opera Company), and Sabine Sparwasser (German Consul General). Adaptation

Thank you, finally, to all our distinguished presenters for their vital An International Symposium contributions to this event.

The Wagner and Adaptation Symposium Team: Caryl Clark (Music), Linda Hutcheon (English and Comparative Literature), Sherry Lee (Music), and Katherine Larson (English), University of Toronto. 31 January - 2 February 2013 Graduate Student Assistants: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Julia Dolman, Hilary Donaldson, Rebekah Lobosco, and Sean Bellaviti

http://www.operaexchange.net/wagner-and-adaptation

Wagner and Adaptation – University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

Wagner and Adaptation: An International Symposium University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

HONOURING LINDA HUTCHEON – PROGRAMME –

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, 31 JANUARY

JACKMAN HUMANITIES BUILDING, ROOM 100A

3:30 p.m. Welcome and Introduction Robert Gibbs, Director, Jackman Humanities Institute

3:45 p.m. Michael P. Steinberg (Brown University) “Reflections on Dramaturgical Work for the / Ring, 2010 – 2013”

5:00 p.m. Reception hosted by the Faculty of Music The participants of the Wagner and Adapation symposium have Graduate Colloquium Series gathered to celebrate our esteemed colleague, University Professor Linda Hutcheon, for her outstanding scholarly and public contributions to our understanding of the processes and practices of adaptation, and of opera in dialogue and performance. Wagner and Adaptation – University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013 Wagner and Adaptation: An International Symposium

FRIDAY MORNING, 1 FEBRUARY In Act I of ’s Tristan und Isolde, the title characters share a drink, and unwittingly alter the course of both their own FACULTY OF MUSIC, WALTER HALL destinies and those of their respective nations. The infamous love potion, secretly substituted for a death draught, turns out to be both deceptive and revelatory, bringing to the surface a long-hidden 9:15 a.m. Welcome connection between two members of rival cultures, and transforming Don McLean, Dean, Faculty of Music it into a consuming desire. Tristan and Isolde’s transformative potion is an analogue of the 9:20 a.m. Richard Leppert (University of Minnesota) continual and multifarious processes of adaptation of the works of “Operatic-Cinematic Dream Notes” Wagner, the transformative artist par excellence of the nineteenth century, around which our symposium revolves. Wagner’s own 1865 Chair: Michael Hutcheon adaptation of the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseut was itself arguably the catalyst for the modern phenomenon of adaptive operatic staging practices: in February 1903, and Alfred Roller 10:30 a.m. Coffee break produced a Tristan in Vienna that transformed the tradition-bound approach to the work with a new, simplified staging and novel, hosted by the Faculty of Music coloured-electrical lighting techniques. Now in 2013, 110 years after this adaptive landmark and 200 years after Wagner’s own birth, our symposium coincides with the Canadian Opera Company’s 11:00 a.m. Brian Kane (Yale University) presentation of Bill Viola and Peter Sellars’ acclaimed Tristan “Acousmatic Phantasmagoria and the Problem of Project, a multimedia art piece whose combination of larger-than-life Techné” video imagery with live performance is an extraordinary act of adaptation that has resonated internationally. 11:45 a.m. Sander Gilman (Emory University) Wagner and Adaptation brings together a stellar international lineup “1942: Opera Adaptations in Opera and Beyond” of participants across multiple disciplines, to interrogate from a myriad of perspectives the processes of performative adaptation, from the staged to the filmic and beyond, that have accrued to Wagner’s Chair: Sherry Lee oeuvre. This symposium marks both the Wagner bicentenary and the tenth year since Linda Hutcheon, together with Caryl Clark, launched the Opera Exchange, a series of interdisciplinary symposia that has 12:30 p.m. Lunch break sustained a decade-long connection between the University, the performing arts community, and the opera-loving public. Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

His articles have been published in The Cambridge Opera Journal, The Wagner Journal, The Opera Quarterly, and numerous collections about opera and musical theatre.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 1 FEBRUARY

Bettina Brandl-Risi studies subjects such as FACULTY OF MUSIC, WALTER HALL performativity and virtuosity, image and movement in contemporary performance, and theatricality and visual mises en scène at the 2:30 p.m. Ryan Minor (Stony Brook University) intersections of literature, theatre and the fine “Tannhäuser contra Wagner, or the Pitfalls of arts. Her research interests also include concepts Operatic Adaptation” of participation and audience, as well as theories and histories of reading from 1800 to today. 3:15 p.m. David Levin (University of Chicago) and Presently a professor of performance and Mary Ann Smart (University of California Berkeley) contemporary theatre in the Institute for Theatre and Media Studies at “Provocative Restagings of Wagner” the Universität Erlangen, she has also served as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and Yale University. Chair: Caryl Clark, Music, U of T Brandl-Risi is the author of BilderSzenen:Tableaux vivants zwischen Bildender Kunst, Theater und Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, and her articles appear in numerous anthologies and journals devoted to theatre and performance studies. 4:15 p.m. Coffee break hosted by the Faculty of Music

4:45 p.m. John Deathridge (King’s College London) “Waiting for Wagner”

Chair: Steven Vande Moortele, Music, U of T Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

SATURDAY MORNING SATURDAY MORNING, 2 FEBRUARY Clemens Risi: “Performing Wagner for the 21st Century” FACULTY OF MUSIC, WALTER HALL Wagner’s works have long been the focus of questions concerning the possibilities, limits and necessity of the director’s role in opera 9:00 a.m. Welcome and Introduction productions. I will discuss recent developments in staging Wagner at Katherine Larson, English, U of T the Bayreuther Festspiele, including Katharina Wagner’s 2007 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Hans Neuenfels’ 2010 , and Sebastian Baumgarten’s 2011 Tannhäuser. All of these productions 9:15 a.m. Clemens Risi (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) could be described as “Regietheater” (“director's theater”), a “Performing Wagner for the 21st Century” performance practice that retains the musical dramaturgy of the work while radically questioning, re-examining and re-contextualising the layers of meaning in an opera. These productions also mark new steps 10:00 a.m. Christopher Mokrzewski, piano (Toronto) in the staging practice of Wagner’s oeuvre, going beyond questions of Performance of Franz Liszt’s transcription of the the interpretation of a single work. How does a well-known opera Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde react under the conditions of a newly established situation as in a laboratory?

10:30 a.m. Coffee Break Clemens Risi is professor of performance hosted by the Faculty of Music and contemporary theatre in the Institute for Theatre and Media Studies at the Universität Erlangen. His research interests include 11:00 a.m. In conversation: opera and musical theatre from the 17thC to Linda Hutcheon (English and Comparative the present, with emphasis on performativity Literature, University of Toronto), and theatricality, affect and emotion in Bettina Brandl-Risi (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), music, theater, and opera, the experience of Michael Baba (Tristan – Canadian Opera Company), rhythm and time, and audiovisual perception. and Margaret Jane Wray (Isolde – Canadian Opera Author of Auf dem Weg zu einem Company) italienischen Musikdrama, he has also co- edited several collections, including, most recently, in 2011, Power, Powerlessness, Chance: Performance Practice, Interpretation and Reception in the Musical Theatre of the 19th Century and the Present and a special edition of Opera Quarterly entitled Opera in Transition. Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

John Deathridge: “Waiting for Wagner” SPEAKERS Reluctant musicology, radical philosophy, and a fraught legacy are still playing their role in creating debates about Wagner that are THURSDAY AFTERNOON largely inchoate. This paper considers whether aspects of the discourse can become an ‘event’ (Badiou), the origin of a new Michael P. Steinberg: “Reflections on Dramaturgical Work for the intellectual translation of Wagner that allows us to see him in a new La Scala / Berlin Ring, 2010 – 2013” light, or whether, like Tristan, we still have to wait (in vain). Michael P. Steinberg was educated at Princeton University and the University of John Deathridge, King Edward Professor of Chicago. His research is focussed on the Music at King’s College, London, is a cultural history of modern and specialist in music of the 19th and 20th Austria, particularly German Jewish centuries, and one of the world’s leading intellectual history and the cultural history of experts on the music of Richard Wagner and music. He has written studies of Hermann its reception history. His research interests Broch, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and include music and social theory, in Charlotte Salomon, and the German edition particular the work of Adorno and the of his Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of Frankfurt School, and he is a noted the won Austria’s Victor authority on Beethoven. From 1971-1980 Adler Staats preis in 2001. He is also the he served as full-time director of music at author of Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th-Century St. Wolfgang, Munich, during which time he continued his research Music and Judaism: Musical and Unmusical, and currently serves as on Wagner, acted as a conductor and broadcaster, and worked as an the Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera editor of the Wagner complete edition. Deathridge has also taught at Quarterly. Steinberg has been the recipient of grants and fellowships King’s College, Cambridge, Princeton University (1990–1991) and from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the the University of Chicago (1992). A Fellow of the Royal College of National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Organists, he is in demand as an organ recitalist, conductor, piano Learned Societies, and the American Academy of Berlin (Berlin accompanist, and radio and television broadcaster, as well as a Prize). He is presently the Director of the Cogut Center for reviewer for scholarly music journals in Germany and the United Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University, Kingdom. Deathridge served from 2005 to 2008 as President of the and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Royal Musical Association, and is currently a Member of the Board University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. of the European Academy of Music Theatre. He is the author of Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (2008). Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

FRIDAY MORNING Eyes (1994), and the author of Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Richard Leppert: “Operatic-Cinematic Dream Notes” Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (1998), and Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Zemlinsky (2007). Opera and cinema share a tendency toward representing dream worlds (whether utopian or dystopian), one in which music plays a key part – obviously foundational to opera but sometimes nearly as important in film, and particularly in films on musical subjects. The Mary Ann Smart is Professor of question addressed here tends toward the micrology of affect and Musicology at the University of California, effect, that is, examples of the specific means by which music drives Berkeley. She holds a PhD in Musicology the dream world of operatic and cinematic representation. from Cornell University, an MA in Music Criticism from McMaster University and a Richard Leppert is Professor of Cultural Bachelor of Music in Flute Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at the from McGill University. Her research University of Minnesota. His research focuses on nineteenth-century opera with interests are focussed on critical theory, particular emphasis on staging and gesture, discourse theory, and cultural studies, in singers, and music and gender. She is the particular the post-structuralist sociology of author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in popular and high culture, the Frankfurt Nineteenth Century Opera, the editor of Siren Songs: Representations School, and Theodor Adorno. He is the editor of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, and the co-editor of Reading of Theodor W. Adorno: Essays in Critics Reading: Criticism of French Opera from the Revolution to Music (2002), and co-editor of Beyond the 1848. Her articles have been published in the The Cambridge Opera Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (2007). In addition to his Journal, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, and the selected essays (Sound Judgment, 2007), Leppert is the author of The Cambridge Companion to Verdi. She also authored articles on several monographs including The Sight of Sound: Music, Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti in the Revised New Grove Representation and the History of the Body (1993), Art and the Dictionary of Music and Musicians and is the editor of a critical Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery (1996), and The edition of Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien. She is currently Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western working on a book entitled Risorgimento Fantasies: Opera and Modernity (2007). He has been the recipient of the John Simon Politics in Italy to 1848, which examines the political meanings of Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a National Endowment for the Italian opera in Verdi’s lifetime, during the fight for Italian Humanities Senior Fellowship for Independent Study and Research. unification. A member of the University of Minnesota’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers, he was named Regents’ Professor by the University of Minnesota Board of Regents in 2007. Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

Society. He has also contributed chapters to Franz Liszt and His Brian Kane: “Acousmatic Phantasmagoria and the Problem of World, The Oxford Handbook of Opera, 19th-Century Choral Music Techné” and The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Minor is currently the Co- Architecture is not tone deaf: It can create silent places and eddies of Executive Editor of Opera Quarterly, and is working on a monograph noise, deeply affecting our experience.This paper considers the entitled “German Opera and its Spectators.” experience of listening and the audibility of space in relation to Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, raising key questions about the phenomenological manifestations of sonic-theatrical space. David Levin and Mary Ann Smart: “Provocative Restagings of Wagner” Brian Kane is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Yale University. Kane's scholarly David Levin is Professor of Germanic work is interdisciplinary, in the margins Studies and Cinema & Media Studies at the between music theory, composition and University of Chicago. He specializes in philosophy. Working primarily with 20th theories of spectacle, performance theory, century repertoire, his emphasis is on and the intersections of cinema, theater, and questions of sound and signification. Central opera, particularly with regards to German themes in his research include music and Cinema. His recent research interests centre sound art, histories and theories of listening, on questions of performance and phenomenology, improvisation, music and spectatorship, especially the institutional and subjectivity, technology, conceptualizations ideological histories of absorption. He has of sound and music in literature and philosophy, and theories of the served as a dramaturg at the Frankfurt voice. Kane's work appears in several journals including Organised Opera, the Bremen Opera, and the Frankfurt Sound, Current Musicology, Contemporary Music Review, Journal of Ballet, and more recently at Lyric Opera of Chicago and Opera Cabal Visual Culture, and Music Theory Spectrum. Co-Chair of the Society Performing Arts Association, an avant-garde opera company based in for Music Theory's Music and Philosophy Interest Group, founder of New York and Chicago. In the Spring of 2010, he co-hosted (with the Yale Sound Studies Group, and founding editor of the Christopher Wild) "Praxes of Theory," an international conference at interdisciplinary journal nonsite.org, Kane is also a composer of the University of Chicago bringing together artists and scholars from acoustic and electroacoustic music, a sound installation artist, and a Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance dedicated jazz guitarist. practice and performance theory; this conference inaugurated a multi- year cooperation with the Institute for Theater Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2006 he has served as the Executive Editor of The Opera Quarterly. He is the editor of Opera Through Other Wagner and Adaptation – Symposium Programme University of Toronto, 31 January – 2 February 2013

Sander Gilman: “1942: Opera Adaptations in Opera and Beyond” FRIDAY AFTERNOON The politics of opera composition often reflect the real-politics of the day in complex and unimagined ways. Looking at the early 1940s in Ryan Minor: “Tannhäuser contra Wagner, or the Pitfalls of the USSR, Germany, and the United States the use of opera parodies Operatic Adaptation” (in both the literary and musical senses) can give a sense of the Tannhäuser presents a landscape full of sounds: bells, fanfares, songs, politics of culture in moments of heightened nationalism. and prayers. Similarly, Wagner’s sources—Hoffmann, Tieck, and others—depict a world whose moral, libidinal, and geographic Sander Gilman is a cultural and literary contours are marked out through sound: not only the warning cries historian whose research centres on emitted from the Venusberg, but also the singing that lures men there medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in in the first place. While Wagner’s opera shares with its sources a social and political discourse. In particular, reliance on sounds and listening to delineate collective and moral he investigates the constellations of medical, boundaries, it departs radically from these forebears in its promotion social, and political dialogues that emerge at of the very kind of enchanted listening the sources fear. This talk critical historical junctures. Gilman has held explores Tannhäuser’s ambivalent endorsement of musical the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane enchantment, and suggests that Wagner was only able to demonstrate Studies at Cornell University (1976-1995) the means, not yet the content, of musico-emotional identification. It and the Henry R. Luce Distinguished is this discrepancy, I propose, that may have partially generated Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Wagner’s famous comment that he still “owed the world his Human Biology at the University of Chicago (1994–2000), and was a Tannhäuser”—an admission that is as much about spectatorial distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator politics as it is the opera itself. of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2002–2005). He was awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at Ryan Minor is Associate Professor of Music the University of Toronto in 1997, was elected an honorary professor History and Theory at SUNY Stony Brook. of the Freie Universität Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the His research deals with musical and political American Psychoanalytic Association (2007). He has been the culture in the “long nineteenth century,” with Northrop Frye Visiting Professor of Literary Theory at the University special emphasis on opera, including issues of Toronto, the inaugural Drobny Professor in Jewish Studies at the of staging, dramaturgy, nationalism, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Hooker Professor at politics of spectatorship. He is the author of McMaster University. Gilman is the author and editor of over eighty Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and books, including Jewish Self-Hatred (1986), Seeing the Insane (1982, Nationhood in 19th-Century Germany, as 1996), Race and Contemporary Medicine: Biological Facts and well as articles in Cambridge Opera Journal, Fictions (2008), Obesity: The Biography (2010), and Wagner and 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe, 2010). Musical Association, and the Journal of the American Musicological