Announcing upcoming lectures by Gottfried Wagner: 26-27 October 2004.

Gottfried H. Wagner (b. 1947) is the great grandson of the composer Richard Wagner and the great-great grandson of the composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt. He studied musicology, German philology, and philosophy, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1977. His dissertation on Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht was published as book in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Dr. Wagner works internationally as a multimedia lecturer, director (stage, video, radio), music historian, and writer. His writings, translated and published in eleven languages, deal with such diverse subjects as German culture and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; life, art theories, and works of Kurt Weill; and humanitarian questions relating to anti-Semitism. His autobiography, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy, first published in Germany in 1997, created world-wide interest and has been translated into six languages (New York: Picador 1999). In 1992, he co-founded the Post-Holocaust Dialogue Group with the historian Dr. Abraham Peck. Since 1983 he has been living in Italy.

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"Wagner's Music and Ideology in the Political Climate of the Twenty-First Century"
Tuesday, 26 October 2004, 7:30 P.M., Jordan Hall 124

"Weill and Brecht: Two Worlds in Collaboration"
Wednesday, 27 October 2004, 7:00 P.M., Faculty Club, Indiana Memorial Union

Abstracts:

Wagner's Music and Ideology in the Political Climate of the Twenty-First Century

The "Wagner controversy" is not limited to the role of Wagner's music as inspiration for Hitler's ideology and its function in the Third Reich, but it also concerns larger questions pertaining to the relationship between politics and the arts. The German experience and Wagner's visions of a future in which the nationally and racially superior German spirit will bring redemption to humankind were central to the evolution of his ideas. Therefore, they have bearing on his aesthetic concepts of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork).

How can one discuss, study and stage Wagner's visions, considering their role in the Holocaust--especially in the political climate of the present, when totalitarian religious systems again profess deliverance of universal salvation to mankind?

In his multimedia lecture, writer, lecturer, and stage director Dr. Gottfried Wagner, the great-grandson of Richard Wagner, will discuss Wagner's philosophy of life (Weltanschauung), his impact on arts and politics internationally, and Wagner reception in the period since World War II, in order to propose ways of approaching Wagner, the man and his oeuvre, in the future.

Weill and Brecht: Two Worlds in Collaboration

Gottfried Wagner has been the director of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York and wrote his doctoral dissertation (published as a book and translated into several languages) on Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. His dissertation was written during the time when Weill scholarship was completely dominated by the Brecht Foundation in East Germany, and as a result Weill's music was interpreted as ancillary to Brecht's Marxist ideology. The Weill Foundation in New York accepted this image of two leftist heroes with identical political ideas--an ideological falsification that continued as the prevailing view until the fall of Communism.

Dr. Wagner will dismantle these falsifications through a discussion of differences between Weill and Brecht, including their diverging political viewpoints as well as their profound personal dislike for each other. The lecture will present different philosophies of life (Weltanschaungen) within Weill's and Brecht's collaborative works, taking as examples the songspiel Mahagonny and the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. In these works, the libretto and the music are in complete contradiction, yet the resulting works were immensely successful and became central to the musical theatre tradition of the twentieth century.

Gottfried Wagner's visit is sponsored by the School of Music Lecture Fund in collaboration with Germanic Studies, Institute of German Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Office of International Programs.