Diskurs 2023 – Wagner machines

In Richard Wagner’s work, technical and aesthetic innovation often went hand in hand. As „Gesamtkunstwerker“ – as „total artist“ – he delved into the details of the theatre machinery. To this day, he is the only composer in music history who can boast that a patent for a stage curtain bears his name. The WAGNER-MACHINE is the subject of Diskurs Bayreuth in encounters between artists, researchers and the public on the Grüner Hügel. What innovations has the history of the Bayreuth Festival produced? What ideas did Wagner himself have of an innovative theatre? What perspectives do technologies like augmented reality offer? What are the ethical and aesthetic consequences of using such technologies? How are they used by composers today? What conditions does the “human machine“ need in order to realise the challenges of a Wagner score?

With: Markus Poschner, Jay Scheib, Nathalie Stutzmann, Georg Zeppenfeld
Johanna Dombois, Jochen Hörisch, Gundula Kreuzer, Moritz Lobeck, Kai Hinrich Müller, Brigitta Muntendorf, Wolfgang Struck, Øyvind Torvund

Concept and moderation: Patrick Hahn, Marie Luise Maintz

5. + 6. August 2023
10-14 Uhr
Festspielhaus, Probebühne 4
Eintritt frei

The Programme

August 5, 2023

10:00 am
Archaism and High-Tech. Composer in the age of media revolutions
Jochen Hörisch

11:00 am
Singing Wagner. How one becomes the other – and what role the orchestra plays in this process
Nathalie Stutzmann and Georg Zeppenfeld

12:30 pm
Sounding Bodies. On the divisibility of the indivisible
Brigitta Muntendorf

O wonder! How to visualise the sacred
Jay Scheib

1:30 pm
Machine in the light. Another green hill and its media
Moritz Lobeck

August 6, 2023

10:00 am
Impossible Sounds. Of Grail Bells and Gut Strings
Kai Hinrich Müller

The abyss as a mixing desk. The Conductor in the Engine Room
Markus Poschner

11:30 am
Unstageable? Of stage directions and the history of special effects
Wolfgang Struck

Eye, Curtain, Glasses. From the old media to the new media
Johanna Dombois

12:45 pm
A Steam Engine. Stage illusions from the boiler
Gundula Kreuzer

13:30 pm
Not so finished. Plans for future operas
Øyvind Torvund

Topics and participants

August 5, 2023

10:00 am
Archaism and High-Tech. Composer in the age of media revolutions
Prof. Dr. Jochen Hörisch, University of Mannheim

The 19th century is an age of media revolutions: Richard Wagner experiences the advent of photography and sound recording. In the medium of theatre, he seems to have anticipated the cinema in many respects, which was only invented twelve years after his death. The media theorist and loyal Wagnerian Jochen Hörisch is interested in the tensions in Wagner’s work: between invented archaism and longed-for high technology, between ingenuity and engineering.

11:00 am
Singing Wagner. How one becomes the other oneself – and what role the orchestra plays in this process.
Nathalie Stutzmann and Georg Zeppenfeld

Wagner roles pose very special challenges for singers, both technically and creatively. How do you create a different identity on stage? What is technically required? And what goes beyond that? Georg Zeppenfeld reports on the very real joys and hardships of battling stage fog, dazzling spotlights and sweaty costumes. 
In Wagner’s music, the orchestra often seems to know more than the characters on stage. Nathalie Stutzmann sheds light on how the orchestra becomes the narrator in Wagner’s music.

12:30 pm
Sounding Bodies. On the divisibility of the indivisible
Prof. Brigitta Muntendorf, Cologne University of Music and Dance

In her compositions, Brigitta Muntendorf uses artificial intelligence to clone voices virtually or synthetically. Can a voice, an expression of identity in all cultures, be artificially reproduced at all? And what does it mean if this were possible? What is artistically interesting about it? A fine line between fiction and deepfake.

Oh wonder! How to visualise the most sacred
Prof. Jay Scheib, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jay Scheib is a director and media artist. He stages Parsifal with “augmented reality” technology. How does staging change when incorporating the “infinite possibilities” of the new machines? What challenges arise from the use of the new technologies? What opportunities will it offer in the future? What barriers still need to be broken down?

13:30 pm
Machine in the light. Another green hill and its media
Moritz Lobeck, Dresden

Dresden also has a festival theatre on a green hill, built in 1911 in Dresden-Hellerau, a garden city. The theatre hall was designed by the reformer Adolphe Appia: a space with a flowing boundary between stage and auditorium, without a peep-box stage, but with state-of-the-art lighting technology. Moritz Lobeck is programme director in Hellerau, where the use of new technologies has been common practice for many years. Where is the experimental music theatre scene heading? A conversation about media and fashions and performances without a curtain.

August 6, 2023

10:00 am
Impossible Sounds. Of Grail Bells and Gut Strings
PD Dr. Kai Hinrich Müller, Cologne University of Music

Even as a composer, Richard Wagner did not want to be hemmed in by the limitations of the instrumentarium of his time and repeatedly inspired new inventions, among which the Grail Piano by the Steingraeber company is probably the best known. In the course of the last 150 years, the instruments have evolved. What consequences has this had for Wagner interpretation and especially for Wagner singing? How did Wagner hear his own music? These are questions that Cologne musicologist Kai Hinrich Müller is researching.

The abyss as a mixing desk. The Conductor in the Engine Room
Markus Poschner, Chief Conductor Bruckner Orchestra Linz, Symphony Orchestra Basel, Orchestra della Svizzera italiana

Is the Wagner Orchestra like a PA of Pink Floyd, as the media theorist Friedrich Kittler once speculated? Tristan conductor Markus Poschner offers a look inside his mixing console, explains which controls he has to operate in order to really turn this system up and how Wagner tuned it to remove the boundaries of temporality.

11:30 am
Unstageable? Of stage instructions and the history of special effects
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Struck, University of Erfurt

Machines have always been used in theatre to create surprise effects and magic, to realise the seemingly impossible. Wolfgang Struck researches the art of spectacular special effects to captivate the audience. At the same time, he is fascinated by “impossible” designs of the authors. What if new technologies now make “everything” possible?

Eye, curtain, glasses. From Old Media to New Media
Dr. Johanna Dombois, Robert Schumann University Düsseldorf

Non-linearity, interactivity, biofeedback, parallel worlds and projection technology, simulation and immanent self-reference: in her works on Richard Wagner and his media, the author Johanna Dombois has often shown how Richard Wagner sought new forms of seeing, hearing and feeling in his work – and found new interfaces for them. She reflects on the use of new media on the opera stage as critically as she makes them fruitful for productions. She began experimenting with virtual, interactive and old new media (such as the magic lantern, argand lights, curtain pulls) for the opera stage in 1999. In 2009 she presented a production of the Rheingold prelude (Ring-Studie 01) in which she used the online computer game platform SecondLife® as staging material. A conversation about the weal and woe of “media change”.

12:45 pm
A Steam Engine. Stage illusions from the boiler
Prof. Dr. Gundula Kreuzer, Yale University, New Haven

Richard Wagner wanted to leave the chimneys of the modern metropolises behind him when he installed himself on the Green Hill. He realised his stage ideas, however, with the help of two steam locomotives. Musicologist Gundula Kreuzer offers a historical view of the Wagner Theatre.

1:30 pm
Only not so finished. Plans for future operas
Øyvind Torvund

What will the art of the future look like? Every work of art already contains an answer to this question. But do we really want to commit ourselves in this way? In his series of works “Plans”, the composer Øyvind Torvund presents plans for pieces that have utopian potential in their finished unfinishedness, in the interplay of sketches and musical realisation.

Reading List

Archäologie der Spezialeffekte.

Herausgegeben von Natascha Adamowsky und Nicola Gess, München 2017

Richard Wagner und seine Medien. Für eine kritische Praxis des Musiktheaters.

Johanna Dombois und Richard Klein, Stuttgart 2012

Weibes Wonne und Wert. Richard Wagners Theorie-Theater.

Jochen Hörisch, Berlin 2015

Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera.
Gundula Kreuzer, University of California 2018

Theatermaschinen – Maschinentheater. Von Mechaniken, Machinationen und Spektakeln.
Herausgegeben von Bettine Menke und Wolfgang Struck, Bielefeld 2022
Wagner-Lesarten. Bände 1-3.
Herausgegeben von Kai Hinrich Müller, Köln 2019-2022
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-343518