Christopher Morris

‘Alienated from his Own Being’: Nietzsche, Bayreuth and the Problem of Identity

A central theme of Nietzsches Wagner criticism is the theatre and acting. Nietzsche professes a deep suspicion of the ‘herd mentality’ promoted by theatre and the shallowness and persuasive power of the actor. Wagner and Bayreuth, he claims, embody these characteristics in their most intense form, compounding the theatres worst features with a thoroughly modern set of blind contradictions. But Nietzsches writings can also embrace theatrical masks and ‘histrionics’, presenting them as the key to a conception of identity as plural, mobile and random. In fact the very form of his writings, with its weave of multiple authorial identities, reinforces this view. This article argues that Nietzsches anti-Wagnerian rhetoric is a mask that conceals more sympathetic attitudes. While repelled by Wagnerian theatre on many levels, Nietzsche also positions Wagner and the experience of music drama as a model for new definitions of identity.

The Mute Stones Sing: Rigoletto Live from Mantua

“At the time and in the place of the action.” This is the tagline of a series of opera broadcasts transmitted live on European television. Each is shot in the locations depicted in the opera, its broadcast staggered so that each act airs at the time of day specified in the libretto. What are the material and performative implications of this overdetermined authenticity of time and place, this mediatized encounter between opera stage and reality TV?

What the conductor saw: Sex, fantasy, and the orchestra in Strauss's feuersnot

Abstract Ernst von Wolzogens libretto for Strausss second opera, Feuersnot, draws on a Flemish folktale in which a magician wreaks revenge on a young woman who has refused his sexual advances. By introducing multiple layers of symbolism and identifying the magician with Strauss himself, Wolzogen transforms the tale into a contemporary parable on sexuality and its role in (masculine) artistic creativity. Strausss music reinforces Wolzogens ideology, most vividly in the sexual encounter between the magician and the young woman that forms the operas denouement. Presented as an orchestral interlude with a darkened stage, this musical “seduction” traces a fantasy of ego reinforcement that ultimately reflects back upon the authorial subject.