Mark Berry (University College London)
„Berlin Alexanderplatz or Das Berliner Requiem? City, (Counter-)Revolution, and Crocodiles in Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring“

Richard Wagner formulated Der Ring des Nibelungen in the white heat of revolutionary Dresden, an active participant turned chronicler and critic. He wrote that he intended ‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense,’ words and ideas inevitably transformed by the decreasing likelihood of another revolutionary outbreak and increasing preoccupation with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The (East) German director Frank Castorf’s postdramatic Ring (2013-17) for the Bayreuth Festival travelled in some respects a similar journey. My principal interest here lies with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, with the apparent moment of revolution – Siegfried’s sword shattering Wotan’s spear of law – and its unexpected outcome and consequences. In Castorf’s alternative historical universe, a Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Mount Rushmore revolves to reveal a late-capitalist Alexanderplatz that plays with our observations and expectations, both historical and contemporary. How does the staging complement and conflict with Wagner’s text, here left, unusually for Castorf, completely intact. How were Wagner, Bayreuth, and opera transformed by Castorf, and vice versa?

Mark Berry is Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and this year a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University. He is the author of Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono, and Arnold Schoenberg, and co-editor with Nicholas Vazsonyi of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’. He regularly reviews opera and concert performances for his blog, ‘Boulezian’, and is currently working on a history of the complete Mozart operas in historical and intellectual context.