Brown University recently issued the following announcement.
Nearly 140 years after his death, the German composer Richard Wagner’s name is still splashed across newspaper front pages.
In recent weeks, members of the Wagner Group, a Russian network of private security contractors, have been linked to indiscriminate killings of civilians in Ukraine, according to German foreign intelligence. The mercenaries are rumored to have engaged in fighting on the Kremlin’s behalf. And the group’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, is reportedly an avowed neo-Nazi who uses the call sign Wagner in reference to Adolf Hitler’s favorite opera composer.
The Wagner Group’s rise to prominence is reigniting some generations-old questions: Was Richard Wagner anti-Semitic, and would he have been a Nazi sympathizer? If so, is it possible to separate his art from his views?
Those are questions that Michael Steinberg, a professor of history and music at Brown University, has long pondered. Like many scholars of European music, he is one of Wagner’s biggest fans and biggest critics — a tough tightrope to walk in a world where hot takes and 280-character tweets reign supreme. For decades, he has investigated how the most revered musician of the 19th century, and possibly one of the most influential cultural figures of all time, became an idol for racists and an often taboo topic in countries such as Germany and Israel.
Steinberg’s latest project invites the world to ponder those questions alongside him. He recently worked with Berlin’s German Historical Museum to curate “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” an exhibition that explores how Wagner’s emotionally moving music and socially relevant plots and characters fueled a kind of national pride that sometimes bred hatred and resentment of outsiders.
The exhibition, some of which is available to explore online, opened in April and continues through Sept. 11. Following its opening, Steinberg answered questions about his relationship to Wagner’s work, the composer’s responsibility for the atrocities of World War II and more.
Original source can be found here.
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