News
06.11.2021
Exhibition Berlin - Richard Wagner and German Feeling
8 April 2022 - 11 September 2022
RICHARD WAGNER AND GERMAN FEELING
Richard Wagner experienced and shaped the 19th century in very different positions - as an effective composer and employed court musician, but also as an author, a revolutionary, an exile, a bankrupt, a protégé of wealthy patrons and a king, a theatre reformer, a festival founder. He was not only a witness to political upheavals and currents, but also registered, took up and (re)shaped the social and emotional sensitivities of his time - as an artist as well as an entrepreneur. In doing so, Wagner shows himself to be an emotional technician who, in an increasingly commercialised world, re-located the social status of art - and of the artist. To this end, he developed strategies in which emotions play a leading role. His ideas of the music drama as a total work of art were always also a critique of modernism. They were thus characterised by the aspiration to change not only the individual, but society as a whole - a desire that can also be found in Karl Marx in a different form and expression. Wagner was an anti-Semite. The extent to which his staging of emotions, his ideas about music and art, his fantasies about oppression and redemption as well as his criticism of modernity were influenced by this anti-Semitism or contributed to anti-Semitism is still disputed today. The exhibition looks at Wagner's productions of concrete feelings and places the history of his conception back into the context of the 19th century.
The exhibition is curated by Michael Steinberg. The scientific co-curator is Katharina J. Schneider.
Opening hours
Pei Building:
Fri-Mi 10am-6pm
Thu 10am-8pm
Zeughaus: closed
24 December closed
RICHARD WAGNER AND GERMAN FEELING
Richard Wagner experienced and shaped the 19th century in very different positions - as an effective composer and employed court musician, but also as an author, a revolutionary, an exile, a bankrupt, a protégé of wealthy patrons and a king, a theatre reformer, a festival founder. He was not only a witness to political upheavals and currents, but also registered, took up and (re)shaped the social and emotional sensitivities of his time - as an artist as well as an entrepreneur. In doing so, Wagner shows himself to be an emotional technician who, in an increasingly commercialised world, re-located the social status of art - and of the artist. To this end, he developed strategies in which emotions play a leading role. His ideas of the music drama as a total work of art were always also a critique of modernism. They were thus characterised by the aspiration to change not only the individual, but society as a whole - a desire that can also be found in Karl Marx in a different form and expression. Wagner was an anti-Semite. The extent to which his staging of emotions, his ideas about music and art, his fantasies about oppression and redemption as well as his criticism of modernity were influenced by this anti-Semitism or contributed to anti-Semitism is still disputed today. The exhibition looks at Wagner's productions of concrete feelings and places the history of his conception back into the context of the 19th century.
The exhibition is curated by Michael Steinberg. The scientific co-curator is Katharina J. Schneider.
Opening hours
Pei Building:
Fri-Mi 10am-6pm
Thu 10am-8pm
Zeughaus: closed
24 December closed