Notes to Deconstruction and the Modern Bayreuth Festival

All notes in the main text are linked to this page, but it is easier to create two separate tabs in your browser in order to navigate between the main text and this notes page.   

1. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), letter to Franz Liszt, 8 Sep. 1852, 267–9.

2. See Jonathan Bate, The Royal Shakespeare Company ‘Hamlet’, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York, 2008), 45.

3. Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2002), 8–13, 42–4.

4. Ibid., 73–81.

5. See Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2002).

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1976).

7. Butler, Postmodernism (note 5), 17.

8. See Ulrike Kienzle, entry on ‘Religion’, tr. Holly Wermter, The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge, 2013), 469–79.

9. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image–Music–Text, Roland Barthes, tr. Stephen Heath (New York, 1978), 142–8.

10. Bernard Williams, ‘Richard Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics’, On Opera (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), 77.

11. Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc abc … ’, Glyph, ii (1977), 167ff.

12. See ‘Différance’, Wikipedia online entry.

13. David Summers, ‘Intentions in the History of Art’, New Literary History, xvii/2, Interpretation and Culture (Winter, 1986), 305–21.

14. George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s ‘Ring’ (New York, 1967; repr. of 4th edn, 1923); Edward A. Bortnichak and Paula M. Bortnichak, ‘The New Wagnerian Menagerie: Bayreuth as Social Evolution and Bioethics Laboratory’, The Wagner Journal, vi/2 (2012), 4–16.

15. Robert Donington, Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols: The Music and the Myth (London, 1963); Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, ed. Phillip Freund, (New York, 1914; republished 1964), 3–96; Richard D. Chessick, ‘The “Ring”: Richard Wagner’s Dream of Pre-Oedipal Destruction’, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, xliii/4 (1983), 361–74.

16. Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006).

17. Richard Fricke, Wagner in Rehearsal 1875–1876: The Diaries of Richard Fricke, tr. George Fricke, ed. James Deaville and Evan Baker (Stuyvesant, NY, 1998), 99.

18. Oswald Georg Bauer, Richard Wagner: The Stage Designs and Productions from the Premieres to the Present, tr. Stewart Spencer (New York, 1983), 274–8.

19. Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (note 16), 110.

20. Fricke, Wagner in Rehearsal (note 17); Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring’: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, tr. Robert L. Jacobs (Cambridge, 1983).

21. See Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1869–1883, tr. and ed. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols. (London, 1978–80), 29 April 1878 and associated note on p. 1031. See also 8 May 1877 and associated note on p. 1150.

22. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, tr. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York, 2006), 70; Richard Wagner, ‘Opera and Drama’, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, tr. and ed. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols (London, 1892–9; facsimile repr. 1993–5), ii.  

23. See Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, tr. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York, 2005), 47–50, 74–85; Mary A. Cicora, Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner’s Music–Dramas (Westport, CT, and London, 2000).

24. Mary A. Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor: Romantic Irony, Critical Theory, and Wagner’s ‘Ring’ (Westport, CT, and London, 1998); Cicora, Modern Myths (note 23).

25. See Cicora, Modern Myths (note 23), 4 and passim, and Mythology as Metaphor, 24 and passim. See also entry for ‘Romantic Irony’ in Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3rd edn), online, Oxford University Press, 2014.

26. Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor (note 24).

27. Ibid., 75–6 (and elsewhere); Wagner, ‘Opera and Drama’ (note 22).

28. Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor (note 24), 54–5. 

29. Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York, 1968), 399–403.

30. Bernard Williams, ‘Richard Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics’ (note 10), 81–2.

31. See: Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor (note 24), 110. 

32. Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (note 16), 382.

33. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (note 22), 122.

34. J. Douglas Kneale, ‘Deconstruction: 1. Derrida, de Man, and the Yale Critics’, Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman (Baltimore, MD, 2012), 104–10.

35. Jan Plug, ‘Deconstruction: 2. The 1980s and After’, Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (note 34), 110–16.

36. In support of this point, note the following date and place of birth of Bayreuth directors from 2004 to 2013: C. Schlingensief (1960, Oberhausen, Germany), C. Marthaler (1951, Zurich, Switzerland), T. Dorst (1925, Sonneberg, Germany), K. Wagner (1978, Bayreuth, Germany), S. Herheim (1970, Oslo, Norway; currently based in Germany), H. Neuenfels (1941, Krefeld, Germany), S. Baumgarten (1969, East Berlin, Germany), J. P. Gloger (1981, Hagen, Germany), F. Castorf (1951, East Berlin, Germany).

37. ‘Everyman’s Bayreuth’ designation coined by the authors and first appearing in: Edward A. Bortnichak and Paula M. Bortnichak, ‘Jedermanns Bayreuth’, The Wagner Journal, v/3 (2009), 84–90. It has since been used elsewhere.

38. Götz Friedrich’s immensely important first production for Bayreuth was Tannhäuser in 1972, but we do not include it in this list of deconstruction-based milestone productions because the significance of that production owed more to its overt theatricality in offering an East German Marxist-inspired socio-political perspective for a predominantly western capitalist audience than to its employment, specifically, of deconstructionist techniques.

39. See Bortnichak and Bortnichak, ‘The New Wagnerian Menagerie’ (note 14). Also, reviews of the Bayreuth Holländer and Lohengrin productions by these same authors on this website.

40. Patric Seibert, ‘Oil I, II, III, IV’ and ‘Primordial Depths’, Bayreuther Festspiele: Programmheft, Der Ring des Nibelungen (2013), 40–43, 48–69 (English text).

41. Posthumanism refers to the state of over-reliance on the unrestrained use of technology and science to the point where individual human characteristics and values are altered, as portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s classic novel Brave New World (1932), and in the social critiques of C.S. Lewis and Feodor Dostoyevsky. Many contemporary philosophers and bioethicists view the ‘posthuman’condition as the near-future negative extreme of our current, generally positive, emphasis on life-extending and life-enhancing biotechnology; our interim state is commonly referred to as ‘transhuman’ or transhumanism. For an excellent, comprehensive discussion of these topics, especially the threat that some hypothesise posthumanism will pose to our present social integration and understanding of personhood, see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York, 2002).

42. Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 148.

43. Edward A. Bortnichak and Paula M. Bortnichak, ‘The “Missing Link” in the Evolution of Wagner’s Siegfried’, The Wagner Journal, x/2 (2016), 4–17.

44. See note 41.

45. Patric Seibert, Bayreuther Festspiele: Programmheft, Der Ring des Nibelungen (2015), 73 (English text for direct reference by Seibert).

46. Tash Siddiqui, ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’, The Wagner Journal, viii/3 (2014), 52–9.

47. Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, ‘Kaspar Hauser’, The Wild Child: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, tr. and introduced by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, 1997), 85.

48. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Crocodile (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), 1–42.