Conference Agenda

Situated at the intersection of musicology and Asian-German studies, this panel explores musical entanglements between “Asia” and “Germany” (realizing that both are constructs) through the theme of fairy tale. The children’s literary genre has occupied a significant place in the imagination of the “Volk” and of nationhood. In musicology, we are especially familiar with nineteenth-century German invention and co-optation of the seemingly diminutive stories from Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano or the Brothers Grimm for a grand national project. Yet, fairy tales have often enjoyed a life of their own, traversing national borders and morphing into something else unexpected. In this panel that spans the “long twentieth century” and has a shifting geographical focus, we explore not only the enchanting world of fairy tales in music but also their role in thinking through Asian-German connections. Aiming to move beyond Orientalism in our consideration of the “East” and “West,” we foreground new perspectives, including an emphasis on East Asian creative agency (often erased by a Western conceptualization of the East Asians as “mechanical” and “uncreative”).

Common threads unite this panel’s papers, and Wagner plays a critical role. Located in early twentieth-century Japan, the first paper examines the 1913 Tokyo Imperial Theatre’s staging of Humperdinck’s post-Wagnerian, fairy-tale operaHänsel und Gretel, arguing it to be a sonic articulation in Japan’s otherwise literary fascination with Wagner at the time. Reversing the flow of travel to focus on Germany per se, the second paper considers how Weimar German operatic adaptations reconfigured the nineteenth-century legacy exemplified by Wagner. In seeking to update fairy tales for the modern day, composers also updated their exotic settings and sources, reflecting contemporary understandings of Asia and Africa as modernizing and de-colonizing spaces. Finally, transcending national boundaries with concerns centered on the globally popular genre of anime and the global crisis of climate catastrophe, the third paper explores Studio Ghibli’s use of the Valkyries’ music in Ponyo (2008), which is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Connecting Ponyo and Wagner’s Ring, it seeks a narrative of reconciliation between people and nature via their central female characters.

When late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and Japan were both transforming into modern nation-states and expanding colonial empires (Baranowski 2011; Lee 2009), the Japanese developed a special affinity with the Germans (Cho, Roberts, and Spang 2016). The East Asian islanders became enthralled by two German cultural entities: Wagner’s music dramas (Takenaka 2021; McCorkle 2018) and Grimms’ fairy tales (Koizumi 2019; Murai 2014). While the monumentality of Wagner’s world might first appear jarring next to the diminutiveness of the children’s stories, both instrumentalized the idea of the “Volk” to articulate a vision of German national identity (Roberts 2010; Vazsonyi 2004). I examine Japan’s articulation of that Volk/minzoku-driven nationalist ideology through a Japanese staging of a post-Wagnerian, fairy-tale opera: Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. Taking the 1913 Tokyo Imperial Theatre’s staging of this opera as my case study, I furthermore argue it to be an expression of Japanese creative agency, challenging the received wisdom depicting Meiji- and early Taishō-era Japan as merely imitative in its pursuits of Western modernity.

Indeed, the operatic ventures of the Tokyo Imperial Theatre—opened in 1911 as Japan’s first Western-style theatre—has normally been credited to the Italian ballet master Giovanni Vittorio Rosi, who the theatre had hired to lead its opera department, 1912–1916 (Facius, 2021; Matsumoto 2017). Yet, instead of an instance where Rosi enchanted the Japanese audience with his European expertise, the 1913 translated and abridged version of Hänsel was to a large extent the collective effort of the translator-playwright Shōyō Matsui (Masui 2003); members of the Theatre’s affiliated arts school, which began as the actress Sada Yacco’s Imperial Actress Training School (Ito 2009); and supporters such as industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi and playwright Kaoru Osanai, who promoted the acceptance of actresses on stage (Yamanashi 2012). By studying the theatre programs, production photos, and relevant commentaries in newspapers and magazines, I foreground Japanese involvement in the hitherto Eurocentric history of Japan’s Hänsel. Ultimately, I contend that the 1913 Hänsel represented an occasion on which the Japanese actively assuaged its fervent Wagnerism before they could undertake Wagner’s mammoth-scale works.

Modern art in Weimar Republic Germany was famously self-conscious of its modernity. In opera, composers mixed jazz with atonality to accompany action in film studios and on luxury steamships. Characters drove cars on stage and sang arias in bathtubs about the joys of hot running water. Yet, amongst all these references to the present day and the detached outlook that informed the style label “New Objectivity”, fairy tales experienced a seemingly paradoxical renaissance in avant-garde and radical Leftist artistic circles. Drawing on their pedagogical function and penchant for magical unreality, Weimar artists reconfigured existing fairy tales and penned new ones that served a didactic function for adults, ranging from grotesque distortions of convention that challenged what it meant to be happy, beautiful, or successful, to explicit lessons about political ideology. These modern fairy tales appealed to composers of music theater, who not only shared many of these objectives, but also used irreverent and ironic treatments of fairy tales to distance themselves from the Romantic legacy exemplified by Weber, Wagner, Humperdinck, and Pfitzner.

In this paper, I argue that modernizing the musical fairy tale necessitated a re-evaluation of their frequently exotic settings, and in some cases, foreign source materials. In the 1920s, locations like Persia, India, or China were no longer the mysterious and distant lands that they had been for Germans centuries prior, nor did these rapidly modernizing countries, either independent or with prominent anti-colonial movements, fit nineteenth-century Orientalist tropes of being caught in a perpetually pre-industrial past. Indeed, these qualities made them well-suited for certain goals of the new kind of updated, avant-garde fairy tales being created in the Weimar Republic. My case studies further demonstrate how the treatment of Asian and African sources and locales in these musical fairy tales tracked the development of the New Objectivity from its Expressionist origins after WWI in Paul Hindemith’s Das Nusch-Nuschi, to its celebration of modern life in the heady middle years of the Weimar Republic in Ernst Toch’s Der Fächer, to its political urgency in the Republic’s final years in Kurt Weill’s Die Bürgschaft.

A globally respected art form, Japanese animation (anime) circulates beyond national boundaries and weaves its way into popular culture in other parts of the world, a fact illustrated by Netflix’s recent acquisition of international streaming rights to Studio Ghibli films. Among their numerous collaborations for Studio Ghibli, director Miyazaki Hayao and composer Joe Hisaishi’s Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, or simply, Ponyo) best illustrates the way the European fairy tale The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, along with Wagnerism can be reshaped into a specific Japanese artistic vision.

When I first saw the film, I was struck by a specific moment that included a paraphrase of “Ride of the Valkyries.” Despite the astonishing music and visuals of this scene, Hisaishi scholar Alexandra Roedder concludes that this allusion is merely superficial, given that the movie is inspired by The Little Mermaid and not the Ring Cycle (Roedder 2013). Yet Roedder also admits, “Perhaps Hisaishi’s allusion to Wagner in such a beautiful, happily triumphant scene will re-legitimate ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ as a pro-feminist statement rather than as a symbol of masculine warfaring intimidation” (Roedder 2013). In this paper, I want to press on Roedder’s observations and explore the ways Ponyo meshes the fairy tale with Wagner’s Ring. In particular, I investigate an important connection between Ponyo and the Ring that has hitherto gone overlooked: the role of gender and environmental commentary and their reciprocity.

Wagner’s Ring has commonly been understood as a critique of humans’ exploitation of nature (see Paige 2019, Grey 2017, Grey 2020, Shaw 1898). Many Studio Ghibli pictures, including Ponyo, can similarly be understood as ecological commentaries that condemn the destruction of nature and trace a narrative of reconciliation between humans and the natural world via central female characters. In using Wagner’s music and aesthetics to unite concepts about gender, nature, and Romanticism under an aegis of Japanese nationalism, Ponyo encapsulates a global Wagnerism that flowed from Japan to other parts of the world.