Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:03am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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The Musical Memorialization of Britishness Session Chair: Christina Fuhrmann | |
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British Wagnerism of the 1890s and the Victorian Fin de Siècle University of Pittsburgh In the second half of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813-83) became a renowned figure in England. Wagner visited London in 1839, 1855, and 1877 to perform his operas including Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman with the Philharmonic Society of London; and by the time of the 1880s, the London public was ready to become aficionados of Wagner. Since the foundation of the London Wagner Society in 1873, and since Francis Hueffer published Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future in 1874, Wagner’s music was performed at various venues including the Grosvenor Gallery in the West End of London. He was also acclaimed by artists such as Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), and Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). This paper explores Wagnerism in England of the 1890s to discuss how the cult of Wagner contributed to the advance of the British Fin de Siècle, which refers to the sociocultural milieu at the turn of the century when people shaped their ideas of decay, degeneration, and convalescence. In existing studies of British musical modernism, Wagner’s art has been less discussed because of its foreign origin. However, I argue that Wagnerism was central to the development of the cultural movement of British decadence, by examining works by the two Wagnerites: Wilde and Beardsley, who represent the Victorian Fin de Siècle. To do so, I will investigate Wagner’s music, operatic works, and aesthetic philosophy as represented in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Beardsley’s black-and-white illustrations including Tannhäuser (1891), Siegfried Act II (1892), and The Wagnerites (1894). My paper will conclude that Wagnerism in England built its characteristics of “Britishness” which makes “British Wagnerism” distinguished from the continental Wagnerism. This happens when contemporary British artists employed Wagnerian elements in their works as cryptic symbols suggestive of ideas such as pleasure, sickness, and (aberrant) sexual impulses to challenge the domestic rules in Victorian England. By investigating the significance of Wagnerism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, my paper will reinterpret the cultural history of musical modernism as developed in late-nineteenth-century England. | |