Conference Agenda

In the summer of 1904, the American modern dancer Isadora Duncan brought her newly acquired celebrity to a three-month residency at the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, where she was to dance the First Grace in the opening Venusberg scene of Tannhäuser. For many, Duncan’s radical departure from traditional theater ballet, along with her deep reliance on Wagner’s writings for her own theory of dance, seemed to promise the long-awaited reunion of tone, word, and gesture that anchored Richard Wagner’s fabled theory of a Gesamtkunstwerk (unified artwork).

To explain the anticipation Duncan aroused, I connect the muses of dance, music, and poetry, who personify Wagner’s tale of artistic unity in The Art-Work of the Future, to the Three Graces’ dancing role in Tannhäuser. This pairing helps to illuminate the aesthetic and political underpinnings of Wagner’s unified music drama and Duncan’s potential to realize them in the Venusberg scene. Correspondence between Duncan, Cosima Wagner, and Cosima’s Bayreuth administrators; archival records of the 1904 Tannhäuser production in the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung-Bayreuth; and Wagner’s own production notes for Tannhäuser further reveal why the Venusberg scene’s Bacchanale, with its three dancing Graces, was perceived as an exemplary dramatization not only of the unified arts, but also of Wagner’s longing for a politically unified Germany.

How then, do we explain the explosion of German press criticism vilifying Duncan’s contribution to Tannhäuser, which insisted on its failure of unity? Drawing on scholarship in Wagner and dance studies, I argue that the effects of Duncan’s celebrity in Bayreuth, her idiosyncratic dance style and costume, the conservative Bayreuth establishment’s ironic stifling of her choreographic ambitions, and a long-standing critical resistance to her use of German concert music all contributed to this deeply nationalist critique of Duncan from advocates of a unified German Kulturstaat. Backlash against Duncan’s 1904 Bacchanal scene reveals a cherished belief in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—and the Three Graces in particular—as a crucial aesthetic model for a culturally unified and resurgent Germany.

In Rodion Shchedrin’s Anna Karenina, a quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Second String Quartet (1874) stands as the lone area of depth and stability in a score full of shifting sounds. The theme appears in multiple forms - intact, atonal, or fragmented - yet recognizable through its rhythmic motifs. It generates a series of self-derived transformations, and Shchedrin relies on them to trace Anna’s psychological strain resulting from the conflict between the outer world of repressive conventions and her inner world of liberation. This introspection, achieved by borrowing, challenges the main trend in late Soviet music that Alfred Schnittke labeled ‘‘polystylistic,’’ an intentionally opaque term emphasizing the non-integrative citation of themes or styles (Schnittke 1971).

Anna’s complex moral portrait makes Leo Tolstoy’s novel resistant to adaptation despite its melodramatic content: at its core, it is a forbidden love story that ends in suicide. Another reason is Tolstoy’s harsh views on music; he considered ballet and chamber music decadent, trapped in excessive sensual delight and unable to represent self-awareness (Tolstoy 1897). Still, Shchedrin found the means to represent Anna’s path to self-destruction through Tchaikovsky, whose aesthetic outlook stands in tension with Tolstoy’s. Rather than functioning as a mere citation, the quotation becomes a generative musical object whose successive transformations seal the score’s collage structure and give musical form to Anna’s inner division.

This talk analyzes the manifestations of Tchaikovsky’s theme in Shchedrin’s previously unstudied score, treating them as an example of collage technique. Drawing on literary theories of subjectivity (Todorov 1970; Jackson 1981; Genette 1982; Morson 1994), I argue that the theme’s transformations expose Anna’s latent psychological dimensions that, in Tolstoy’s opinion, only literature could do. This introspective rigor problematizes the conventional perception of ‘‘polystylism’’ as the dominant interpretive framework in later Soviet music. Ultimately, this paper proposes that stylistic heterogeneity is produced by transforming a stable musical quotation into new forms of meaning, rather than mere representation, at a time in Soviet music when, as Richard Taruskin put it, “everything mattered, but nothing was possible” (Taruskin 1992).

Sasha Waltz’s version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint John Passion, BWV 245, which premiered on March 22, 2024, in Salzburg, melded props, costumes, visual art, electronic music interpolations, chorus, singers, dancers, and musicians to present her conception of the oratorio as an operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Beginning with nude dancers at sewing machines making white gowns and ending with the dancers and choral singers in white gowns hugging on a bare stage, the clothes assume symbolic meaning throughout the piece. Singers, choral members, and instrumentalists join in gesturing, singing, or musicking on and off stage. Relying on themes drawn from the passion, such as violence, oppression, truth, unity, and hope, Waltz added her own abstract subtext with relevance for contemporary audiences. Even so, the musical interpretation, directed by Leonardo García-Alarcón, is historically informed.

This article offers the first detailed analysis of Waltz’s choreography of Bach’s Saint John Passion. It shows that Waltz joined other artists in the twenty-first century in re-envisioning the Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet while many Postmodern Gesamtkunstwerks juxtapose a multiplicity of art forms, Waltz’s piece also contains an artistic synthesis among the music, dance, and poetry. In addition, Waltz introduces explicit references to visual arts, such as when choreography becomes sculptural or architectural. Waltz thus reconceives of the twenty-first century Gesamtkunstwerk as both multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary. Her approach offers a unique solution to performing Bach that not only considers authorial intent with respect to interpreting the music, but also antihistoricist means of presenting diverse disciplines as one unified body. In the process of comparing this setting to other Saint John Passion stagings and positioning it within a twenty-first century revival of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the article adds to recent scholarship about staged versions of Bach’s passions and to a broader range of scholarship about the recent reception of Bach’s music, choreomusicology, and the Gesamtkunstwerk concept in the twenty-first century.