Wagner's Music in Classic Hollywood Cartoons
2023-02-17 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Description:
Scholarship met fun in this delightful evening. Prof. Goldmark opened our eyes to the pervasive presence of Richard Wagner in the popular American culture of the mid 20th Century. Profusely illustrated by clips of hilarious cartoons such as the classic What’s Opera, Doc? which is the source of the immortal lines, “Kill the wabbit” and “Oh Bwunhilde you’re so lovely.”
Prof. Daniel Goldmark, Director of Popular Music Studies, Case Western Reserve University. Prof. Daniel Goldmark works on American popular music, film and cartoon music, the history of the music industry, and popular music in Cleveland. He is the author of Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (California, 2005).

Daniel Goldmark presents the characterization of classical music in the golden age of Hollywood cartoons.

Wagner & German Nationalism with Prof. Michael P. Steinberg
2023-04-17 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Description:
Prof. Michael P. Steinberg of Brown University and co-curator of the recent exhibit in Berlin’s German Historical Museum explained the influence of Wagner on German nationalism in the mid-19th century and its lasting impact on German self-identity. As Prof. Steinberg explained to The New York Times, “You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany. It’s impossible.” The presentation took place at the National Opera Center in New York City, followed by a social hour with refreshments.

“In Germany... every production of Wagner has to take the history of Wagner, the political history of Wagner, the history of German taste into account. There is no way to be innocent about Wagner in Germany.” – Prof. Michael P. Steinberg (Brown University)

Members & guests socialize after the presentation

F. Peter Philips welcomes members and guests to the evening’s presentation

Members & guests socialize after the presentation

Members & guests socialize after the presentation

YouTube Link:

Recent Wagner Productions
2023-09-19 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Description:
Our well-traveled Society members reported on productions of Wagner operas in the U.S. and abroad, including Opera Atlanta’s Das Rheingold, the Bayreuth Festival’s Parsifal, and Ring Cycles in Budapest and Vienna. We also had a presentation by bass-baritone Joseph Parrish, our 2023 Bayreuth stipendiat, and a talk with two young WSNY members about their first Bayreuth experience. After the presentations we hosted a social hour with refreshments.

Social hour at the National Opera Center

Bass-Baritone Joseph Parrish discusses his experience visiting Bayreuth as a WSNY stipendiat

Caroline Couch and Ethan Osman discuss their first visit to the green hill

Bruce Patrick discusses the Augmented Reality implementation for Parsifal

Kevin Salinger discusses Parsifal at Bayreuth

David Shengold discusses the Santa Fe production of Der fliegende Holländer

F. Peter Philips introduces the Recent Wagner Productions program

Barry Millington: A Collision of Like-Minded Souls
2024-01-14 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Barry Millington (editor of The Wagner Journal, author of The Sorcerer of Bayreuth) will join us from England in a pre-recorded talk to discuss his recent research on the relationship among Wagner, painter Edward Burne-Jones, and author George Eliot. These three sensationally gifted late-18th century artists had substantial influence on each other and the age in which they lived. Millington calls it “A Collision of Like-Minded Souls.” This is a members-only, online-only event; members will receive a livestream link automatically via e-mail; no need to pre-register.
About the speaker: Barry Millington is Chief Music Critic for the London Evening Standard and founder/editor of The Wagner Journal. He is the author and editor or co-editor of eight books on Wagner, including Wagner, The Wagner Compendium, The Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion and Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, and also contributed the articles on Wagner and his operas to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. His latest Wagner book, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, was published by Thames & Hudson/OUP in 2012. He was the founder and artistic director of the Hampstead & Highgate Festival (1999–2003), has acted as dramaturgical adviser at international opera houses, and co-founded the ensemble Counterpoise, working with artists such as Sir John Tomlinson and Sir Willard White. He was co-director of Wagner 200, a wide-ranging series of events celebrating the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth in 2013, and is known also as a broadcaster and lecturer. He organises concerts and a music appreciation series in Hampstead Garden Suburb and has belatedly begun to develop a low-profile career locally as a collaborative pianist.

“Long Live America!”: Wagner and the New World
2024-02-28 18:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Scholar Hans Vaget returns to offer thoughts on Wagner’s relationship with America. This lecture offers a condensed English version of Prof. Vaget’s recent book, Richard Wagners Amerika. Eine Ausgrabung (2022). Examining Wagner’s repeatedly stated intention to emigrate to America, and drawing on the privately printed Reminiscences of his American dentist, N.S. Jenkins, we can now reassess the role of America in Wagner’s imagination. Dr. Jenkins was a much sought-after cutting edge dentist who treated Wagner and became a friend. Prof. Vaget highlights the lasting, though largely obscured attachment of the creator of The Ring to the revolutionary heritage of the United States. He shines a light on the prominent role of American dentistry in Europe, and illuminates a little-known but surprisingly revealing aspect of German American cultural relations in the Nineteenth Century.

"The creator of The Ring was driven to deception by the well-founded fear that the legacy he wished to bequeath to the German nation - the annual festival at Bayreuth - was far from being secured. ... [King Ludwig's] generosity regularly needed to be reanimated; if all else should fail, by threats of immigration."

"Even after the idea of immigration had shed its semblance of seriousness, Richard Wagner and Cosima kept talking about America as a dream destination. In the Summer of 1880, still in Naples, Cosima noted on July 12 'America constantly in our conversations.' Two days later: 'and again and again America'. Wagner in an almost giddy mood, fantasizing about a voyage to America 'in order to make his fortune, visions of us all arriving in California in a royal carriage'. This is why Cosima's diary is so delicious: because you get lots of details like that."

Hans Vaget on Wagner & America, February 2024

In-person, followed by a social hour with refreshments, and livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.
About the speaker: Hans Rudolf Vaget, a native of Marienbad (Czechoslovakia), received his academic training at the universities of Munich, Tuebingen, Cardiff (Wales), and Columbia University, New York, where he earned a PhD in German literature. From 1967 to 2004 he taught German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College. He is the author of books on Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Wagner; most recently (2022): Richard Wagners Amerika. Eine Ausgrabung (Excavating Wagner’s America). Associated with the WSNY since the 1980s, he served, from 2005 to 2013, as co-editor of wagnerspectrum, the first independent journal of Wagner Studies; he also contributes regularly to The Wagner Journal and Wagner Notes. He first visited the Bayreuth Festival in 1959 and returned frequently.

Art & Social Transformation
2024-03-07 18:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
New York University Professor Larry Wolff joins us to discuss Wagner’s convictions of “Art and Social Transformation.” Quite beyond Wagner’s revolutionary fervor of 1848-49, he had a deep conviction that art, by its very nature, had the power to clarify, incite, and advance our society.
An in-person talk, followed by a social hour with refreshments, and livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours from the start of the program). WSNY Members will receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to register in advance.
About the speaker: Larry Wolff is the Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University. He received his A.B. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. At NYU he has previously served as Executive Director of the Remarque Institute and as Co-Director of NYU Florence at Villa La Pietra. His newest book is The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy (2023). He is also the author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (2020) and Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (2019), The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (2016), Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (2012), The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010), Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions (1988), and Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna (1988). He writes frequently about opera, publishing essays and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Hudson Review. He has received Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, and Guggenheim fellowships, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Accessibility: The Opera America building has ground-level entry with elevators to the 7th floor. Wheelchair accessible; modular seating will be arranged to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers. Handicap-accessible restrooms are available on the same floor. The venue is located on the west side of 7th Avenue between 28th-29th Streets, closer to 29th Street. Sidewalk curb cuts at the 29th Street corner are uneven; for easier access and tactile paving enter from the 28th Street corner (at the downtown #1 subway station).

Wagner From a Queer Perspective
2024-05-15 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
In recent years, a number of works of interest to queer Wagnerians have been published, including Laurence Dreyfus’s Wagner and the Erotic Impulse and Alex Ross’s Wagnerism. This talk will explore these works as well as topics such as the homosexuality of key people in Wagner’s circle (such as King Ludwig II and Wagner’s son Siegfried), Wagner’s fetishes with respect to satin and perfume, the unorthodox sexual relationships and ethics in Wagner’s life and works, and LGBTQ+ devotees to Wagner’s operas from the 19th century to today.
The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments, and livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members will receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.
About the speaker:
Dr. Patrick S. Cheng is the Visiting Professor of Anglican Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. An Episcopal priest and a lover of Richard Wagner’s works, Dr. Cheng enjoyed attending Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal at Bayreuth this past summer. Dr. Cheng has published three books on queer theology, including Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology. He holds a B.A. from Yale College, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary.

Reports from the 2024 Bayreuth Festival
2024-09-12 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
This annual event provides the unique opportunity for our members to learn some of the events and developments in this year’s Bayreuth Festival. We will offer an illustrated discussion of the new production of Tristan und Isolde starring Andreas Schager and Camilla Nylund; receive a report from a Society member on his first visit to the Festival; hear from the three young artists whom the Society sponsored as part of the Festival’s Scholarship Program; and welcome a special guest, American bass Jordan Shanahan, who sang the role of Klingsor in the Jay Scheib “augmented reality” production of Parsifal.

Atsuko Imamura on the new production of Tristan und Isolde

Conductor Tengku Irfan on his experience as a Bayreuth Scholarship Award Winner

Doru Bercea on his first time at the Festival

Members discuss the Bayreuth experience during social hour

Members discuss the Bayreuth experience during social hour

The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments, and livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members will receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.

A View from the Prompter's Box with Craig Rutenberg
2024-10-31 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
“The prompter is the ultimate safety net for the performance: a helper, part conductor, part assistant stage director, knowing the problem spots with individual singers — an in-the-moment problem solver. Those are just a few of the skills required.” – Craig Rutenberg

"I think the best description I've ever heard of what a prompter does is, we are the safety net. That was Maestro Levine's term for it. And if a conductor or director - more and more nowadays - doesn't see the need for a safety net - they're hanging themselves out to dry pretty badly."

On prompting a chorus: "There are certain, ahem, chorus masters who say: 'Don't bother the chorus.' The chorus comes to me and says, 'Please! We need your cues! Don't care what he says... we need you!' So it's always a delicate balance there. "

Social hour after Mr. Rutenberg's talk

Former Head of Music Staff at the Metropolitan Opera, Craig Rutenberg explains what a prompter does, what preparation prompters undergo in a particular production, and how a good prompter can rescue performers from disaster. He will also discuss the various responsibilities of the music staff at the Met — from rehearsal pianist to diction coach to assistant conductor to prompter.
This informal talk with Mr. Rutenberg will be led by conductor Tyson Deaton and discuss how prompting Wagner is different from, say, Mozart or Puccini; the differences between prompting solo singers as opposed to difficult ensembles such as Die Meistersinger; developing sensitivity to the individual needs of artists; the function of a prompter in the rehearsal room vs. the stage, and physical/technical aspects of positioning; memorable moments while prompting and in rehearsals, and of course what happens when things go wrong – or surprisingly right!

The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments, and livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members will receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.
Program Change: Regrettably Ms. Joan Dornemann is unavailable for her originally scheduled talk. We thank Craig Rutenberg for accepting our invitation to this interview.
About the Speaker: Craig Rutenberg, a native of New Haven, CT, is best known as an accompanist and vocal coach. He is former Head of Music at The Metropolitan Opera and has coached nationally and worldwide for the opera companies in San Francisco, Chicago and Houston as well as at The Paris Opera, Covent Garden and The Glyndebourne Festival. Mr. Rutenberg has appeared in recital and recorded with Thomas Hampson, Ben Heppner, Christine Brewer along with many others. Future plans include coaching at several universities in the USA in addition to visits to China, Sweden, Italy and the Czech Republic.
Accessibility: The Opera America building has ground-level entry with elevators to the 7th floor. Wheelchair accessible; modular seating will be arranged to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers. Handicap-accessible restrooms are available on the same floor. The venue is located on the west side of 7th Avenue between 28th-29th Streets, closer to 29th Street. Sidewalk curb cuts at the 29th Street corner are uneven; for easier access and tactile paving enter from the 28th Street corner (at the downtown #1 subway station).

Anton Bruckner & Richard Wagner
2025-03-20 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Conductor Jakob Lehmann presents an exploration of the fascinating relationship between Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner – a connection that was characterized by one-sided admiration and disappointed hopes. The younger revered the elder, even if the latter did not always fulfill his few promises. For Bruckner, however, Wagner always remained the ‘master of all masters.’ Particular attention will be paid to the myth of Bruckner’s “Wagner symphony” and the facts behind it. Audio examples will show how performance traditions of both composers have changed over the years, from the first recorded performances to today’s interpretations.

Jakob Lehmann on Bruckner & Wagner March 2025

For further reading: Bruckner in Bayreuth from the Anton Bruckner Institut Linz (in German)

Social hour after the evening's lecture

“There is so much mythmaking going on in the 20th century, and especially once the Third Reich started to get their hands and their ideology on Bruckner. There is so much mythmaking that has nothing to do with historical precedent – and still today – that mythmaking is influencing the actual musical interpretations of these pieces. And what I think may not really be clear enough to us is that with many other composers, we have tried to make a clean slate: But in Wagner and Bruckner, that just hasn’t happened yet in the way that it maybe should have happened. And this is something that I’ve personally been very interested in exploring.”
About the speaker: Conductor Jakob Lehmann is the Artistic Director of the chamber orchestra Eroica Berlin, and Associate Artistic Director of New York based Bel canto festival Teatro Nuovo. The week after his appearance with the WSNY he will lead period instrument ensemble Juilliard415 in a performance of Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 2, live at Alice Tully Hall, and streamed on Juilliard.live and WQXR on Saturday, March 29 at 7:30 p.m.
The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments.
Source Material: Mr. Lehmann emphasized the importance of the book Bruckner in Bayreuth, a publication of the Anton Bruckner Institut Linz (2019, Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag Wien – in German).
Livestream: the event will be livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members will receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.
Accessibility: The Opera America building has ground-level entry with elevators to the 7th floor. Wheelchair accessible; modular seating will be arranged to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers. Handicap-accessible restrooms are available on the same floor. The venue is located on the west side of 7th Avenue between 28th-29th Streets, closer to 29th Street. Sidewalk curb cuts at the 29th Street corner are uneven; for easier access and tactile paving enter from the 28th Street corner (at the downtown #1 subway station).

Wagner/Brahms: Music, Culture, and Politics
2026-02-11 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10001, United States
Wagner/Brahms: Music, Culture, and Politics: A comparative study of two paragons of 19th century German romanticism.
This lecture will explore the relationship between two figures who were arguably the most important German composers of the late nineteenth century. Although early on Wagner and Brahms had several positive interactions and even expressed mutual admiration, the two composers became caught up in a broader culture war, pitted against each other by their respective followers. In this conflict, Wagner was often depicted as modern and progressive and Brahms as backward-looking and conservative. But their musical languages, as well as their cultural and political values, suggest the opposite may be the case.
About the speaker: Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 1982. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania and has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, Germany, and China.
Professor Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Schubert to Schoenberg. He has written numerous articles and two books on Brahms, including Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984) and Brahms: the Four Symphonies (1996, 2003). He served as editor of the volume Brahms and His World (1990, 2009) and was the founding president of the American Brahms Society in 1983. He is the co-author, with George S. Bozarth, of the Brahms article in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000). Professor Frisch’s publications on Schoenberg include the book The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (1993) and the edited volume Schoenberg and His World (1999). He also edited and contributed to a volume on Schubert’s music, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (1986). His book German Modernism: Music and the Arts (2005) investigates the relationships between music and its cultural context in Austria and Germany during the period 1880-1915.
The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments.
Livestream: the event will be livestreamed (viewable up to 36 hours after the start of the event). WSNY Members receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to pre-register.
Location: NOTE CHANGE: this event will take place in the Rehearsal Hall on the 7th floor of the National Opera Center, to the left as one enters at reception.

Rienzi: A Critical Introduction
2026-07-21 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | https://wagnersocietyny.org/event/rienzi-a-critical-introduction/
Two Wagner experts will engage in a conversation about his early success, Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen. Topics will include the plot, the source material, reflections on the influences of then-current opera composition, and indications of the innovations to come in Wagner’s next work, Der fliegende Holländer.
John Deathridge’s many publications about Wagner include Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’: a Reappraisal based on a Study of the Sketches and Drafts (Oxford 1977), still the only academic monograph devoted exclusively to the opera. John lives in Cambridge England where he was a Fellow of King’s College and Lecturer (then Reader) at the University from 1983 to 1996, after which he was appointed to the King Edward VII Chair of Music at King’s College London. Now Emeritus after retiring in 2013, he continues to pursue his interest in performance and research. His English translation of Der Ring des Nibelungen was published by Random House as a Penguin Classic in 2018 and his current work includes a fresh look at Beethoven and the Enlightenment. Connections between Beethoven and Rienzi – and the Bayreuth Festival as a whole – will inform part of the discussion.
John J. H. Muller IV is a faculty emeritus of The Juilliard School, where for many years he taught a wide variety of courses in the music history department. From 2010 to 2019, he presented lectures for the Wagner Society of New York at the Bayreuth Festival and for other Wagner Societies in the United States. Prof. Muller has also been a noted speaker for the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the American Psychoanalytic Association. His essay on Parsifal appeared in the book, Wagner Outside the Ring, and a chapter on Tristan und Isolde was included in Opera on the Couch, published in 2022.
Livestream: the event will be livestreamed via Zoom only; no replay available.
WSNY Members receive livestream link automatically by e-mail; no need to purchase.

Parsifal Lecture in Bayreuth: Thomas Launius
2026-08-16 10:30 - 13:00 (Europe/Berlin) | Arvena Kongress Hotel, Eduard-Bayerlin Str. 5a, Bayreuth, 95445, Germany
Join us for a two-part lecture from Dr. Thomas Launius, that includes a short break for a sandwich and soft-drink lunch.
10:30am – 11:30am Part 1 Morning Session: Wagner’s Wolfram

11:30am – 12:00 noon Lunch Break

12:00pm – 1:00pm Part 2 Afternoon Session: You Become What You Reject

Morning Session: Wagner’s Wolfram — How a Medieval Grail Knight Became an Operatic Myth

Richard Wagner didn’t simply adapt Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival — he dismantled it and rebuilt it according to a completely different logic. In this opening session, mythologist and storyteller Dr. Thomas Launius applies the tools of the Historical-Critical Method to Wagner’s 1877 libretto, tracing the specific decisions Wagner made in transforming characters, compressing settings, and fundamentally reconceiving the Grail itself. What emerges is not just a source comparison, but a portrait of a composer working as a mythmaker — selectively suppressing, amplifying, and reinventing his medieval inheritance to produce something that exceeds its sources in every direction. Listeners familiar with the opera will find the work defamiliarized in productive ways; those new to the medieval tradition will discover that Wagner’s Parsifal is, among other things, a brilliant act of creative concealment.

Afternoon Session: You Become What You Reject — How Wagner Built the Structure and Brought the Fire

Having dismantled Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval epic, Wagner faced a formidable challenge: what he had left lacked structure and momentum. In this afternoon session, Dr. Thomas Launius uses the Historical-Critical Method to reveal how Wagner reached into the deep riches of the European fairy tale tradition. Drawing on ancient narrative patterns, Wagner found the structural spine and the energetic engine his opera required. The result is a work of extraordinary compositional intelligence — one in which a single bewitched figure connects every character in the drama, and a single moral test is deployed four times with escalating intensity, each more demanding than the last. And a delicious irony is revealed: in the very act of rejecting Wolfram, Wagner became more like Wolfram than Wolfram himself ever could have been.

Thomas Launius was born into a military family and spent his early years living in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States. He came of age in Louisiana, earning a degree in Physics from Louisiana State University alongside a minor in Vocal Performance. Trained as a tenor, he sang in university and regional opera productions for five years before turning to the academic study of story, symbol, and myth. He later earned a doctorate in Mythology and spent over three decades as a professional storyteller, speaker, and mentor working at the intersection of narrative, meaning, and human transformation.

In 2017, Thomas fulfilled a lifelong dream by relocating to Bavaria, not far from Munich. Since 2019, he has worked as a professional tour guide specialising in historically rich and mythologically resonant experiences throughout Munich, Salzburg, and especially Neuschwanstein Castle — the fairytale fortress built by King Ludwig II as a living tribute to Richard Wagner and his operas.

His encounter with Wagner through Neuschwanstein opened into a sustained scholarly engagement with Wagner’s work, and particularly with Parsifal. Applying the Historical-Critical Method — the rigorous interpretive framework developed by German biblical scholars and since extended across literary and cultural analysis — Thomas brings source criticism, redaction criticism, and social-historical analysis to bear on Wagner’s libretto, situating the opera within the full depth of its medieval sources, its 19th-century intellectual context, and its ongoing challenge to 21st-century audiences. His work draws on the mythological scholarship of Paul Ricoeur, Max Lüthi, and Joachim Kaiser, among others, and is animated by the conviction that genuine critical understanding deepens rather than diminishes our encounter with great art.
Thomas is a member of the Munich Wagner Society — the München Wagner Verband, the second oldest Wagner Society in the world — and lectures to Wagner Societies internationally.

This in-person-only event will take place at the Arvena Kongress Hotel in Bayreuth, Germany.
Tickets are $25 in advance online. A sandwich and soft-drink lunch is included. Pre-registration is required, and ends on August 13.
