Karol Berger (Stanford): Richard Wagner and the Law

Abstract

Richard Wagner was often on the wrong side of the law. But it is not Wagner's biography that will be my concern here. Rather, I would like to consider the prominent role played by law in one of the composer's central works, the four-evening music-dramatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, for which Wagner wrote the text between 1848 and 1852 and the music between 1853 and 1874.
The allegory of Wagner's Ring is a story of "the twilight of the gods," the end of the old regime that has ruled the world until now, so that it might be replaced by something better. The old regime has locked in a life-and-death struggle two competing powers: the traditional political power of the aristocratic pleasure- and beauty-loving elite of mountain-heights gods led by Wotan, power resting on legal and constitutional arrangements that have been accumulating since the beginning of history and that limit the elite's freedom of action, and the more recent, modern economic power of the capital accumulated by the new financial elite of plutocrats like the subterranean dwarf Alberich who forswears the sensuous beauty and pleasure of love for the sake of single-minded acquisition of wealth, power resting on nothing more than naked economic domination that allows Alberich to enslave and ruthlessly exploit the toiling proletariat of his Nibelung brethren. In my paper I'll explore the intellectual sources of Wagner's diagnosis of the ills plaguing modernity, of his prescription for how these ills might be healed, and of his vision of what might replace the modern order, a vision of a post-political and post-legal world.
Prof. Dr. Karol Berger

Curriculum Vitae

Karol Berger ist Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts am Department of Music der Stanford University. Dort lehrt und forscht er zudem am Department of German Studies sowie am Europe Center des Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Geboren in Polen, lebt er seit 1968 in den Vereinigten Staaten, wo er 1975 in Yale promoviert wurde und seit 1982 in Stanford lehrt. Professor Berger hatte Fellowships des National Endowment for the Humanities, der Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, des American Council of Learned Societies, des Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center sowie des Stanford Humanities Center inne. Von 2005 bis 2006 führte ihn die Robert Lehman-Gastprofessur nach Florenz an das Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti). Von 2011 bis 2012 war er überdies EURIAS Senior Fellow am Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Wien. Karol Berger ist Auswärtiges Mitglied der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Ehrenmitglied der American Musicological Society. Sein Werk Musica Ficta erhielt 1988 den Otto Kinkeldey Award der American Musicological Society und sein Buch Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow wurde 2008 mit dem Marjorie Weston Emerson Award der Mozart Society of America ausgezeichnet. 2011 erhielt Professor Berger zudem den Glarean-Preis für Musikforschung der Schweizerischen Musikforschenden Gesellschaft.

Publikationen (Auswahl)

• Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; paperback 2004).
• A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; paperback 2002; also available in the Oxford Scholarship Online philosophy series). Polish translation: Potega smaku. Teoria sztuki, trans. Anna Tenczynska (Gdansk: slowo/obraz terytoria, 2008).
• Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007; paperback 2008).