We are pleased to announce our next meeting:

The Toronto Wagner Society is pleased to invite you to a conversation with Nicholas Vazsonyi. The meeting will take place on Wednesday May 29th at 7:00 pm on Zoom. Following our conversation with Vazsonyi.

Nicholas Vazsonyi was our guest last November. His perspective was so intriguing a follow-on engagement seemed in order.Vazsonyi’s Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand argued that Wagner used techniques that would only become standard many decades later to fashion himself and his approach to composing as a brand.In this presentation, he will use Tristan and Isolde along with Die Meistersinger to demonstrate how Wagner establishes and promotes the Wagner brand in his stage works. Here are two brief examples:

“Tristan und Isolde is thus ultimately about Wagner’s music, about the extraordinary effort to create it in a world hostile to nature and ‘true’ art, but also about Wagner’s music as a media revolution: a demonstration of its immense power to transport and transfigure those who ‘use it as directed.’ Tristan resembles the proverbial vaccine that contains the disease it seeks to thwart.”

“Die Meistersinger is a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of Wagner’s project, which disavows all association with the commercial world, yet employs techniques to defame the competition (to Wagner’s dramas) and highlight itself, all in an effort to create a distinctive brand and induce customer loyalty.”

He will also discuss the evolution of the Wagner Societies as a means of expanding the brand.
A refresher on Professor Vazsonyi: as a Wagnerian, Vazsonyi has authored many articles on German national identity, German literature and culture of the 18th through the 20th centuries, and cultural intersections of music, literature and film. He is the author of several books on these subjects.