Minou Arjomand
"The Final Trumpet: Opera and the Politics of Redemption"
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Abstract
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My project will explore how redemption is staged in operatic performances in Berlin and St. Petersburg during the interwar period. I will present these stagings of redemption in counterpoint to government-sponsored public spectacles, such as war reenactments, that served to affirm the ideologies of the regimes. In both the Soviet Union and Germany during the turmoil of the 1920s and 30s, multiple factions attempted to exploit Christian narratives and iconography in order to gain support from the urban and rural poor. In Germany and the U.S.S.R., opera was privileged as the art form capable of forging mass consciousness. In both countries, Wagner’s conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk designed to have transformative power over its audience members, as well as his conception of redemption through self-sacrifice becomes a central, politically inflected theme in opera. While the Third Reich’s use of Wagner for propaganda purposes is widely known, the Soviet affinity to Wagner—from Lenin to Sergei Eisenstein—has been less thoroughly explored. The focus on Christian narrative and iconography within the opera house and in public spectacles will address the interactions of the aesthetic and political realms during the rise of totalitarianism in both countries and will also raise broader questions of secularism and modernity.
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