Événements
20. Oct 2019
20. Oct 2019
Oct
20.
2019
Dunedin, New Zealand
Wagner Society New Zealand - Mozart, Ibsen, Wagner and Shaw
Dunedin
Venue: Black-Sale House Lecture Room
cnr. St. David and Leith Streets
Sunday, 20 October at 2.00pm
Don Juan in Hell: Mozart, Ibsen, Wagner, and Shaw
Emeritus Professor of English Chris Ackerley previews his talk to the Dunedin Centre on 20 October
"I recall, from a university lecture long ago: “George Bernard Shaw didn’t really believe in God … there simply wasn’t room in the universe for both of them.”
What Shaw did believe in, after his apprentice years as a theatre and music critic, a would-be boxer and a failed novelist, was what he called the Life Force: an idiosyncratic synthesis of Lamarckian evolution, Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, and Bergson’s élan vital — avant-garde theories that were in their day controversial, and in time discredited.
This philosophy informed Shaw’s advocacy of Ibsen and Wagner, whom he often mentioned together, notably in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), which did much to advance Ibsen as a formative force in Modernist drama; and in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), a commentary on Wagner’s Ring, which he approached as a dramatist to combine valuable musical insights and a genuine appreciation of Wagner’s genius with a curious Marxist allegory of the collapse of capitalism through its internal contradictions.
Opera entered directly into two of Shaw’s own dramas: his first staged play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), an ambitious attempt to translate Das Rheingold into the idiom of Ibsen; and Don Juan in Hell, an independent interlude that forms Act III of Man and Superman (1903), a Shavian afterword to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Neither constitutes Shaw’s best writing, but each is drawn from the pot-pourri of ideas that inform his more celebrated (and opinionated) works.
Venue: Black-Sale House Lecture Room
cnr. St. David and Leith Streets
Sunday, 20 October at 2.00pm
Don Juan in Hell: Mozart, Ibsen, Wagner, and Shaw
Emeritus Professor of English Chris Ackerley previews his talk to the Dunedin Centre on 20 October
"I recall, from a university lecture long ago: “George Bernard Shaw didn’t really believe in God … there simply wasn’t room in the universe for both of them.”
What Shaw did believe in, after his apprentice years as a theatre and music critic, a would-be boxer and a failed novelist, was what he called the Life Force: an idiosyncratic synthesis of Lamarckian evolution, Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, and Bergson’s élan vital — avant-garde theories that were in their day controversial, and in time discredited.
This philosophy informed Shaw’s advocacy of Ibsen and Wagner, whom he often mentioned together, notably in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), which did much to advance Ibsen as a formative force in Modernist drama; and in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), a commentary on Wagner’s Ring, which he approached as a dramatist to combine valuable musical insights and a genuine appreciation of Wagner’s genius with a curious Marxist allegory of the collapse of capitalism through its internal contradictions.
Opera entered directly into two of Shaw’s own dramas: his first staged play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), an ambitious attempt to translate Das Rheingold into the idiom of Ibsen; and Don Juan in Hell, an independent interlude that forms Act III of Man and Superman (1903), a Shavian afterword to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Neither constitutes Shaw’s best writing, but each is drawn from the pot-pourri of ideas that inform his more celebrated (and opinionated) works.