In recent years, historians have joined musicologists in seeking to understand music as a dimension of Western cultural, social, and even political life. This panel proposes to build on these cross-disciplinary conversations by exploring the notion of opera as festival from a transatlantic perspective. In part, the participants wish to reflect on the significance of opera in the performing arts festivals that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: most notably the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals, but also such institutions as the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and opera festivals in the United States inspired by European models. How do such festivals situate opera and in relation to what audiences? In addition, the session aims to interrogate the very notion of opera itself as festive genre and specific operas as festive operas. That is, over and above the efforts of formal festivals to create a special environment in which opera is both experienced and consumed, how can the programming of particular operas at particular times create a festive sense? And what might this dynamic suggest about opera’s power to alter or at least suspend normal rhythms of daily (urban) life?

The first paper, by Anthony J. Steinhoff, examines Richard Wagner’s final stage work, Parsifal, perhaps the quintessential festival opera. From 1882 to 1913, the work anchored the Bayreuth Festival. When the Bayreuth Festival was relaunched after World War Two, Wieland Wagner’s bold production of Parsifal figured centrally in the Wagner grandchildren’s efforts to depoliticize the festival and rethink Wagnerian stage practice. But once Parsifal passed into public domain in 1914, theaters elsewhere also sought to honor the spirit of Wagner’s intentions by programming it to help mark major religious feasts and other public holidays.

The panel’s second paper, by Larry Wolff, proposes that we also regard Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten as “festival opera.” Here it is not the association with a particular festival, but rather the work’s considerable artistic demands – a massive orchestra, difficult vocal writing, complicated scene changes – that encouraged theaters to reserve its performance for festive occasions. Analyzing the opera’s inclusion in festival programs in both Austria and the United States sheds light on evolving understandings of “festival opera,” but also opera festivals as a cultural and political practice.

Finally, Emily Richmond Pollock’s paper examines the ways in which festivals at Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne set the template for opera festivals founded in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. In crucial matters such as the geographic and chronological separation of festivals, the orientation to new and rare works, and the relationship to tourism, American festivals drew on the defining characteristics of existing European precedents.