Worshipping at the Shrine of Wagner: Fandom, Media and Richard Wagner

Nineteenth-century opera composer Richard Wagner has long inspired passionate responses, with contemporary commentators often noting the cult-like reverence with which lovers approached his operas. In the years since, however, interest in Wagner’s art has not disappeared. In this dissertation, I explore the contours of modern Wagnerism using as my primary case study the Toronto Wagner Society, asking how members incorporate opera into their lives and what Wagner means to them. To do this, I employ a multimethodology of ethnography, an examination of Wagner’s art and rhetoric, and a consideration of the materiality of opera. These findings are analyzed through a dual lens of fan studies and cultural techniques, with which this dissertation makes two principal moves: first, to highlight how fandom of high culture is different in nature, not in kind to fandom of popular culture; second, to propose a networked model of fandom, one which conceptualizes fandom as a dynamic assemblage of audience, media and text. \nChapter 1 opens by asking what is a fan, which I resolve through the introduction of cultural techniques, and subsequently, my networked model of fandom. I also consider how cultural techniques research might expand to include ethnography. Chapter 2 lays out the main findings of my interview. Particularly, I examine how aging intersects with reception, how fans re-enact the distinction between German and Italian opera, and the joy of opera as an explicitly performance art. Chapter 3 tackles the dual description of Wagner as both “work” and “overwhelming.” By taking seriously Theodor Adorno’s criticism, I illustrate how his music and rhetoric exert their agency onto fans. The final chapter studies the materiality of reception. Employing the metaphor of Michel Serres’ parasite, I analyze how the media which host opera shape reception through an examination of the role of the theatre, and by tracking mentions of Wagner in Toronto’s Globe newspaper in the years 1875–1876.

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