Alumni are invited to join the German Cambridge Society for a lecture on Richard Wagner, Lohengrin by Katharina Duda (dramaturge at the Cottbus State Theater)

Richard Wagner's Schopenhauer reading is well known from research on “Tristan”. In fact, the well-read composer was familiar with the philosophical discourses of his time from his youth. Partly in close reading, partly in productive misunderstandings, he processed figurations of romantic philosophy and literature, especially in his “romantic operas”: “Die Feen”, “The Flying Dutchman”, “Tannhauser” and “Lohengrin”. This talk focuses on the last of these three works. The utopian world of ideas that Wagner outlines around the appearance of the Knight of the Grail Lohengrin can be understood as a continuation of aesthetic, epistemological and political theories of German Romanticism. Wagner's vision of the Grail appears in this light as a philosophically inspired, revolutionary idea of a renewal of society and man through the medium of (musical and dramatic) art.