Join Chris Stacey and Daniel Balsam for a co-hosted inaugural presentation of the Coda Clash series on Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Richard Wagner did not emerge from a vacuum. He was forged in the fires of a century that remade every certainty Europeans had lived by. From the barricades of Dresden in 1849 to the unification of Germany under Bismarck, from the railway and the telegraph to Darwin and the death of old certainties, the nineteenth century was an age of upheaval on a scale not seen since the Reformation. Opera, too, was ripe for revolution: the bel canto tradition that had dominated European stages for decades was, in Wagner's view, a gorgeous irrelevance — all vocal display and no dramatic truth. This presentation explores the political convulsions, technological transformations, and philosophical ruptures that shaped Wagner's radical vision of what opera could become, and ask why it took a century this turbulent to produce an artist willing to tear the art form down to its foundations and rebuild it as something the world had never seen.

Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Time: 6:30Pm Central, 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific. For those in Europe the time is 12:30AM in London on June 25.

Location: Zoom Video Conference

Cost: Free

Photo Credit:"Victims of the March Revolution in Berlin Lying in State or The Laying-Out of the Fallen March Revolutionaries," 1848, by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), oil on canvas, 45x63 cm. Public Domain.