Gundula Kreuzer
· Prof and Chair Music Dept (on leave Fall 2025)Yale University · Department of Music
Active 2001–2025
About
Gundula Kreuzer is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Music at Yale University, where she is on leave for Fall 2025. She studied musicology, philosophy, and modern history at the Universities of Münster and Oxford, earning her Master of Studies and D.Phil. in musicology. She joined Yale's Department of Music in 2005 after holding a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Kreuzer approaches music from interdisciplinary perspectives, including social, cultural, political history, and theories of technology and multimedia. Her research focuses on the history and theory of opera, with particular emphasis on staging, technology, and mediality, as well as contemporary experimental opera and opera in postwar memory cultures. She has authored award-winning monographs such as 'Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich' and 'Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera,' which examine the cultural and technological aspects of opera and their influence on national identity and staging practices. Kreuzer has contributed significantly to music historiography, media archaeology, and reception studies, and her work explores the intersections of music, politics, and cultural history since 1800, especially in German and European contexts. She is actively engaged in fostering dialogue about opera through conferences and working groups, and she has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, including election to the Academia Europaea in 2022.
Research topics
- Biology
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Literature
- Art
- Fishery
- History
- Anthropology
- Aesthetics
- Law
- Art history
Selected publications
Cyborg-Bayreuth: Ideologie und Potenzial historischer Bühnentechnik bei Richard Wagner
2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks · 2025-06-10
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2025-07-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2024
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Biology
Since the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, Wagner has been widely considered an innovator of the illusionist stage who foreshadowed twentieth- and twenty-first-century immersive multimedia. Yet a sole focus on his stage-technological achievements glosses over many revealing ironies. Not only was Wagner deeply ambivalent about technological progress; but he conceived of his Gesamtkunstwerk as an aid to overcome what he perceived as the socio-culturally alienating effects of industrialisation. This chapter illuminates Wagner's ultimately fraught strategy, in both theory and practice, to advance and simultaneously conceal his stage machinery. Although pushed to new extremes, Bayreuth's stage-technical solutions for the particularly challenging Ring cycle were firmly based on contemporary practices; moreover, they fell far behind Wagner's idealist visions. In the end, the inevitable technologisation of Wagner's stage presented a critical predicament in his aspiration to outdo both opera and the machine.
Flat Bayreuth: A Genealogy of Opera as Screened
2021-02-16
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingGundula Kreuzer challenges common assumptions about the ‘screenification’ of contemporary opera productions by reconsidering historical screening techniques within staged opera. Beginning with the Baroque picture-frame stage, she highlights how a desire for visual illusion on stage came into conflict with the increasingly complicated array of equipment, scenery, and props required to produce such elaborate scenes. Retracing strategies tested out at Wagner’s Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, she argues that the theatre’s curtain line came to imply an invisible screen with the capacity to organize the various media on the deep stage into a unified whole, a perception fostered by the visual and acoustic environment of the auditorium. Rather than a part of the telos of modernist painting, she highlights this flattened planar format as the outcome of technical and aesthetic conflict, whose legacy proves highly relevant to contemporary experiments with operatic staging.
Butterflies on Sweet Land? Reflections on Opera at the Edges of History
Representations · 2021 · 23 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- History
Taking inspiration from Kalle Pihlainen’s philosophy of historical representation, this essay explores some of the ways in which operatic performance can harness the ambiguity between the genre’s historicist and presentist implications to mobilize not just the difference of the past from the present but also their connection. The essay focuses on two recent examples—Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (New York, 2017) and The Industry’s Sweet Land (Los Angeles, 2020)—whose unconventional presentations critically engage such temporal complexity. Moving beyond the proscenium and crucially involving the music in their directorial visions, both couch history’s grip on the present in terms of the consequences of past actions. By self-staging their differences from mainstream opera-house productions, moreover, both explore whether opera can still aspire to sociopolitical relevance today. Though Butterfly tackles a controversial repertory staple, while the immersive and site-specific Sweet Land enlists the operatic genre itself to probe various modes of historical imagination, both expose continuities of historical racism in contemporary US culture. Their blurring of lines between past and present prevents audiences from confining racist positions to the operas’ allegedly historical plots: instead of presenting past alterity, the productions reveal transhistorical semblance. Opera thus becomes a medium for performing the multidimensionality and open-endedness of history.
Nineteenth-Century Music Review · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Art
- Art history
- Literature
Richard Wagner, Das Liebesverbot Christopher Maltman, bar, Peter Lodahl, ten, Ilker Arcayürek, ten, David Alegret, ten, David Jerusalem, bass, Manuela Uhl, sop, María Miró, sop, Ante Jerkunica, bass, Isaac Galán, bar, María Hinojosa, sop, Francisco Vas, ten Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real, Madrid, Ivor Bolton, cond. Kasper Holten, stage director Opus Arte 1191, 2017 (1 DVD: 160 minutes), $32.50 - Volume 19 Issue 1
Operatic Configurations in the Digital Age
The Opera Quarterly · 2019-01-01 · 4 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingLet me start with a seeming paradox. Beginning in December 2006, the rise of “Live in HD” broadcasts from New York’s Metropolitan Opera (and, soon thereafter, other major houses) has made some commentators worry, once again, about the survival of opera. As New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini paradigmatically argued in 2013, broadcasts into the cinema offer a fundamentally different experience from prior forms of operatic remediation because of the former’s combination of audiovisual immersion and communal—even live—viewing. Thus, Tommasini feared, not only might HD broadcasts lure audiences away from the opera house, but they also blur a sense of “what the real thing is.”1 The cinema is cast as opera’s angel of death. Ironically, a number of film scholars have simultaneously raised concerns about the future of the cinema itself, which they see endangered by the recent proliferation of digital technologies.2 Partly in response, Francesco Casetti in 2015 (re)defined cinema by focusing not on its enabling technologies but on the experience it affords—an experience constituted by three fundamental aspects: an enclosed environment, the onscreen creation of a world, and “an audience immersed in viewing.”3 In his analysis, this cinematic experience has now “relocated” to new devices and situations, summarily marked by a loss of darkness. Hence Casetti’s verdict: “No longer capable of aiding the other arts, it is now cinema that is in need of assistance.”4 This diagnosis could make us ponder whether HD opera broadcasts perhaps promote cinema more than they do opera; whether the novel content and added boon of a live event, simulcast (by now) in over seventy countries, lend assistance and cultural cachet to an ailing technical medium.5 But I want to emphasize instead Casetti’s own rescue operation—his call to adjust our idea of the cinema: it lives on, he holds, in multiple medial configurations, and it reveals its essence precisely through these new relocations. Such a conceptual sleight of hand is elegant; but it would surely not appease Tommasini, concerned as he is with the embodied live performance that the cinema has arguably always been missing (at least since the rise of sound film).
9. Flat Bayreuth: A Genealogy of Opera as Screened
Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingGundula Kreuzer challenges common assumptions about the 'screenification' of contemporary opera productions by reconsidering historical screening techniques within staged opera. Beginning with the Baroque picture-frame stage, she highlights how a desire for visual illusion on stage came into conflict with the increasingly complicated array of equipment, scenery, and props required to produce such elaborate scenes. Retracing strategies tested out at Wagner's Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, she argues that the theatre's curtain line came to imply an invisible screen with the capacity to organize the various media on the deep stage into a unified whole, a perception fostered by the visual and acoustic environment of the auditorium. Rather than a part of the telos of modernist painting, she highlights this flattened planar format as the outcome of technical and aesthetic conflict, whose legacy proves highly relevant to contemporary experiments with operatic staging.
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 17 shared
Rüdiger Campe
Freie Universität Berlin
- 17 shared
Francesco Casetti
- 16 shared
Francesco Campe
University of Minnesota System
- 16 shared
Beatriz Colomina
Princeton University
- 16 shared
Craig Buckley
- 16 shared
Rüdiger
University of Iowa
- 16 shared
Martha Mohr
University of Iowa
- 16 shared
Thomas M. Donnelly
Cappagh National Orthopaedic Hospital
Awards & honors
- Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society (…
- Gaddis Smith International Book Prize of the MacMillan Cente…
- Martin Chusid Award for Verdi Studies (2013)
- Paul A. Pisk Prize of the American Musicological Society (20…
- Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society…
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