008 | Wagner’s Death and Resurrection : The Rebirth of the Opera Through the Regietheater (2020)

This book is based on the author Lee Yong-sook's 2018 doctoral thesis in Performing Arts at Seoul National University, "Regietheater Study: "Parsifal," which is based on how he was reborn as a new work through a register. As it was published as a volume of the SeAH Woon Hyung Lee Foundation, the title was changed to "Wagner's Death and Resurrection" to avoid expression of the thesis. Death here means the death of Wagner's work, not the death of Wagner, the nature. This is because the research began with the intention of changing the traditional directing style of Wagner's music drama, which has lost meaning in the era, to increase interest and understanding of Wagner's plays and music to the audience of opera theaters in our time.
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Through various production analyses of Richard Wagner's musical play "Parsifal", the book studies how the Regietheater applied to the opera can overcome the problems of the original opera. In theory, we consider the current status and aesthetic trends of the register, and in content, we analyze how Wagner accepted and interpreted Wolfram von Eschenbach's 13th-century article "Parzival" as a new work, and how the problems were overcome through concrete production cases of modern registers.

The social anti-authoritarian movement, which began in the West in the 1960s, developed a prisoner-centered cultural theory that denied the absolute authority of writers and texts. In addition, the diversity of interpretation of texts made possible was linked to the diversity of production that interpreted and staged the play. In this background, the director-centered play "Register" was naturally spread to the opera field in the 70s because theater directors often also directed opera.

In the field of theater, the concept of a register gradually disappeared, and post-dramas emphasizing performance and media emerged, but due to the complex nature of genre forms, the register is still the norm in the field of opera. Therefore, the book examines the opera's unique registor strategy of dismantling production while preserving musical text, and the method of directing between historical and presentity.