“After the End: Wagner and the Apocalyptic Imagination”

Participants:  David Castillo (RLL), Jonathan Golove (Music), Sean Graney (WBFO-Silvers Visiting Professor), Shane Thorn (Theatre & Dance)

Moderator: Jacob Gallagher-Ross (Theatre & Dance)

In Wagner’s Ring cycle, the end of the world foretells a new beginning. The brief interval of human civilization is merely the prelude to the Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, which brings with it interminable war, a burning world, a cleansing flood—and, just possibly, rebirth. In other words, Wagner’s fantasy looks very much like our present reality. WBFO-Silvers Visiting Professor Sean Graney’s new play A Ring Never Ends—which receives a world premiere production at UB this spring—begins where Wagner ends. Humanity huddles in the ashes of a ruined world that once resembled our own. Graney’s play asks: How do we rebuild after the end? How do we begin again?

This interdisciplinary conversation will bring together scholars of music, literature, and theater—along with Graney himself—to consider these questions. What does Wagner’s work have to say to us now? How can we picture the end afresh?