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Wagner’s abundant evocation of fogs and fires in Der Ring des Nibelungen was unprecedented. The water vapor used in 1876 at Bayreuth’s inaugural festival provided Wagner with his most “real” stage ingredient. Additionally, the chapter proposes, steam could mediate between bodies and painted scenery and could both enliven and veil open transformations. Yet while onstage vapors became a visual icon of the Ring, steam also drew attention to tensions within Wagner’s works and theories. Although intended to evoke unspoiled mythic nature, this novel and multisensorial technology generated smells and sounds associated precisely with the industrial modernity that Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was to overcome. Allegorically, steam’s rendering of both fogs and fires anticipated the vanquishing of nature in the Ring by fire, the oldest human technology. Ultimately, its multivalence allowed steam to transcend both scenic realism and the operatic stage to become a cyp her of both modernity and performativityper se.

The prologue tells the story of how Friedrich Nietzsche fled to the resort of Klingenbrunn in the Bohemian Forest and began to write the notes that eventually formed the first part of Human, All too Human. This book marks Nietzsche’s decisive break with his earlier philosophy and with the two figures who exercised the greatest influence on it, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. With the publication of Human, All too Human, Nietzsche declared his independence and cut the cord between him and Schopenhauerian pessimism, as well as all forms of romanticism in one fell swoop. In studying Nietzsche’s reasons for this shift in philosophy, it is necessary to unravel his complicated relationship with Wagner and Schopenhauer in the years leading up to the Bayreuth Festival of 1876.

This chapter cites how the premiere of Grace Bumbry represented a new era in German history which had been a product of hundred years of Black networking and transatlantic activity. Her debut at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre caused a listening public to work out the ties between music, race, and nation. Black classical musicians challenged the deeply entrenched notion in German history that Blackness and Germanness were discrete categories. However, Bumbry was not the first Black singer on stage, as it was Afro-European contralto, Luranah Aldridge. The chapter also tackles the concepts of musical universalism and Black migration. It includes the assumptions, expectations, and desires that white audiences placed on Black bodies across the Atlantic Ocean.