Photo: Publicity photo of Anna Russell, 1965 (Wikimedia Commons).
Dr Jeremy Coleman (Lecturer in Music) will be presenting a research paper at the Annual Meeting 2023 of the American Musicological Society, in Denver, Colorado, 9-12 November. Dr Coleman will be speaking as part of a themed panel on 'Wagnerian Parodies', which he conceived together with co-panellists Dr Adeline Heck and Dr François Delécluse.
The title of Dr Coleman's paper is 'The Function of Parody in Anna Russell's Wagner'. For further details, the abstract of the paper is given below:
English-born comedian, singer, pianist and composer Anna Russell (1911-2006), who described her career as ‘finding the comical in serious music’, is best known for her send-up of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, a routine she performed on five continents from the early 1950s until her ‘farewell’ tour in the mid-1980s. In her unique style, Russell deftly summarised opera’s biggest canonical work, guiding her audience through the mythological intricacies of Wagner’s plot complete with musical excerpts and commentary. The subtitle of her autobiography confirmed her reputation as ‘the Queen of Musical Parody’, and her Wagner routine has even been discussed in scholarly literature as part of a longer history of Wagner parodies and satires. But is it in fact a parody? If so, in what sense? Who, or what, is the object of Russell’s ridicule?
To answer these questions, my paper seeks to go beyond mere analysis of Russell’s script (memorably quotable as it is) to consider her routine as a kind of theatrical performance, the production and reception of which may be pieced together via autobiography, press criticism, fandom and recordings. Among other things, I want to explore the question of ‘camp’ in Russell’s theatrical persona, in particular the role of camp and parody in the discrimination of social hierarchies of taste (serious/comic, elite/popular etc.), while at the same time bringing into dialogue various strands of her reception. Russell’s routine, I suggest, may be regarded less as a parody in any straightforward sense than as an informed piece of music appreciation for a general audience.
