Dresden, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saxony since 1806, was intimately connected with Wagner’s childhood and his early professional life as Royal court Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1849. The locale is thus both a key site of early life impressions and the site of the composer’s most critical period of creative development, from the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer up to the first conceptual stages of Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The shared post of Hofkapellmeister involved continual negotiations between a musical-theatrical ancien régime and Wagner’s developing vision of a radical new aesthetic-social order manifested in his own operas, writings and utopian ideals. Wagner’s programming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at key junctures during the later period of his Kapellmeistership and the burning of the ‘old’ (Pöppelmann) court theatre during the May 1849 insurrection are read as symbolic of a key transition in Wagner’s life and artistic career.

Lisa Robertson’s feminist poetics engage with the histories of sexualised domination, and indulge erotic pleasures while committing to ‘return to the sex of my thinking’. Robertson’s poetry seeks to free feminised subjects from the constraints of poetic patriarchy, embodied by Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch and Rousseau. Conflating Lucretius with the Story of O, she proposes a theory of reading as sensual pleasure and domination. But she explicitly rejects the imperial militancy of the Ovidian tradition, and inverts the gendered relations of domination and subjection associated with Petrarchanism in her book The Men. Her poems show how a feminised subject might resist the logic of domination and bondage that inheres in much classical erotic poetry through a ‘soft architecture’ – a term she borrows from Gottfried Semper. Robertson’s aesthetics of precarity (the shack, the blackberry) incorporates feminised embodiment into the patriarchal city (Rome) or the settler one (Vancouver). Through her art-historical and architectural interests in the fold, fashion and textiles, Robertson seeks to translate bondage into ornament, and release the lyric from the constraint of a singular ‘I’ into a more collective and transient impersonality.