In Zukunft anders? Musiktheater zwischen Institution, Digitalität und Künstlerischer Forschung

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Published: 2026-01-16

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Marie-Anne Kohl
Silvia Bier

Abstract

In the winter semester of 2023/24, the lecture series ‘Opera and Co. for the Future!? Music Theatre between Institution, Digitality and Artistic Research’ at the Research Institute for Music Theatre (fimt) at the University of Bayreuth examined questions surrounding the transformation of opera in the present and looked into its possible future.  The series was curated around three thematic areas: institution and space, technologisation and digitality, artistic research and new formats, and gave representatives from academia and practice a platform to express their views.

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Vol. 13 No. 1 (2026): Oper und Co. für die Zukunft!? Musiktheater zwischen Institution, Digitalität und Künstlerischer Forschung

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Author Biographies

Marie-Anne Kohl

Assistant professor of historical musicology with a special focus on mobility, (forced) migration, and cultural transfer, including exile and remigration, at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Previously, she was a research assistant and managing director of the Research Institute for Music Theater at the University of Bayreuth and senior curator of the Berlin art space alpha nova & galerie futura. She wrote her doctoral thesis on vocal performance art as feminist practice in downtown New York, using Meredith Monk as an example. She has worked as an assistant at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Staatstheater Darmstadt, among others. Her strongly interdisciplinary research focuses on music and diversity, music theater, 20th/21st century music, cultural mobility, globalization, and, more recently, exile studies, as well as the intersections between artistic and socially engaged practice. As a musician and curator, she has participated in various world premieres and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations internationally. She is currently developing an understanding of casting shows as glocal music theater in her postdoctoral project.

Silvia Bier

Silvia Bier studied musicology, art history and education in Saarbrücken and Paris. In 2019, she received her doctorate from the University of Bayreuth with a thesis on the synthesis of the arts in early tragédie en musique. Prior to that, she conducted research as part of a DFG project on staging strategies on and off the stage during National Socialism, using Nuremberg as an example, and worked intensively with contemporary witnesses on this topic. Another focus of her work is research into historical dance. Interdisciplinary approaches also characterise her postdoctoral project „Public music history“ on questions of performative practices in historical culture, using the example of music and dance. Since 2013, she has been teaching and researching at the Research Institute for Music Theatre at Thurnau Castle, where she has been managing director since November 2023.

In the 2025/26 academic year, she holds the Chair of Musicology at the University of Bayreuth as substitute professor.