A conversation with musicologist Oleksandra Chebotar, who attended this year’s anniversary festival in Bayreuth thanks to the Kyiv Wagner Society and the Richard Wagner Scholarship Foundation. She is now ready to share her impressions with us.
September 28, 7 pm – VERE MUSIC HUB (Kyiv, 21/8 Malopidvalna St.)
FREE ENTRY.
Every summer, people travel to Bayreuth, Germany, to listen to Wagner – and to argue about what has been done with his operas this time.
Musicologist and radio host Oleksandra Chebotar will share her experience of the Bayreuth Festival: how the festival works, what happened this year, which productions captivated audiences and which raised questions. We’ll talk about special events, directorial choices, and the controversies surrounding AI.
And then we’ll turn the conversation to ourselves.
What can the Bayreuth experience offer Ukrainian music?
How can we make sure that a rediscovered opera doesn’t disappear again after its first production?
How freely can we reinterpret the classics?
And how does an audience emerge that keeps coming back every year – even when it is outraged by what it sees?
There will be plenty of opera excerpts, so we can listen, watch, and argue for ourselves. Among them, we’ll look at excerpts from the historic premiere of Rienzi and talk about why it took Bayreuth 150 years to finally stage it.
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Oleksandra Chebotar is a PhD student at the National Music Academy of Ukraine, researching French Romantic opera.
She has presented her research in Ukraine and abroad, including at conferences of the Croatian Musicological Society (From Private to Public: The Institutionalization of Bourgeois Musical Culture in the 19th Century, 2025) and the University of Cambridge (France: Music, Culture 1789–1918, 2025).
Since 2024, she has been a host of music programmes on Radio Culture. As a music journalist, she has collaborated with The Claquers and Kyiv Daily, and as a writer with the Ukrainian Radio Orchestra and the National Presidential Orchestra. In 2026, she participated in the Fellowship for Mediamakers programme by the Media Development Foundation (Ukraine) and Media in Cooperation and Transition (Germany).
She is a laureate of the Liudmyla Kaverina Award for Young Musicologists (2025) and has twice received the President of Ukraine’s Scholarship for Young Artists (2025, 2026). In August 2026, she received a grant from the Richard Wagner Scholarship Foundation to attend the Bayreuth Festival.