Book Presentation | Palace of Flies
© New Vessel Press
Join New Vessel Press and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York for a panel discussion and musical performance to celebrate the publication of
PALACE OF FLIES (FLIEGENPALAST) by Walter Kappacher
Translated from German by Georg Bauer
On Wednesday, October 12th, 2022 at 7 P.M.
At the Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 East 52nd Street (betw. Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10022
***
PROGRAM
Welcome by Dr. Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York
- Presentation by Professor Michael P. Steinberg (Brown University)
- Presentation by Professor Fatima Naqvi (Yale University)
Musical interlude:
- Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen
Aria from Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss
(libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal)
- Zueignung
Lied by Richard Strauss
Performed by Christoph Stocker (vocals) and Joanne Chew-Ann Chang (piano)
Discussion moderated by Michael Z. Wise, New Vessel Press
Musical interlude:
- Ständchen
- Morgen!
Lieder by Richard Strauss
Performed by Christoph Stocker (vocals) and Joanne Chew-Ann Chang (piano)
Reception to follow
***
About PALACE OF FLIES
This absorbing, sensitive novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child. But in the spa town where he once thrilled to the joys of youth, he now feels unproductive and uninspired, adrift in the modern world born after World War One. Over ten days in 1924 in a ramshackle inn that has been renamed the Grand Hotel, Hofmannsthal fruitlessly attempts to complete a play he’s long been wrestling with. The writer is plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues, imaginary conversations and nostalgic memories of relationships with glittering cultural figures. Palace of Flies conjures up an individual state of distress and disruption at a time of fundamental societal transformation that speaks eloquently to our own age.
Professor Michael P. STEINBERG
Michael P. Steinberg is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. From 2016 to 2018 he served as president of the American Academy in Berlin. At Brown he served as the founding director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities (2005-2015), as Vice Provost for the Arts (2015-16), and on the Academic Priorities Committee in 2019-20. He was member of the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers ad Institutes (CHCI) between 2006 ad 2016 and serves as a board member of Bard College Berlin as well as the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA.
Educated at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he has been a visiting professor at these two schools as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and National Tsing-hua University in Taiwan. He was a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005; a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin in 2003 and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2015-16. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 2009 and 2013 he served as dramaturg on a co-production of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Berlin State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. He is curator of the exhibition “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling” at the German Historical Museum in Berlin (April – September 2022).
© Anette Hornischer
Professor Fatima NAQVI:
Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She works largely on Austrian culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. She has written on victimhood in European culture after 1968; the films of Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and Ruth Beckermann; the representation of the “insulted” landscape in Peter Handke and Wim Wenders; and the interrelationship between architecture and Bildung in Thomas Bernhard’s oeuvre. She is currently working on a monograph about the hospital experience in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
© Fatima Naqvi
Christoph STOCKER:
Christoph Stocker started his artistic and vocal training at the institution of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. The education he received allowed him to perform across the globe – including in the Middle East, South America and Japan – and with some of the most renowned conductors in the world, e.g. Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He performed as a soloist, among others at Carnegie Hall, and as the lead in the opera Erwin das Naturtalent, a cooperation with the Vienna Folk Opera. Furthermore, he appeared in movies in the Massai Mara with Jane Goodall, in Vienna with Elisabeth Orth, and many more. Subsequently, he moved to the U.S. to study acting for film and stage at the renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His most recent works include four short films shot in Los Angeles with directors such as Rayna Campbell, and his upcoming concert at The Green Room 42 in New York created and conducted by Emmy-Award-winning composer Sean Pallatroni.
© Dana Patrick
Joanne Chew-Ann CHANG
Described for her captivating and poetic musical interpretations, 
Malaysian pianist Joanne Chew-Ann Chang has performed internationally in North America, Europe, and Asia.
She has been featured on distinguished platforms including the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series (Chicago), WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase (New York), WFMT’s Fiesta Latin America (Chicago), BFM’s Front Row Podcast (Kuala Lumpur), International Menuhin Music Academy (Switzerland), Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center (Bloomington), Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara), and the National Youth Orchestra of China (Beijing).
Joanne holds a doctorate in Piano Performance and Literature from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, with minors in Music Theory and Arts Administration. A graduate of Florida State University (MM) and Kent State University (BM – summa cum laude), Joanne’s doctoral research document “The Bridge to Modernism: Franz Liszt and the Late Piano Music” (2021) explores the connection of the composer’s late piano works with music of the early 20th century.
© Joanne Chew-Ann Chang
Michael Z. WISE:
Michael Z. Wise is publisher and co-founder of New Vessel Press, an independent publishing house devoted to fiction and narrative nonfiction from around the world. He spent five years living in Vienna as a correspondent for Reuters and The Washington Post.