The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon
Edited by Cormac Newark and William Weber
Author Information
Cormac Newark is Head of Research at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. He writes mainly on nineteenth-century French and Italian opera and literature, and is the author of Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust. He has published articles in journals including 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.
William Weber is Professor of History, Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach. He has contributed to the Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (OUP, 2011) and is the author of several books, including The Rise of Musical Classics in 18th-Century England (OUP, 1992) and The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms.
Contributors:
Karen Ahlquist teaches in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is the author of Democracy at the opera: Music, theater, and culture in New York City, 1815-60 (a Choice outstanding academic book for 1998) and editor of Chorus and community (2006).
Micaela Baranello is assistant professor of music at the University of Arkansas. Her book-in-progress, The operetta empire, considers musical theater and national identity in Vienna during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Mark Berry is Reader in Music History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written widely on musical and intellectual history from the late seventeenth century to the present day. Coeditor of the forthcoming Cambridge companion to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, he is also the author of Treacherous bonds and laughing fire: Politics and religion in Wagner's Ring and After Wagner: Histories of modernist music drama from Parsifal to Nono.
Michael Burden is Professor of Opera Studies at Oxford University and Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Music; he is also Fellow in Music at New College, where he is Dean. His published research is on the stage music of Henry Purcell, and on aspects of London dance and theater in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
William Gibbons is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. Much of his research focuses on the development of historical operatic canons, focusing in particular on France around 1900.
Jennifer Hall-Witt is an independent scholar and lecturer in history at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She has written essays on opera-going at the King's Theatre and the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden in the nineteenth century and published Fashionable acts: Opera and elite culture in London, 1780- 1880.
Katherine Hambridge is a Lecturer in Musicology at Durham University. She joined the music department in 2016 following a postdoctoral position on the AHRC-funded project "French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era" at the University of Warwick.
Rutger Helmers is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Amsterdam, and has also taught at Radboud University Nijmegen and Utrecht University in recent years. His special interests in nineteenth-century music history include nationalism, Russian music, musicians' mobility, and opera generally.
Karen Henson is Associate Professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, part of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century opera, singers and opera performance, and opera and technology.
Kasper Holten was born in 1973 in Copenhagen and is former Director of Opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He was Artistic Director of the Royal Danish Opera from 2000 to 2011 and led the inauguration of Copenhagen's new opera house. He has directed more than 65 operas, plays, operettas and musicals. He received a knighthood and the medal Ingenio et Arti from HM Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and has received numerous awards for his artistic work. He is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and Vice-President of Opera Europa.
Raymond Knapp, Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, also serves as Academic Associate Dean for the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and Director of UCLA's Center for Musical Humanities. He has authored five books.
John Mangum is the President and Artistic Director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, in Southern California. Previously, Mangum has held several senior artistic planning roles at American orchestras. Most recently, he served as Director of Artistic Planning at the San Francisco Symphony; prior to that, he worked as Artistic Administrator for the New York Philharmonic and as Vice President for Artistic Planning at The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Michel Noiray is Emeritus Researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (CNRS, Paris) and former guest lecturer at the universities of Paris-Sorbonne, Tours and Rouen. He has published on Gluck, opéra comique, music under the French Revolution and Napoleon, the repertory of the Paris Opéra, Burney, Mozart, and eighteenth-century music aesthetics.
Franco Piperno is Professor of Music History in the Faculty of Humanities of "Sapienza" University of Rome and former Dean of that Faculty. His principal research fields are: music at the Italian Renaissance courts; sixteenth-century Italian madrigal; Italian seventeenth-century instrumental music; and the production and consumption of eighteenth-century opera.
Hilary Poriss is Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts, Media and Design and Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. She is author of Changing the score: Arias, prima donnas, and the authority of performance, coeditor with Roberta Marvin of Fashions and legacies of nineteenth-century music, and coeditor with Rachel Cowgill of The arts of the prima donna in the long nineteenth century.
John Rockwell has written about opera his entire career. As a music critic, he first worked for the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. He then went to the New York Times, where he was a classical music critic, reporter, and editor; chief rock critic; European cultural correspondent; editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section; arts columnist; and chief dance critic.
Hugo Shirley is a critic and independent scholar based in Berlin. He was an Early Career Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University and has written opera criticism in the UK for the Daily Telegraph, Spectator and Financial Times, and widely on opera for a variety of additional publications.
Yannick Simon is Professor of Musicology at the University of Rouen. He has studied musical life in France under the Third Republic and in occupied France (1940-1944), focusing on how provincial cities developed opera companies and concerts by orchestras and chamber music ensembles.
Carlotta Sorba is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Europe specializing in the relationship between theater, society and politics. Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Padua (Italy), in 2009 she founded the Centro Interuniversitario di Storia Culturale (CSC), joining scholars from the Universities of Padua, Bologna, Venice, Verona and Pisa.
Patrick Taïeb is University Professor in the department of Musicology of Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier. Having studied at the Conservatoire de la Musique de Paris, he worked on music history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jean Mongrédien and Jean Gribenski at the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne.
Sabine Teulon Lardic studied for her doctorate in musicology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and became professor of music education at the Conservatoire de Nîmes. Helping lead study of musical life in Montpellier, she wrote Inventer le concert public à Montellier: La Sociètè des concerts symphoniques, 1890-1903 (2014, winner of the Prix des Muses).
Jutta Toelle studied musicology and history in Berlin and Venice. In 2005 she received a PhD in musicology at Humboldt University, Berlin, with a dissertation on the Italian opera industry in the nineteenth century. Since 2013 she has been a research associate at the Department of Music at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt.
Benjamin Walton is University Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow, Director of Studies in Music and Dean of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has worked widely on the cultural and global history of music in the first half of the nineteenth century, and particularly on the reception of Italian opera inside and outside Europe.
Kimberly White is a postdoctoral research fellow at Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on the profession of opera singing in nineteenth-century Paris, and interrogates the cultural discourse surrounding performers in various media from the musical press and the sheet music industry to stage works featuring the singer-as-character.
Flora Willson is a Lecturer in the Music Department at King's College London. She previously held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at KCL and a Junior Research Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. Her research broadly concerns the place of opera in nineteenth-century urban history and culture.
