Trinity Hall Forum: Wagner's Shakespeare

Monday 28th October 2013, 6.15pm

Trinity Hall Lecture Theatre

Free admission but booking essential

 

By Dr Patrick Carnegy (Trinity Hall 1960), Author of Wagner and the Art of the Theatre

Further details to follow.

To book or for more information contact Mary Richmond on 01223332555 or events@trinhall.cam.ac.uk

Abstract:

Throughout his life Wagner was a passionately knowledgeable Shakespearean.  As a 15-year-old he concocted Leubald und Adelaïde, a corpse-strewn tragedy modelled on Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.  His rarely performed second opera Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love) is modelled on Measure for Measure.  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg  is indebted to Wagner's experience of Ludwig Tieck's famous 1844 Berlin production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Wagner saw himself  as the apotheosis of Bach and Beethoven, and of the dramatic legacy of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Goethe.  Of these seminal influences, only Shakespeare has escaped significant attention.

Patrick Carnegy believes that at the bicentenary of Wagner's birth (1813) it is time to make amends.  He will argue that Shakespeare crucially shaped Wagner's ideas for theatrical reform, his conception of music-drama, and his ideas about how it should be performed.  Dr Carnegy will describe how in East and West Germany in the 1960s productions of Die Meistersinger reasserted Wagner's Shakespearean ancestry and thereby helped exorcise the ghosts of Nazi appropriation.  To understand that ancestry is to open up a new perspective on Wagner, and on the performance, enjoyment and study of his works.

A graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Patrick Carnegy's books include Faust as Musician (1973), a highly regarded study of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus.  His Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (2006) won a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and in the USA a George Freedley Memorial Award for its 'outstanding contribution to the history of the theatre'.  In 1988 Dr Carnegy was appointed by Sir Jeremy Isaacs as the first ever Dramaturg at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.  Since 1998 he has been Stratford theatre critic for The Spectator.