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The 'Germanic Flood': Verdi, Puccini and Wagnerism
When: Thursday 31st May 2012 - 5pm - 6.30pm
Where: Victor Salvi Room, Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place, Cardiff Bay, Cardiff CF10 5AL
Free public lecture about the cultural politics of Italian opera in the later nineteenth century as the mantle passes from the ageing Verdi to the younger Puccini.
Through an (illustrated) historical narrative and a brief theoretical interlude, we will tell a story about the cultural politics of Italian opera in those fraught years of the later nineteenth century, as the mantle passes from the ageing Verdi to the younger Puccini. The time following Italian unification was marked by strong nationalism, but also by calls for a renewal of an exhausted musical culture by an infusion of the new, in this case, the theoretical and musical work of the German Richard Wagner. The elderly Verdi’s ‘late style’ is both a form of resistance and a message to younger Italian composers like Puccini: to innovate and yet remain Italian.
Michael and Linda Hutcheon are not siblings, but a married couple, and both teach at the University of Toronto, though in different faculties. Linda holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and Michael Hutcheon is Professor of Medicine. Linda Hutcheon is the author of nine (solo) books on contemporary culture and theory; Michael Hutcheon has published widely in the fields of medical education as well as lung transplantation. The two have worked collaboratively and across their very different disciplines on the intersection of medical and cultural history, using opera as their vehicle of choice. They have given many lectures and published a number of articles and three books so far: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996); Bodily Charm: Living Opera (2000); Opera: The Art of Dying (2004). They are currently studying creativity and ageing through the late style and later lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera composers.
A limited number of free tickets are available for these events. To secure your place, call WNO on 029 2063 5030 or email marketing@wno.org.uk