Professor Michael Hackett, School of Theater, Film and Television, University of California Los Angeles

It is impossible to separate Parsifal’s psychological journey from his theatrical and musical one.  Specifically, transformation—musically, dramatically, psychologically, spiritually, geographically—is at the core of Wagner’s great mystical work.  The talk will analyze the complex interconnections amongst various elements of the music and stage action that make this opera one of the greatest works of the 19th century and beyond.  It is the synthesis of these dramatic elements that is characteristic of the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk.

Professor Michael Hackett, Dept of Theater Arts UCLA 

Michael Hackett is a Professor of Theater at the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA and Chair of the Department of Theater. He has directed for the Royal Opera, Covent Garden; the Royal Theatre at The Hague; the Centrum Sztuki Studio and Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw; Santa Fe Short Story Festival; Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl; Los Angeles Opera (children’s series); Musica Angelica; Antaeus Company; Geffen Playhouse; and twelve radio productions for LA Theater Works.

For three years, he taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art where he co-designed and instituted a music-drama program and gave a series of lecture/demonstrations for the Royal College of Music; he has also given workshops for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and conducted Greek chorus workshops and performances from 1995 through 2006 for the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

His directing projects for the Getty Villa include Sophocles’ “Philoktetes” with Henry Goodman for the Getty Villa Theater Lab and his recent staging of the satyr play “The Trackers” also by Sophocles. The collected set of his four radio productions of plays by Oscar Wilde, including “The Importance of Being Earnest” with Charles Busch, was chosen as one of the “Best Audio Books of 2010” by the “Library Journal.”

Familiar to opera audiences in Southern California, he has lectured extensively for the Los Angeles Opera and, for these activities, he was given the 5th Annual Peter Hemmings Award by the Opera League of Los Angeles

He has a BA from Boston College and a Ph.D from Stanford University in Drama and the Humanities.

The Wagner Society is delighted to welcome Professor Hackett back.  When Hackett first visited the Society he gave a talk on the historical Hans Sachs.