Wagner From Middle Ages to Modernity with Simon Williams

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ARCHIVAL RECORDING OF THIS EVENT: https://youtu.be/m41F2OvlLyY

The WSNC Webinar Series continues with Simon Williams presenting his talk “Wagner from the Middle Ages to Modernity”. In this talk Professor Williams discusses similarities and differences between Wagner’s use of the medieval landscape in Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde. Williams will discuss how in Lohengrin Wagner provides us with the crowning masterpiece of Grand Opera and how, in Tristan und Isolde, Wagner moves in a very different direction which while not entirely abandoning the past points toward the modern theater.

Simon Williams was a Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of Santa Barbara for thirty years. He has taught at universities on four continents, including the University of Regina, of Alberta, Cornell University and, since 1984, UCSB. He has published widely in the fields of European continental theatre, the history of acting, Shakespearean performance, and operatic history. His major publications include German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Greenwood, 1985), Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586-1914 (Cambridge, 1990), Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre (Greenwood, 1994), and Richard Wagner and the Romantic Hero (Cambridge, 2004). He has contributed numerous articles in his fields of specialty in edited volumes and leading periodicals. He is also an active director and reviewer of opera. His current projects include co-editing A History of the German Theatre for Cambridge University Press and studies of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century and European opera in the nineteenth.