Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts in the Department of Music, Stanford University. His most recent book, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (2007; paperback 2008) received the 2008 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award of the Mozart Society of America. An earlier book, A Theory of Art (2000; paperback 2002), appeared recently in a Polish translation.
Leon Botstein is president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts of Bard College. He is the author of Judentum und Modernität (1991) and Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997). He is the editor of The Compleat Brahms (1999) and the Musical Quarterly, as well as the coeditor, with Werner Hanak, of Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870-1938 (2004). The music director of the American and the Jerusalem symphony orchestras, he has recorded works by, among others, Szymanowski, Hartmann, Bruch, Toch, Dohnányi, Bruckner, Chausson, Richard Strauss, Mendelssohn, Popov, Shostakovich, and Liszt for Telarc, CRI, Koch, Arabesque, and New World Records.
David Breckbill holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley and studies music making as preserved on and perceived through recordings. He has contributed to Wagner in Performance (1992), The Wagner Compendium (1992), and the Cambridge Opera Handbook Richard Wagner: “Der fliegende Holländer” (2000). His reviews of recordings have appeared in the BBC Music Magazine, the Wagner Journal, and the ARSC Journal. He has participated in panels and symposia on recording and performance sponsored by the IMS, the AMS, ARSC, CHARM, and Stanford University. In 1996 he was an Edison Fellow at the British Library. Based in Nebraska, he teaches music history at Doane College and is active as a collaborative pianist.
Mary A. Cicora holds a BA in literature from Yale University and an MA and PhD in German literature with a minor in musicology from Cornell University. Her research interest is literature and music, and in particular, Richard Wagner. She has published extensively in the scholarly journals on the interrelationship between Wagner’s works and the German literary tradition as represented by such diverse writers as Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Her numerous book publications deal with such aspects of Wagner’s works as interpretation, influence, and reception.
James Deaville is associate professor of music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa. He has lectured and published on Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Reger, Liszt and his circle in Weimar, music criticism, music and gender, television and film music, and music and race. He is coeditor and cotranslator, with George Fricke, of Wagner in Rehearsal, 1875-1876: The Diaries of Richard Fricke (1998) and is author of the essay “Publishing Paraphrases and Creating Collectors: Friedrich Hofmeister, Franz Liszt, and the Technology of Popularity” in Liszt and His World (2006).
Annegret Fauser is professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications include books on orchestral songs in France (1994), Wagner reception (1999), and Jules Massenet’s opera Esclarmonde (2001). In 2005, she published the monograph Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Currently she is editing the correspondence between Nadia Boulanger and Aaron Copland and writing a monograph on music in the United States during World War II.
Lydia Goehr is professor of philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (essays on Richard Wagner); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (essays on Adorno and Arthur Danto); and coeditor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera.
Thomas S. Grey is professor of music at Stanford University. He is the author of Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (1995), and editor of the Cambridge Opera Handbook Richard Wagner: “Der fliegende Holländer” (2000) and The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (2008). Other publications involve the music of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Eduard Hanslick and the history of musical criticism, opera, and the intersections of music and visual culture in the nineteenth century.
Kenneth Hamilton is a member of the music department of Birmingham University, UK. He has performed worldwide as a concert-pianist, and has published extensively on nineteenth-century music. His latest book is After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (2008).
Steven Huebner is James McGill Professor of Musicology at McGill University. He has written extensively on French and Italian music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including recent essays on the sources of Madama Butterfly, Ravel’s operas, and Beethoven reception at the fin de siècle.
Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer, and translator with a special interest in late-nineteenth-century French fiction. His PhD dissertation investigates the life and work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, and his translations of Huysmans’ writings (Là-Bas, Croquis parisiens) were published in 2001 and 2004. He lives on the Isle of Wight.
Charlotte Mandell has translated over thirty books from the French, including work by Blanchot, Genet, Proust, and Flaubert. Two recent music-related translations are Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy and Listen: A History of Our Ears by Peter Szendy, both published by Fordham University Press. Her most recent translation is The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.
Katherine Syer is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is coeditor, together with William Kinderman, of A Companion to Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ (2005) and author of the volume’s chapter on production history. She is a regular contributor to the Wagner Journal and is currently working on a book on the production history of Wagner’s Ring with a focus on productions of the last thirty years.
Christian Thorau is professor of music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany. His research concerns the intersection of music theory, history of theory, semiotics, aesthetics, and cultural history. His 2003 monograph, Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit, investigates the reception of the Wagnerian “leitmotif” concept as a theory of musical signs and as evidence for the history of listening. In 2008-9 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Raleigh-Durham, NC, with a project entitled “Guided Listening and the Touristic Gaze: The Emergence of ‘Musical Baedekers.’”
David Trippett is completing his PhD dissertation, “Wagner’s Melodies,” at Harvard University, and will shortly take up a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge University. In addition to the music of Wagner, the range of his scholarly interests is reflected by research articles on Franz Liszt in 19th-Century Music, on modernist media and temporality in Journal of Musicology, and on Rudolf Kolisch’s theory of performance in Musiktheorie. He is also a collaborative pianist and conductor; recordings of his playing can be heard at his website, www.davidtrippett.com.
Nicholas Vazsonyi, associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina, has written extensively on issues of German identity and music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book Lukács Reads Goethe (1997) was followed by two edited volumes, Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität 1750-1871 (2000) and Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation (2003). His current book, Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.