John Deathridge

John Deathridge a lecturer in music at Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College, is the author of Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’ and a co-author of the New Grove Wagner.

Letter

A Great Deaf Bear

7 January 2021

Gavin Tucker speculates about the subject of Beethoven’s Für Elise (Letters, 4 February). He rightly says that the dedication is not confirmed: it could be ‘für Therese (Malfatti) or für Elisabeth (Röckel)’. But it could also have been für Elise Barensfeld, a notion introduced in the Musical Times in 2014 by the late Rita Steblin. Elise was a 13-year-old prodigy who lived opposite Malfatti...
Letter

Carmina Europae

17 October 1985

SIR: John May’s spirited defence alludes to the deliberate anti-Modernism of Carmina Burana. But the ‘vigorous world’ of Orff’s music is surely less innocent than he thinks it is. When Carmina Burana first appeared in 1937, a year after the success of Orff’s music for the opening of the Berlin Olympic Games, critics spoke of a ‘Bolshevistic levelling’ of musical standards and, more positively,...

‘The bewildering variety of interests and standards in Wagner scholarship (or what passes for it) is congenitally resistant to study.’ Thus John Deathridge, the leading Wagner scholar...

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