Musicologist, translator and lecturer John Deathridge discusses musical threads in the Ring cycle, and offers advice on how to navigate the story. With musical extracts featuring Longborough's Alberich, the internationally celebrated baritone Mark Stone.
This event is part of Between the Ring, our standalone series of exciting events designed to fit around our Ring cycle. You don’t need a ticket to the Ring to book for these events.
John Deathridge is a musician and writer living in Cambridge, where for some years he was a Fellow of King’s College and Lecturer and Reader in Music at the University. In 1996 he was appointed King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London when he began to pursue his teaching of music in wider technical and cultural contexts. He is best known as a Wagner scholar and former broadcaster.
Among other outlets and programmes abroad, he contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library and three television series (The Great Composers, The Genius of Beethoven, Symphony). Among his many scholarly contributions and collaborations is a new Urtext edition of Wagner’s Lohengrin with Klaus Döge casting new light on that still underrated opera. In 2008 his book Wagner Beyond Good and Evil appeared with California Press arguing for a more open and critically informed engagement with Wagner. And in the same spirit he published a new edition and translation of the text of The Ring of the Nibelung with Penguin Classics in 2018. He is currently working on a revisionist appraisal of Beethoven and German music in terms of both historical documentation and contemporary cultural and performance practice.
Mark Stone was born in London and studied Mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, and singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1998 he was awarded the Decca Prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards.
Recent operatic engagements include his first foray into Wagner roles, with acclaimed role debuts as Wotan/Die Walküre for Grimeborn, for which he was nominated for an Offie Award for best performance in an opera, Gunther/Götterdämmerung at the Grand Théâtre de Genève and Alberich/Das Rheingold at Longborough.
Other roles include Wozzeck in Geneva, Ford/Falstaff in Philadelphia, Germont Père/La Traviata in Philadelphia and Longborough, Balstrode/Peter Grimes in Queensland, the King/Lessons in Love and Violence at the Mariinsky Theatre, Protector/Written on Skin in Philadelphia, Mountjoy/Gloriana at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Marcello/La Bohème in Copenhagen and for ENO, Gianni Schicchi in Philadelphia, Don Giovanni for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, New Zealand Opera, ENO and the Toyko Symphony Orchestra, Il Conte/Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera, Hamburg and Tampere, Papageno/Die Zauberflöte for Welsh National Opera, Philadelphia and Valencia and Guglielmo/Così fan tutte in Santa Fe. (Read more)
