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.