Paul du Quenoy (born November 15, 1977) is an American publisher, critic, historian, and philanthropist. He is President and Publisher of Academica Press, an international non-fiction publisher based in Washington, DC, and London. [1]
Paul du Quenoy (born November 15, 1977) is an American publisher, critic, historian, and philanthropist. He is President and Publisher of Academica Press, an international non-fiction publisher based in Washington, DC, and London. [1]
Paul du Quenoy graduated from George Washington University and received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, [2] where he was the last Ph.D. graduate of the Russian History scholar Richard Stites. He has taught at multiple universities and was a Fulbright scholar in Russia. He has received fellowships and other awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the American Historical Association, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan.[ citation needed ]
Paul du Quenoy's first book, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia, was published in 2009. The book attacks Soviet arguments and demonstrates the vital commercial elements in Russian culture, which du Quenoy argues was relatively free before the Revolution of 1917. [3] According to the Modern Language Review Stage Fright offers "a detailed counter-argument to teleological readings of the cultural and political situation in late imperial Russia." [4] The book was commended by Princeton University Russia scholar Caryl Emerson for "its devastating command of the historical record." [5] Professor E. Anthony Swift of the University of Essex described it as an "important new contribution to the field" that "should be read by anyone interested in the relationship of politics and the arts." [6] [7]
Du Quenoy subsequently published Wagner and the French Muse: Music, Society, and Nation in Modern France (2011), an extensively documented narrative of the German composer Richard Wagner's reception in France. [8] Novelist, poet, and Welsh National Opera dramaturg Simon Rees's review in Opera magazine called it a "rattling good read" and "well-written analysis." [9] His third book, Alexander Serov and the Birth of the Russian Modern (2016, rev. 2nd edition 2022) was described by Russian Review as a "new angle" with "views that allow for a reexamination of some of the century's biggest controversies." [10] Music and Letters described it as "ably written, balanced, highly detailed, and documented with care ... As such it outdoes existing Russian efforts." [11] He has also published a volume of selected music criticism. The Royal Opera's chorus director William Spaulding hailed it as "knowledgeable and accessible," adding that "Paul du Quenoy’s brilliant reviews reveal the timelessness of opera’s core values." [12]
Du Quenoy contributes criticism and commentary on art, society, and politics to a variety of publications. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, [13] Newsweek, [14] the New York Post, [15] the Washington Times, [16] the Los Angeles Review of Books, [17] the Washington Examiner, [18] the Spectator, [19] the New Criterion, [20] Musical America, [21] Tablet, [22] City Journal, [23] the American Conservative, [24] The Critic (modern magazine), [25] The European Conservative, [26] New York Classical Review, [27] Al Jazeera, [28] and various academic journals, including the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, International History Review, and Russian Review. [29] [30] His music criticism has included bylines from New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, San Francisco, Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Santa Fe, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Houston, Miami, Palm Beach, Beirut, and the Salzburg, Bayreuth, Verona, and Glimmerglass Festivals. [31] [32] [33] [34]
Since 2013, Paul du Quenoy has served as chairman of the Russian Ball, Washington, D.C., a major social event in the U.S. capital. [35] [36]
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Der Ring des Nibelungen, WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel", structured in three days preceded by a Vorabend. It is often referred to as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.
Parsifal is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail.
Das Rheingold, WWV 86A, is the first of the four music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 22 September 1869, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, on 13 August 1876.
Die Walküre, WWV 86B, is the second of the four music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 26 June 1870, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 14 August 1876.
Bayreuth is a town in northern Bavaria, Germany, on the Red Main river in a valley between the Franconian Jura and the Fichtel Mountains. The town's roots date back to 1194. In the 21st century, it is the capital of Upper Franconia and has a population of 72,148 (2015). It hosts the annual Bayreuth Festival, at which performances of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented.
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of stage works by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Wagner himself conceived and promoted the idea of a special festival to showcase his own works, in particular his monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal.
The Kyiv Opera group was formally established in the summer of 1867, and is the third oldest in Ukraine, after Odesa Opera and Lviv Opera.
Patrice Chéreau was a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor and producer. In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films La Reine Margot and Intimacy, and for his staging of the Jahrhundertring, the centenary Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976. Winner of almost twenty movie awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize and the Golden Berlin Bear, Chéreau served as president of the jury at the 2003 Cannes festival.
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.
Alexander Nikolayevich Serov was a Russian composer and music critic. He is notable as one of the most important music critics in Russia during the 1850s and 1860s and as the most significant Russian composer in the period between Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka and the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky.
Musical nationalism refers to the use of musical ideas or motifs that are identified with a specific country, region, or ethnicity, such as folk tunes and melodies, rhythms, and harmonies inspired by them.
The Bayreuth canon consists of those operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) that have been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. The festival, which is dedicated to the staging of these works, was founded by Wagner in 1876 in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, and has continued under the directorship of his family since his death. Although it was not originally held annually, it has taken place in July and August every year since the 75th anniversary season in 1951. Its venue is the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which was built for the first festival. Attendance at the festival is often thought of as a pilgrimage made by Wagner aficionados.
Virginia Zucchi was an Italian dancer. Her career as a ballerina spanned the years 1864 to 1898, and she was known as "the Divine Zucchi" or even "the Divine Virginia" for her artistry, expressiveness, and virtuosity. Perhaps her most lasting legacy is the celebrated La Esmeralda pas de six, which Marius Petipa created for her to the music of Riccardo Drigo in 1886. She was a guest artist in Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Naples and Rome. She was a force in introducing Italian technique in Russia.
Saratov Conservatory is a music conservatory in Russia.
Irina Andreyevna Papkova, is a scholar of religion and international relations, currently a Research Fellow of Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She is based in Washington, DC and New York.
Regieoper is a form of Regietheater specific to opera. In Regieoper, the stage director assumes a central role in determining the concept of an opera, often exchanging the established traditions related to that opera for an approach that may or may not adhere to the composer's or librettist's original intention. The director's approach may include but is not limited to changing the staging intended by the composer or librettist, modernizing the story to reflect contemporary political controversies, and infusing the production with shock value.
The Children of Rosenthal is a 2005 postmodern opera in two acts by Leonid Desyatnikov to a Russian libretto by Vladimir Sorokin.
This is a select bibliography of post World War II English language books and journal articles about the Revolutionary and Civil War era of Russian (Soviet) history. The sections "General Surveys" and "Biographies" contain books; other sections contain both books and journal articles. Book entries may have references to reviews published in English language academic journals or major newspapers when these could be considered helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter length bibliographies. The External Links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities.
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