Paul du Quenoy (born November 15, 1977) is an American publisher, critic, historian, and philanthropist. He is President and CEO of Academica Press, an international non-fiction publisher based in Washington, D.C., and London, [1] and President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, an advocacy organization that promotes civil rights, constitutional liberties, and the exceptionalism of the American experience. [2] [3]
Paul du Quenoy graduated from George Washington University and received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, [4] 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. [5]
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. [6] 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." [7] The book was commended by Princeton University Russia scholar Caryl Emerson for "its devastating command of the historical record." [8] 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." [9] [10]
Paul 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. [11] Novelist, poet, and Welsh National Opera dramaturg Simon Rees's review in Opera magazine called it a "rattling good read" and "well-written analysis." [12] 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." [13] Music and Letters described it as "ably written, balanced, highly detailed, and documented with care ... As such it outdoes existing Russian efforts." [14] 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." [15]
Paul 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, [16] Newsweek , [17] New York Post, [18] The Daily Telegraph , [19] Washington Times, [20] the Los Angeles Review of Books , [21] Washington Examiner , [22] The Spectator , [23] New Criterion , [24] Musical America , [25] Tablet , [26] City Journal , [27] Chronicles (magazine), [28] American Conservative , [29] The Critic , [30] The European Conservative , [31] New York Classical Review, [32] and various academic journals, including the American Historical Review , Journal of Modern History , International History Review , and Russian Review . [33] [34] 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. [35] [36] [37] [38]
Paul du Quenoy has served as chairman of the Russian Ball, Washington, D.C., a major social event in the U.S. capital, since 2013. [39] [40]
To protest the University of Michigan's disciplinary investigation of the composer Bright Sheng for having screened Sir Laurence Olivier's 1965 film version of Shakespeare's Othello, in which Olivier appeared in dark makeup, du Quenoy commissioned Sheng to compose a symphonic overture on the theme of freedom. [41] [42] The disciplinary investigation was subsequently dropped. [43] The commissioned overture, titled "Triumph of Humanity", premiered at the opening concert of the Palm Beach Symphony's 50th anniversary season on November 19, 2023, under the baton of music director Gerard Schwarz. [44] Du Quenoy conducted the Star-Spangled Banner to open the concert. [45]
In 2024, the Crown Council of Ethiopia granted du Quenoy the Victory of Adwa Centenary Medal in recognition of his advocacy and charitable work. The Council's president Prince Ermias Sahle Selassie recognized du Quenoy among "supporters in the international community who give aid to the patriots struggling to restore peace and freedom." [46]
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, 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. The drama was to be presented as a continuously sung narrative, without conventional operatic structures like arias and recitatives. 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 16-hour, 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 epic music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It premiered as a single opera at the National Theatre of 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 epic 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.
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 Bayreuth Circle was a name originally applied by some writers to devotees of Richard Wagner's music who attended and supported the annual Bayreuth Festival in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. As some of these devotees espoused nationalistic German politics, and some of them were supporters of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s onwards, this group of people has been associated by some writers with the rise of Nazism.
The Kyiv Opera group in Ukraine was formally established in the summer of 1867, and is the third oldest opera in Ukraine, after Odesa Opera and Lviv Opera.
Wieland Wagner was a German opera director, and grandson of Richard Wagner. As co-director of the Bayreuth Festival when it re-opened after World War II, he was noted for innovative new stagings of the operas, departing from the naturalistic scenery and lighting of the originals.
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.
Judith is an opera in five acts, composed by Alexander Serov during 1861–1863. Derived from renditions of the story of Judith from the Old Testament Apocrypha, the Russian libretto, though credited to the composer, has a complicated history. The premiere took place in 1863 in Saint Petersburg. This stage debut, supplemented with his next opera Rogneda, made Serov the most important Russian opera composer of the 1860s.
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.
This is a partial discography of Parsifal, an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner.
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.
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.
Warwick Olney Fyfe is an Australian operatic heldenbaritone. Winner of the Helpmann Award for Best Male in an Operatic Feature Role for his performance as Alberich in Opera Australia's 2013 Bi-Centenary Cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the State Theatre in Melbourne. In August 2017 he sang Klingsor in a concert performance of Richard Wagner's Parsifal starring Jonas Kaufmann with Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House.
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.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
