Peter Geoffrey Barry Hicks | |
---|---|
Born | Wallsend-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England | 1 February 1964
Occupation | Historian at the Fondation Napoleon; church musician |
Language | English, French, Italian |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater |
Peter Geoffrey Barry Hicks (born 1 February 1964) is a British historian and church musician.
Born in Wallsend-upon-Tyne, then in Northumberland, Hicks is the son of Anglican priest Richard Barry Hicks and schoolteacher Jennifer Margaret Eames. After completing a degree in classics at University College London from 1982 to 1985 and a year of study at Sapienza University of Rome's Istituto di Paleografia, he studied for a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. Hicks was a lettore (language assistant) at the University of Pavia in 1990-1991 whilst being St John's exchange student at Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia, and began working as a historian for the Foundation Napoleon in 1997. He was appointed Visiting Research Fellow (a post held from 1997 to 2007), and he became a visiting professor at the University of Bath in 2007. In 2006, Hicks was appointed an honorary fellow at Florida State University's Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution. He was appointed to the editorial board of St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture in 2011, and was invited to become director of the Massena Society in 2013. [1] In 2008, Hicks was appointed by the Provincia di Alessandria to the advisory committee for the creation of the Marengo Museum in Alessandria, Italy. [2] He is on the editorial boards of the international journals Albertiana and Napoleonica La Revue. [3]
Hicks was organist and choirmaster at the Anglican church in Riding Mill, Northumberland in 1981-1982, and directed the choir of the Anglican church in Milan until 1991. He moved to France that year, becoming director of music at St George’s Anglican Church in Paris, and pursued a career as a singer and choir director. [4] He is the music director of the Paris choir Musicanti. [5]
Peter Hicks received a bachelor's degree from London University in 1985. During the 1985-1986 academic year, he completed a Greek paleography course at the University of Rome's La Sapienza. Hicks received a doctoral degree, on the manuscript tradition of Greek bucolic poems during the Renaissance, at Cambridge University's St. John's College in 1993.
Hicks was nominated for the 2007 RIBA International Book Award for Architecture, and received the 2008 Luciano Bonaparte, Principe di Canino Prize for a book in a language other than Italian from the town of Canino for Clisson et Eugénie.
Hicks is a member of the editorial board for the Fondation Napoléon's e-periodical, Napoleonica La Revue, [6] and the historical committee for publication of the complete correspondence of Napoleon I, Editions Fayard/Fondation Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte, Correspondance générale, vols. 1-7.
Hicks has been the music director at St George’s Anglican Church in Paris and of the Musicanti choir, and he has also been an orchestral conductor. He has conducted Hector Berlioz' arrangement of "La Marseillaise", Brahms' Requiem, Britten's Cantata St Nicholas, Charpentier's Te Deum, Nisi Dominus, Cherubini, Coronation Mass for Louis XVIII, Handel's Messiah, Israel in Egypt, The Ways of Zion do Mourn, Utrecht Te Deum, Utrecht Jubilate, Lesueur's Cantata for the Marriage of Napoleon I and Marie-Louise, Marche du Sacre de Napolon I, Méhul's "Le Chant du depart", "O doux printemps" and "Comblé de bonheur" (cantatas for the marriage of Napoleon I and Marie Louise), Mozart's Credo Mass and Solemn Vespers of a Confessor, Paisiello's Coronation Mass for Napoleon I, Purcell's King Arthur and Rossini's Petite messe solennelle.
On the piano, he performed "Soirée Bonapartiste" in Lucca on 25 August 2008; in Canino in September 2008; in Sarzana in September 2009 and September 2011; in Châteauroux in November 2011; in Saint Petersburg in November 2012; in Rome in October 2013; in Longwood House and Jamestown, Saint Helena in October 2015; in Chicago in October 2016, and in Alençon (January 2017), La Roche-sur-Yon (March), the Château de Malmaison (April) and the Rueil Malmaison in Jubilé in September 2017.
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the nature of those identified now as polymaths. He is considered the founder of Western cryptography, a claim he shares with Johannes Trithemius.
Lucien Bonaparte, 1st Prince of Canino and Musignano, was a French politician and diplomat of the French Revolution and the Consulate. He served as Minister of the Interior from 1799 to 1800 and as the president of the Council of Five Hundred in 1799.
Charles Batteux was a French philosopher and writer on aesthetics.
The Constitution of the Year VIII was a national constitution of France, adopted on 24 December 1799, which established the form of government known as the Consulate. The coup of 18 Brumaire had effectively given all power to Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the eyes of some, ended the French Revolution.
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva.
The Tuscan order is one of the two classical orders developed by the Romans, the other being the composite order. It is influenced by the Doric order, but with un-fluted columns and a simpler entablature with no triglyphs or guttae. While relatively simple columns with round capitals had been part of the vernacular architecture of Italy and much of Europe since at least Etruscan architecture, the Romans did not consider this style to be a distinct architectural order. Its classification as a separate formal order is first mentioned in Isidore of Seville's 6th-century Etymologiae and refined during the Italian Renaissance.
Princess Marie Bonaparte, known as Princess George of Greece and Denmark upon her marriage, was a French author and psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany.
Giovanni Battista Caprara Montecuccoli was an Italian statesman and cardinal and archbishop of Milan from 1802 to 1810. As a papal diplomat he served in the embassies in Cologne, Lausanne, and Vienna. As Legate of Pius VII in France, he implemented the Concordat of 1801, and negotiated with the Emperor Napoleon over the matter of appointments to the restored hierarchy in France. He crowned Napoleon as King of Italy in Milan in 1805.
Mirabilia Urbis Romae is a grouping of hundreds of manuscripts, incunabula, and books in Latin and modern European languages that describe notable built works and historic monuments in the city of Rome. Most of these texts were intended as guidebooks to the city for pilgrims and visitors. Before the fourteenth century, however, the core text seems instead to have served as a census of the built patrimony of the city, the decus Urbis. This inheritance represented the strength of Rome and the power of the institutions that controlled it.
Vaughan Hart is a leading architectural historian, and Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath. He served as head of department between 2008 and 2010.
Roland Napoléon Bonaparte, 6th Prince of Canino and Musignano was a French prince and president of the Société de Géographie from 1910 until his death. He was the last male-lineage descendant of Lucien Bonaparte, the genetically senior branch of the family since 1844.
Gilbert Martineau was a French naval officer, author of books on Napoleon and his family, honorary consul, and curator 1956-1987 of the French properties on St Helena, where Napoleon had been in exile.
The Fondation Napoléon was registered as a French non-profit organization on 12 November 1987. The foundation aims to encourage and support study and interest in the history of the First and Second French Empires, and to support the preservation of Napoleonic Heritage.
Robert Tavernor is an English Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and founding director of the Tavernor Consultancy in London. He is an architecture historian and urbanist, who has published widely on architecture and urban design, including the impact of tall buildings on historic cities. His academic career includes being appointed to the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh at age 36.
Clisson et Eugénie, also known in English as Clisson and Eugénie, is a romantic novella, written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, and it is widely acknowledged as being a fictionalised account of the doomed romance of a soldier and his lover, which paralleled Bonaparte's own relationship with Eugénie Désirée Clary.
Filistine Charlotte Bonaparte Gabrielli was a French Napoleonic princess and the eldest daughter of Lucien Bonaparte and Christine Boyer. She became princess Gabrielli following her marriage to Mario Gabrielli, prince of Prossedi and Roccasecca, Duke of Pisterzo. In Italy, she was known as Carlotta.
The Principality of Elba was a non-hereditary monarchy established on the Mediterranean island of Elba following the Treaty of Fontainebleau on 11 April 1814. It lasted less than a year, and its only head was Napoleon Bonaparte, who would return to rule in France before his ultimate defeat and the dissolution of the principality.
Princess Éléonore-Justine Bonaparte was the wife of Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte. Under the pseudonym Nina Bonaparte she published a memoir titled History of My Life. As she was from a peasant background, her morganatic marriage to Prince Pierre-Napoléon, although recognized by the Catholic Church, was not accepted by Napoleon III and the House of Bonaparte and did not receive civil legitimacy until the fall of the Second French Empire.
Franco Borsi (1925–2008) was an Italian architect and architectural historian. He was professor of history of architecture at the University of Florence, and wrote on Giovanni Michelucci, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Donato Bramante.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, GCSK, is a British-Mauritian historian. He has been a fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford since 1990. Most of his work relates to modern political history from 1850; including the history of contemporary France as well as Napoleon, the Republic and Charles de Gaulle.