The End as Beginning
Every work of Wagner’s maturity is unique and self-contained, and yet Parsifal stands apart from the others. In a way, the composer steps back from his world-changing musical innovations, his constant dramatic and philosophical preoccupations, and asks “suppose all that is now settled or transcended; what then?” The “stage-consecration festival play” is less a summation of his life’s work than the opening of a new pilgrimage that one life could never be sufficient to complete.
About the speaker: Will Crutchfield has divided his opera career between conducting, musicology, and education. As Director of Opera for the Caramoor International Music Festival from 1997 to 2017, he conducted over 30 titles by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and soloists including Lawrence Brownlee, Angela Meade, Vivica Genaux, Hao Jiang Tian, Ewa Podleś, Sumi Jo, Jennifer Larmore, Georgia Jarman, John Osborn, Michael Spyres, and Hei-Kyung Hong. He has also held posts as Music Director with the Opera de Colombia (Bogota) and Principal Guest Conductor of the Polish National Opera (Warsaw), and has made guest appearances with many theaters, including the Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro), the Canadian Opera Company, the Washington National Opera, and the Minnesota Opera among others. For Ricordi and the Fondazione Rossini he prepared the critical edition of Aureliano in Palmira, also conducting the production at Pesaro that won first place as “Best Rediscovered Work” in the 2015 International Opera Awards. In the same year he was named a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation in recognition of his operatic work, and in 2017 he was named as one of Musical America’s 30 “Movers and Shapers” for his leadership in innovative training and performance. In 2020 he was featured in The New York Times for his first-ever reconstruction of Beethoven’s sketches for the lost tenor aria from the1805 opera Leonore. His other reconstructions include Donizetti’s unfinished Symphony in E Minor, the only known full-scale concert symphony by a major Italian composer of the 19th century. He has contributed articles on historical performance practice to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and numerous scholarly journals, and is currently completing a book on the same subject for Oxford University Press.
The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments.
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