Summer Series 2009

The Girl of the Golden West - Dr. Laura Basini

Laura Basini holds a B.A. in Music from Oxford University (England), and a Ph.D. in the History and Literature of Music from the University of California, Berkeley. Before taking up her current position at C.S.U.S., she held a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Basini has presented at international musicology colloquia and conferences including events at Duke University, Cambridge University (England), Georgetown University, Yale University, Lucca (Italy), and the University of Toronto. Her writing has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Opera Quarterly, and Journal of Musicological Research.

Walkure - Simon Williams

Simon Williams is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is an authority on several aspects of European theater and drama and is known internationally as one of the leading authorities on the music dramas of Richard Wagner. He was recently invited to sit on the inaugural editorial board of the prestigious new serial publication, The Wagner Journal. His book Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre provides a through introduction to Wagner’s work and Wagner and the Romantic Hero, recently published by Cambridge University Press, has won very enthusiastic reviews. He reviews regularly for Opera News. He has lectured worldwide on Wagner and has served as English-language audience lecturer at the Bayreuth Festival. He has spoken on operas by Bartok, Berlioz, Britten, Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss and Verdi at opera houses and opera guilds in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle and Orange County. The operas he has directed at UC Santa Barbara include The Turn of the Screw, La finta giardiniera, Werther, Hansel and Gretel, and The Gondoliers. He is also the author of German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and Shakespeare on the German Stage. Within the next few months he will have completed editing the first History of German Theatre in the English language, to be published by Cambridge University Press. He is about to embark on editing an Encyclopedia of Actors and Acting.