Department of German (with the Department of Music)
Public Lecture
Professor Richard Stokes (Professor for Lieder Royal Academy of Music)
'Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine: an illustrated lecture on Schumann's 'Dichterliebe' and the poems that inspired it (with musical examples)
Richard Stokesis Professor of Lieder at the Royal Academy of Music and a translator of German literature with a background of teaching German for 30 years at Westminster School. He has published a number of volumes on music, including Interviews and Encounters with Verdi – a translation of Marcello Conati’s book – and Mahler’s Unknown Letters (Gollancz). For the operatic stage he has translated Wozzeck and La voix humaine (Opera North), Parsifal, Lulu and L’Amour de loin (ENO) and has just finished a singing translation of Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz for performance at ENO in 2012. Other books include The Spanish Song Companion, with Jacqueline Cockburn, J.S. Bach – The Complete Cantatas (Scarecrow Press), A French Song Companion, with Graham Johnson (OUP), and The Book of Lieder (Faber). With Alfred Brendel he collaborated on the latter’s Collected Poems: Playing the Human Game, recently published by Phaidon. His translations of Kleist’s Die Marquise von 0 and Kafka’s Der Prozess and Die Verwandlung have been published by Hesperus Press, and Alma Books published his translation (with Hannah Stokes) of Kafka’s Brief an den Vater. His translation of Jules Renard’s complete Histoires naturelles has recently been published by One World Books. As a teacher of German for 30 years at Westminster School, he ran a series of Lieder recitals at the school which featured such artists as Eugene Asti, Ian Bostridge, Imogen Cooper, Sophie Daneman, Julius Drake, Gerald Finley, Matthias Goerne, Anna Grevelius, Robert Holl, Wolfgang Holzmair, Graham Johnson, Daniela Lehner, Stephan Loges, Simon Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager, Felicity Lott, Malcolm Martineau, Eva Meier, Joseph Middleton, Joan Rodgers, Eric Schneider and Roger Vignoles. This summer he was artistic director of The Danube Festival of Song for Martin Randall Travel.