Gustav Holst and British Operatic Culture ― From Bayreuth to Aldeburgh

Although Gustav Holst is rarely thought of as an opera composer, his operatic works provide a gateway to the exploration of how a budding opera composer negotiated the British operatic world across his career and how his synthesis of a myriad of cultural influences in his operatic works affected his reputation and success as a composer. This interdisciplinary study provides a kaleidoscopic view of how overlapping and often contradictory cultural influences such as imperialism, religion, literature, indigenous theatre, philosophy, folk culture, nationalism, and historiography are reflected in Holst’s operas and figure into his reception as a composer of operas.

Christopher Scheer is the assistant professor of musicology at Utah State University. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan where he completed a dissertation on the roles of Imperialism and Wagnerism in the music and career of Gustav Holst. His research interests focus on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century British musical culture. In 2010, he was chosen as the Leverhulme Visiting International Research Fellow at Liverpool Hope University, where he spearheaded an international interdisciplinary colloquium on the role of Theosophy in the shaping of arts in the early twentieth-century.