Speech William A. Everett Falling Houses: Love, Death and the Sung Power of Memory | 3 May 2025

 Speech William A. Everett
Falling Houses: Love, Death and the Sung Power of Memory
Saturday 3 May 2025
GNO VIP lounge
Starts at: 19.00
Free admission

As a prelude to the two operas being performed this weekend, this multi-media presentation explores how a symbiotic union of music and drama heightens the underlying themes of love, death and memory in Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Orestis Papaioannou, Alekos Lountzis and Orfeas Apergis’s The Fall of the House of Commons (2022, rev. 2025). The talk will also examine two musical theatre works with similar sentiments, the operetta Maytime (1917) and the drama musical Rebecca (2006).

William A. Everett is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Musicology Emeritus at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory (USA). He has published widely on opera and musical theatre. He has written biographies of operetta composers Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, and his latest book is The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2024).