Emeritus Fellow in Music Dr Roger Allen has published a new critical biography, Arthur Nikisch: Connecting Cultures in a Fragmenting World (Boydell Press, 2025). The Hungarian-born conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) lived and worked at a pivotal moment of global political and cultural change. Dr Allen’s biography traces Nikisch’s career across the declining Habsburg monarchy and the rising German Empire at a time when Europe was moving towards the cataclysm of the First World War, and identifies Nikisch as a primary link between the later nineteenth-century performance practice and aesthetics of Wagner and the twentieth-century phenomenon of the all-powerful ‘superstar conductor’ who came to surpass even the composer in importance.
You can learn more about the book here.
About Dr Allen
Dr Roger Allen is Emeritus Fellow in Music of St Peter’s College, where he also served as Director of St Peter’s College Choir. He has published on Wagner and related matters in the UK, USA and Germany and lectures widely in the UK and abroad. Other publications include Richard Wagner's ‘Beethoven’ (1870): A New Translation (Boydell Press, 2014) and Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical (Boydell Press, 2018). His current project is Elgar as Symphonic Poet: a study of Elgar’s music within the context of the wider European symphonic tradition.