ACT Research Seminar with Áine Sheil
RCH/004, Ron Cooke Hub, Campus East, University of York (Map)
Event details
Historiography and myth-making: the case of the Kroll Opera (Berlin, 1927-31)
This talk reevaluates the Kroll Opera (1927–1931), challenging prevailing narratives that define the short-lived Berlin institution predominantly through the lens of experimentation and radical modernism. Historical accounts have often focused on a narrow selection of modernist productions to frame the Kroll as a site of rupture with past opera practices, but this talk demonstrates that innovation and convention coexisted at the company. Analysis of neglected repertory and specific case studies – Die Zauberflöte, designed and directed by Ewald Dülberg; Verdi’s little-known opera Luise Miller; and Stravinsky’s Geschichte vom Soldaten, directed and designed by associates of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator – reveals how the company’s practice was deeply embedded in the broader theatre ecology of the period. In this way, the Kroll’s artistic identity emerges as a complex negotiation between theatrical heritage, continuity, context and innovation, and the company is repositioned as a heterogeneous manifestation of German stage practice during the Weimar Republic.
About the speaker
Áine Sheil
Áine Sheil is a Reader in Music at the University of York, where she was Head of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies (2022–2024) and Head of Music (2018–2022). She studied Music and German as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin and Historical Musicology as a postgraduate at King’s College London. Following her doctoral studies, she worked in the Publications Department of the Royal Opera House, London, and at the Department of Drama, Trinity College Dublin, as a postdoctoral research fellow. She specialises in opera studies and has published on opera in interwar Germany, Wagner, contemporary opera productions and arts policy in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Journal of the Society of Musicology in Ireland and various edited books. She has given research talks at institutions across the UK, Ireland, Germany and China, and has appeared on German radio, Irish radio and the podcast series of Opera North.
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible