Wagner Society of Northern California Program

Beethoven, Rossini and Wagner – Professor Nicholas Mathew – Professor of Musicology, UC Berkeley. Rossini himself supposedly recounted to Richard Wagner late in the nineteenth century the tale of his meeting with Beethoven in Vienna in 1822. This lecture explores what the symbolic opposition between Beethoven and Rossini - a perceived aesthetic antagonism that became ever more fraught as the decades wore on - might teach us about Wagner's position in the history of nineteenth-century music.