Stephen Hinton on Nietzsche and Wagner

STEPHEN HINTON is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Professor of Music and, by courtesy, German, he also serves as the Denning Family Director of the Arts Initiative and the Stanford Institute for Creative and the Arts (SiCa). From 2006-2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and from 1997-2004 chairman of the Department of Music. He studied at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took a double major in Music and German and a Ph.D. in Musicology. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin, first as research assistant to the late Carl Dahlhaus and then as a “wissenschaftlicher Assistent.” His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks, the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh), Kurt Weill: Gesammelte Schriften (edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition), and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith's Collected Works. He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, New Grove Dictionary of Music, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. Recent articles include “The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg’s Two Practices of Composition” (Music & Letters, 2010); “Back to Bach: The Conscience of History" and “Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility” (forthcoming). His book Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Kurt Weill's complete stage works, is being published by the University of California Press in spring 2012.