Laura-Maxine Kalbow Successfully Defends PhD Dissertation

29 May 2024

Photo: CSMC

Laura-Maxine Kalbow has passed her viva voce examination, thus completing her PhD in Musicology.

Congratulations to Laura-Maxine-Kalbow, who defended her PhD dissertation on 29 May 2024! Her thesis, which is entitled Handwritten layers of operatic practices – The reception of Richard Wagner at the Neue Deutsche Theater in Prague (1888–1938), was supervised by Ivana Rentsch.

Historical performance practices can be reconstructed almost only by means of (handwritten) annotations. In her dissertation, Kalbow employed the opera archive of the renowned Neue Deutsche Theater in Prague analyse the various handwritten notes within the printed performance material (conductor’s scores, piano reductions, parts, stage and light directions) and considered the sources’ quality as well as their relation to each other, putting them in context with the public reception of Wagner in Prague. Closely working together with the Czech National Theatre, the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth, as well as the Cluster’s research fields on Artefact Profiling and Data Linking, she compiled a digital presentation of the handwritten notations which illustrates them as substrates of an historic operatic practice.

The dissertation project was part of ‘Handwritten layers of operatic practices’ (RFD12) at the Cluster of Excellence UWA.