Event

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s 2012 opera Written on Skin, based on the thirteenth-century razo of troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh, has the book as object at its centre. In the opera, the creation of histories is played out on in multiple ways, from the politics of book-making being a central tenet of the opera, to the framing of the plot through a twenty-first-century lens via the set design and framing device of angels. This workshop explores how Written on Skin destabilises ideas about history, drawing attention to the strangeness inherent in attempts to collapse the distance between past and present.

Maria Ryan is a second year graduate student in Historical Musicology. She holds a BA in music from the University of Nottingham and an MMus from King's College London. Her work focusses on twentieth-century and contemporary opera, music for the stage, and medieval musical sources. She is particularly interested in how performance is captured and reimagined on the page, intertextuality, and the interplay between the visual and the musical. Her other interests include the music of Benjamin Britten, music in literature, and psychoanalytical theory.