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Katy Hamilton on 'The relationship between Brahms and Wagner'.

Although they were treated as musical and aesthetic polar opposites in the nineteenth-century press, and are now held up as representatives of the opposing sides in the so-called ‘War of the Romantics’, Brahms and Wagner were not as remote from each other as these labels might suggest. Katy will discuss Brahms’s attitude to Wagner and his music, and the extent to which published pieces – by Wagner, and on Brahms’s behalf – have skewed the image of the real musical relationship between these two men.

Dr. Katy Hamilton is a researcher, writer and presenter on music, specialising in the life and works of Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries, and is the co-editor of Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She has also been involved in projects covering subjects as diverse as the history of the Edinburgh Festival, the role of émigré musicians in post-1945 British musical life, and variety shows at the Wigmore Hall in the early twentieth century. She has provided concert introductions and programme notes for the Wigmore Hall, Salzburg Festival, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery, BBC Proms and Edinburgh International Festival.

Katy has taught at the Royal College of Music, City Lit, the University of Nottingham and Middlesex University She has made several appearances on BBC Radio 3, as a Brahms specialist and as part of the Record Review team.