Alan Bilton delivers Bird Research Lecture for Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research in Opera and Drama

Alan Bilton delivered the Bird Research Lecture on ‘Nightingales and Nightmares: The Subversive and the Supernatural in Central European Comic Opera at Cardiff University on February 11th.

Bilton discussed his new novel, At Dawn, Two Nightingales, a comic opera in fictional form, set in Eighteenth Century Bohemia in the time of Mozart. In this session, he will discuss comic opera, singspiel, puppet theatre,  and the idea of 'forbidden' poetry in 18th Century Europe. His paper explored the balance between the supernatural and the comic in Central European Singspiel, interrogating how shifts in tone and genre prefigure notions of the Uncanny, the Surreal and the Magical in Twentieth and Twenty First Century thought. The talk also explored how popular songs and entertainment were frequently viewed as dangerous vehicles for sedition and revolution during the Eighteenth Century, poetry transitioning from high to low culture, and in this way attacked as a means of agitating the masses and fermenting revolution.