Kurt Gänzl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt Gänzl (born 15 February 1946) is an award-winning writer, musicologist, casting director and singer best known for his books about musical theatre.

After a long acting and singing career and a career as a casting director of West End shows, Gänzl has become one of the world's most important chroniclers of the history of musical theatre. According to Canal Académie, "Kurt Gänzl is an institution. No one interested in musicals and operetta can ignore that. He is the world reference – with some few others, like Gerald Bordman, Ken Bloom, or Andrew Lamb – for that subject".[16]

Biography

Gänzl was born Brian Roy Gallas[17] in Wellington, New Zealand and is of Austrian descent, the son of Frederick, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, née Welsh.[17] He studied law and classics at University of Canterbury in New Zealand, receiving a masters degree in 1967 while performing as a radio and concert vocalist.[16]

Career

Early in his career, Gänzl wrote plays. His one-act plays Elektra and The Women of Troy were produced in New Zealand in 1966 and 1967 by Elmwood Players. The latter play won the British Drama League (now British Theatre Association/Drama Magazine) award in 1967.[17] The next year, Ganzl joined the New Zealand Opera Company as a bass soloist. After the company closed, he moved to London and studied for a year at the London Opera Centre. For twenty years, he worked as a performer, including a long run in London's hit show, The Black and White Minstrels. His last show was Harold Fielding's Hans Andersen at the London Palladium.[18] He then worked as a talent agent and as a casting director for over a dozen musicals and plays in London's West End theatres and for musical and operatic productions in Europe and America.[16]

While still working as a casting director, Gänzl began writing theatre reference works. In 1986 he published his two-volume history, The British Musical Theatre (Macmillan Press, 1986), which won the Roger Machell Prize for the year's best performing-arts book and the British Library Association’s McColvin Medal for the outstanding reference work (any subject) of its season. It also won the Library Association McClovin Medal.[17] This was followed by Gänzl's Book of the Musical Theatre (1988 with Andrew Lamb), Encyclopaedia of World's Musicals (1994), and The Musical: A Concise History (1997). Gänzl has published over a dozen important books on musical theatre. He has also contributed many biographical entries to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Gänzl's seminal reference work, The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, was published in 1994 and greatly expanded in a second edition in 2001. It was a Dartmouth Medal honoree in 1995 and was awarded "Outstanding Reference Source" in 1997 by the American Library Association. Theatre historian John Kenrick describes it as follows: "Only serious research libraries carry this set listing thousands of shows and individuals. This expanded update of the 1995 original edition is the best source to date on European musicals, with solid coverage of Broadway too."[19] Another critic calls it "the most exhaustive study anyone has yet made of musicals, and it is difficult to imagine it being done in a better or more thorough way."[20]

The Times wrote, "So, with The Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, Kurt Ganzl... has transcended all rivals. His work embraces not only Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue, but Vienna and Budapest, Paris and Rome, Sydney and Toronto. He even apologises for including only three New Zealand entries. If there is a musical production of any kind that he does not know about, then it is odds-on that nobody else does either."[21] Gänzl has said, "My goals are to make the musical theater a respectable academic subject and to put the musical theater into its international context. I want to bring the so-called 'musical' and 'operetta' back together as part of the same art form and to dispel some of the early myths and quasi-historical errors and distortions that have become accepted as part of musical theater history."[17]

At the end of the 1980s, Gänzl moved to St. Paul de Vence in the south of France to concentrate on writing full time. He later moved to New Zealand, where he owns several harness racing horses[22] and is preparing a multi-volume encyclopedia of Victorian vocalists. His partner of 30 years, the theatrical agent Ian Bevan, died in 2006 aged 87.[23]

Books

Notes

  1. ↑ Antoni Ferrando, Consciència idiomàtica i nacional dels valencians, València, Universitat de València, Valencia, 1980. ISBN 84-370-0162-5
  2. ↑ Antoni Ferrando i Miquel Nicolás, Panorama d'història de la llengua, Tàndem Edicions, Valencia, 1993. ISBN 84-8131-038-7.
  3. ↑ Antoni Ferrando i Miquel Nicolás, Història de la llengua catalana, Universitat Oberta,Ed. Pòrtic, Barcelona, 2005, p. 105-107, 165-169, 251.254. ISBN 84-9788-149-4.
  4. ↑ Rosalia Guilleumas, La llengua catalana segons Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Ed. Barcino, Barcelona, 1957. ISBN 84-7226-475-0.
  5. ↑ Antoni Mas i Forners, «De nationes seu linguae a cuius regio eius lingua. Les demominacions gentilícies de la llengua a Mallorca durant l'edat mitjana», Homenatge a Guillem Rosselló Bordoy, Volum II, Palma, 2002. p. 585-606. ISBN 84-95871-14-9.
  6. ↑ Josep Massot i Muntaner, "Antoni M. Alcover i la llengua catalana", II Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana, Publicaciones de l'Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona, 1985, p. 118-127.
  7. ↑ Manuel Sanchis Guarner, "La llengua dels valencians", Ed. Tres i Quatre, Valencia, 1972. p. 2144.
  8. ↑
  9. ↑ August Rafanell (ed.), Un nom per a la llengua. El concepte de llemosí en la història del català, Vic/Girona, EUMO Editorial/Universitat de Girona, 1991. ISBN 84-7602-804-0.
  10. ↑ August Rafanell Vall-llosera, El llemosinisme. Un estudi de les idees sobre la variació lingüística en la història de la llengua catalana, Publicaciones de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Tesis Doctoral (microficha), Bellaterra: UAB, 1991.
  11. ↑ Mila Segarra, "Llengua i escriptura en la societat catalana medieval" dentro de Història de la cultura catalana I, Ed. 62, Barcelona, 1999, p.125-150. ISBN 84-297-4544-0.
  12. ↑ Sobre la llengua els valencians. informes i documents, Universitat de Valencia, Valencia, 1998.
  13. ↑ Germà Colón i Domènech, La llengua catalana en els seus textos I, Curial Ed., Barcelona, 1978. p. 39-59, 60-71. ISBN 84-7256-158-5.
  14. ↑ Germà Colón i Domènech, Estudis de filologia catalana i romànica, Institut Interuniversiari de Filología Valenciana - Publicaciones de la Abadía de Montserrat, Valencia/Barcelona, 1997, p. 185-194. ISBN 84-7826-833-2.
  15. ↑ Germà Colón i Domènech, De Ramon Llull al Diccionari de Fabra. Acostament a les lletres catalanes, Fundació Germà Colón, Publicaciones de la Abadía de Montserrat, Barcelona, 2003, p. 229-242. ISBN 84-8415-541-2.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Mirambeau, Christophe. "Kurt Gänzl and Emily Soldene (1840 - 1912)", Canal Académie, 17 June 2007
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 Kurt Ganzl at Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002 (subscription required). Accessed 22 March 2009
  18. ↑ Hans Anderson, Guide to Musical Theatre, accessed 21 January 2010
  19. ↑ Kenrick, John. "Suggested Reading", Musicals 101: The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film (2004)
  20. ↑ O'Connor, Patrick Times Literary Supplement, 3 November 1995
  21. ↑ Green, Benny, "All-singing, all-dancing haul of fame", The Times, 2 May 1994
  22. ↑ Gänzl's blog, much of it devoted to his racehorses
  23. ↑ The Times, 2 January 2007, p. 48.

References

Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.