Harp Festival Lecture by Simon Wills

 “The Branded Professor”:  The criminal life and scandalous times of Nicholas-Charles Bochsa 

Nowadays, Nicholas-Charles Bochsa is known as a composer of technically well-organised etudes and pleasant, if slight, pieces for the harp. There was a great deal more to him: he was Musical Director of the Royal Italian Opera in London, Secretary of the Royal Academy of Music, a successful musical entrepreneur and soloist and a prolific orchestral composer whose innovations in ballet music may be seen in theatres today.

He was also a thief sentenced in absentia to branding by a Paris court, a forger, a bigamist, a seducer and a sociopath who caused carnage wherever he went. He precipitated a strike in the Opera orchestra, installed his barely-literate lover as resident poet at the King's Theatre, was vilified by the London press as 'the branded professor' and at the end of his career ran away to Australia with Anna Bishop, wife of the composer of Home Sweet Home. 

This talk draws on diaries, memoirs and umpublished correspondence held at Harvard and Yale universities to present a picture of a musician who inspired hatred, ridicule and devotion in equal measure - and wrote rather well for the harp.

Free, no tickets required