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The American soprano, Rebecca Stewart, is a doctoral student in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures with a secondary field in Musicology as an Ashford fellow at Harvard University (since 2020). This past summer (2020), she taught a survey course on the themes of solidarity, happiness, and love in W.A. Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, L.v. Beethoven's Fidelio, and R. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. In addition to her teaching, she has directed choirs in the USA and in Germany and has sung with choirs and as a soloist in Canada, England, Finland, Germany, and in the USA. She has served as musical director for a number of concerts hosted by the German program at California State University in Long Beach, California (CSULB), including concerts focused on Nietzsche's songs (2017), the music of the reformation (2017), original compositions inspired by Heinrich von Kleist (2016), and an original musical theater piece entitled Outlaw Brecht (2016), which she co-authored with Elaine Chen. In November 2019, she acted as music director for a concert on German revolutionary music at CSULB.
In addition to her musical activity, Rebecca Stewart has co-authored an entry on Heinrich Joseph von Collin with Jeffrey L. High for the Literary Encyclopedia and, in 2018, she co-consulted on a volume of secondary literature on Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans with Jeffrey L. High and Sophia Clark. In 2020, her paper on “Women on the Anti-Napoleonic Stage in German-Speaking Territories” was published in Seán Allan and Jeffrey L. High, eds. Inspiration Bonaparte? German Culture and Napoleonic Occupation with Camden House. W.A. Mozart's Die Zauberflöte is very dear to Rebecca's heart - she has lectured on it at the Aquilon Music Festival in Oregon (summer 2019) and delivered a lecture on teaching the Singspiel in October 2019 at an Opera for Educators Workshop at the LA Opera. For this reason, among so many others, she was so excited and honored to be a part of W.A. Mozart's Die Zauberflöte Harvard College Opera production (January 2020). |
