Roger Allen is Emeritus Fellow in Music of St Peter’s College. He has published on Wagner and related matters in the UK, USA and Germany and lectures widely in the UK and abroad. He is a member of the editorial board of The Wagner Journal, to which he regularly contributes feature articles and reviews, and currently acts as Coordinator of the Elgar in Performance scheme for the Elgar Society. His most recent published book (2025) is a critical study of the Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922); his current project is an investigation of the Elgar’s music within the context of the wider European tradition.
Books and Book Chapters:
Contributions to The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013)
Richard Wagner’s ‘Beethoven’ (1870): A New Translation (2014)
Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art, Politics and the Unpolitical (2018)
‘The Bayreuth Concept and the Significance of Performance’, in Ed Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, (Cambridge, 2020), pp.141-55
‘Adorno’s Mahler’, in Ed Charles Youmans, Mahler in Context (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 266-73
Arthur Nikisch: Connecting Cultures in a Fragmenting World (The Boydell Press, 2025)
Selected Articles:
‘Das, was eigentlich Musik’: Richard Wagner’s reception of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28, Op. 101 (The Wagner Journal Vol 13 No 2, July 2019)
Furtwängler, Schenker and the Idea of the Organic (2019)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a7c6a6b1-f2a2-4117-b4e9-9ae40b4b479a
‘Beethovens unendliche Melodie’ (wagnerspectrum, Heft 1/2020 tr. Stefanie Arendt)
Article: ‘On the Destiny of Opera’: The Musically Conceived Drama or ‘Deeds of Music made Visible’ (The Wagner Journal Vol 15 No 3, November 2021)
Annotated translation with critical apparatus: ‘On the Destiny of Opera’: An Academic Lecture by Richard Wagner (The Wagner Journal Vol 16 No 1, March 2022
Related Websites
www.spc.ox.ac.uk
www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk
www.elgarsociety.org
Current research includes issues of harmony and musical syntax in the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Elgar together with an investigation of the idea of the organic metaphor as a means of understanding musical process. His ongoing study of late nineteenth-century performance practice includes the development of critical methodologies for the study of historic recordings as a musicological resource.
