Micaela K. Baranello is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Arkansas. Her book in progress, The Operetta Empire, examines operetta in Vienna from 1900 to 1930. Her publications include ‘Die lustige Witwe and the Creation of the Silver Age of Viennese Operetta’ (Cambridge Opera Journal) and articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly and Puccini and His World, as well as a number of features and reviews in The New York Times. She has received the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship and a Fulbright study grant in Austria.

Tobias Becker is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute London where he is working on the ‘nostalgia wave’ during the 1970s. Before joining the GHIL he worked on popular musical theatre. Publications include Inszenierte Moderne. Populäres Theater in Berlin and London, 1880–1930 (2014) and Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, 1890–1939 (edited with Len Platt and David Linton, 2014).

Anastasia Belina is a senior research fellow at the School of Music, University of Leeds, where she worked with Derek B. Scott on an ERC-funded project, German Operetta in London and New York in 1907–37: Cultural Transfer and Transformation. She is author and editor of A Musician Divided: André Tchaikowsky in His Own Words (2013), Die tägliche Mühe ein Mensch zu sein (2013), Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (2013, co-edited edition) and The Business of Opera (2015, co-edited with Derek B. Scott). She is also an opera director and librettist, has appeared on BBC3 and presented a documentary film Rebel of the Keys (2015).

Bruno Bower studied at Oriel College, Oxford; Birmingham Conservatoire and King’s College London. He completed his PhD at the Royal College of Music in 2016 with a thesis on critical readings of the programme notes written by George Grove for the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts between 1865 and 1879, illuminating the ideas and ideology surrounding music in Victorian Britain. His doctoral work was supported by a Lucy Ann Jones and a Douglas and Hilda Simmonds Award, as well as by an AHRC Doctoral Studentship. He now teaches music history and analysis modules for various colleges at Cambridge University, and music appreciation evening classes in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial College London. He became a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan through regular performances as an oboist in the orchestra for numerous productions of the Savoy Operas.

Valeria De Lucca is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. She is interested in opera and musical theatre, with particular emphasis on questions of gender and patronage, singers and systems of production in early modern Europe, and on the reception and adaptation of foreign operetta in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. She has published articles and chapters in The Journal of Musicology, Renaissance Studies, Early Music, The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music and The Oxford Handbook of Opera (ed. by Helen Greenwald). Her forthcoming publications include the monograph The Politics of Princely Entertainment: Music and Spectacle in the Lives of Lorenzo Onofrio and Maria Mancini Colonna (1659–1689) (Oxford University Press) and the collection of essays Sound, Space and the Performance of Identity in Early Modern Rome (co-edited with Christine Jeanneret; Routledge).

Lisa Feurzeig is Professor of Music at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Her research is centred on text–music relations in vocal music, especially German art song, the Viennese popular theatre and Wagner’s operas. In her book, Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism, she argues that Schubert created musical equivalents for complex abstract ideas in settings of Schlegel and Novalis. Her critical edition with John Sienicki, Quodlibets of the Viennese Theater, explores practices of musical quotation and reference. Her first operetta-focussed project is a study of political meanings in the 2004 Vienna Volksoper production of Kálmán’s Herzogin von Chicago. She is an organizer of concerts and symposia in Hermann, Missouri, tracing aspects of German-American musical culture. As a performing singer, she has emphasized early music, lieder and music since 1900.

Stefan Frey is a writer, broadcaster, lecturer, dramaturg and director. As an assistant director at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus Hamburg, LTT Tübingen and Thüringer Landestheater Rudolstadt, he directed several productions. From 2004 to 2006 he was the head of the Studio Theatre of the Institute for Theatre Studies at Munich University; since then, he has been lecturer there and at the University of Vienna. Frey is the author of numerous articles on operetta in academic and non-academic publications, radio features and books such as Franz Lehár oder das schlechte Gewissen der leichten Musik (Tübingen 1995), Was sagt ihr zu diesem Erfolg. Franz Lehár und die Unterhaltungsmusik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1999), Emmerich Kálmán: Unter Tränen lachen (Berlin 2003; English translation: Culver City 2014) and Leo Fall. Spöttischer Rebell der Operette (Vienna 2010).

Lynn M. Hooker is Associate Professor of Music History at Purdue University’s Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts with a courtesy appointment in the Department of History. Her book Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. She has published on music and modernism, nationalism, race and popular and folk culture in (among other places) Musical Quarterly, Anthropology of East Europe Review, Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology and European Meetings in Ethnomusicology. After beginning her scholarly career working on the history of music and culture through historical documents, she began in 2000 doing systematic fieldwork in both Europe and North America in Hungarian folk and popular music scenes, focussing on the role of Romani performers. She is currently drafting a book on the transformation of the ‘Gipsy music’ industry in twentieth-century Hungary, based on oral history interviews and archival research.

Matthias Kauffmann is a lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His PhD thesis, funded with a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, focussed on popular musical theatre in the Third Reich. In collaboration with Jens Malte Fischer, he has curated an exhibition of Gustav Mahler (Theatre Museum, Munich, 2010/11) and has also worked as an assistant director with Thalia-Theatre (Hamburg), Frankfurt Opera and the Bavarian State Opera. In 2015 he began working as a dramaturg for musical theatre at Stadttheater Gießen.

John Kenrick, an internationally recognized authority on the history of musical theatre, combines a passion for entertainment history with the practical know-how earned working on stage productions at every level from amateur to Broadway. He served as personal assistant to six Tony-winning producers, working on such Broadway productions as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent. He created the educational website Musicals101.com and has taught courses on musical theatre history at New York University’s Steinhardt School, Marymount College, Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and The New School University. He is the author of Musical Theatre: A History, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amateur Theatricals and contributed a history of Broadway to the Carolina Academic Press textbook Theatre Law. He has appeared on PBS, A&E’s Biography, BBC TV and radio, National Public Radio and in numerous DVD documentaries.

Raymond Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, has authored five books and co-edited two others, including Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (2003), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006) and The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011, with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf). His published essays address a wide range of additional interests, including Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, nationalism, musical allusion, music and identity, camp and film music. His recent book, Making Light (2018), considers Haydn and American popular music in the context of German idealism.

Barrie Kosky is a director in the field of opera and theatre. As a director he is working in international houses such as Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, The Bayreuth Festival, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, The Salzburg Festival, Teatro Real Madrid, Oper Frankfurt, The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the English National Opera London, Opernhaus Zürich and the Opernhaus Amsterdam, as well as at houses such as Deutsches Theater Berlin and Schauspiel Frankfurt. He was the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival in 1996, Artistic Co-Director of Schauspielhaus Wien from 2001 to 2005, and since 2012 he has managed Komische Oper Berlin as General Manager and Artistic Director.

Ulrich Lenz studied musicology, drama and art history in Munich, Berlin and Milan. During his stay in Italy, as correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt, he reported regularly on cultural events in northern Italy. He began his theatre career in the season 1997–8 as an assistant dramaturg at the State Opera, Stuttgart. In succeeding years, he worked as an opera dramaturg at theatres in Linz and Mannheim. In 2006 he became chief dramaturg of the Staatsoper, Hanover, and, since 2012, he has been chief dramaturg in Barrie Kosky’s leading team at the Komische Oper, Berlin.

Pentti Paavolainen is an independent scholar who worked previously for many years as a research professor at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. His recent work consists of a three-volume biography of the theatre and opera manager, founder of the Finnish Theatre company, Kaarlo Bergbom (research funded by the Finnish Academy and private foundations). From 2004 to 2006, he was President of the Society of Theatre Research in Finland, and he has also served two terms in office as President of the Nordic Society for Theatre Research (1995–9). His contributions to edited collections have been numerous, and his articles have been published in the journals Nordic Theatre Studies and Synteesi (Synthesis). His history of theatre in Finland is accessible on the Uniarts.fi pages.

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds. He researches into music, culture and ideology and, among other books, is the author of The Singing Bourgeois (1989, R/2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008) and German Operetta on Broadway and in the West End, 1900–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He has edited or co-edited numerous books, including The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009) and Confronting the National in the Musical Past (2018). He has written numerous articles in which he has been at the forefront in identifying changes of critical perspective in the socio-cultural study of music.

Jan Smaczny is well known as an authority on many aspects of Czech music. As an academic he has taught at the universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Queen’s Belfast, where he is Emeritus Professor of Music. His publications include a book on Dvořák’s B Minor cello concerto (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and edited collections of essays on Irish Music (Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Four Courts Press, 2007) and Bach’s B minor-Mass (Exploring Bach’s B minor Mass, Cambridge University Press, 2013). Much of his work has been based on archival research into the operatic repertoire of the Prague Provisional and Czech National Theatres. Of particular relevance to the present project is his book, The Daily Repertoire of the Prague Provisional Theatre (Prague, 1994) an extensively annotated catalogue of operas and operettas performed in the theatre and ‘Grand Opera in the Czech Lands’ (in David Charlton ed., The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Christopher Webber is an actor, stage director and writer, and a leading authority on Spanish Zarzuela. His book The Zarzuela Companion (Scarecrow Press, 2002, with foreword by Plácido Domingo) is the standard English-language reference work on the genre. A major contributor to the Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford University Press, 2002), he wrote and edited many entries on Iberian and Ibero-American genres, composers and countries. As Editor in Chief since 1997 of the internet portal zarzuela.net, he has published many articles and reviews on Spanish lyric theatre, and he is a regular, wide-ranging contributor to Opera magazine. Webber has lectured and published on zarzuela for international symposia at the Universities of Sheffield (UK), Tübingen (Germany), Oviedo and Valencia (Spain) and has directed and performed zarzuela in London’s West End, as well as adapting two zarzuelas for Santa Fé Opera. He also serves on the theatre and music panels of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Avra Xepapadakou is a lecturer at the Department of Philology, Division of Theatre and Music Studies, University of Crete, where she teaches history of theatre and opera. Her research interests focus on nineteenth-century theatre, music and cultural life. She has published articles and papers on topics such as the relations between Italian and Ionian opera, the question of westernization/orientalism in modern Greek theatre and art music, the foreign opera troupes touring in nineteenth-century south-eastern Europe and the Orient and the invasion of operetta on the modern Greek stage. The subject of her recent book is the Ionian opera composer Pavlos (Paolo) Carrer (Athens, 2013). She is the project leader of the research project ‘Archivio’, concerning the theatre archive of Romeo Castellucci and the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. In the spring of 2015 (February–May) she conducted research at the California State University, Sacramento, and recently she was granted a research visitorship from the Balzan Musicology 2012 Programme Towards a Global History of Music (2015–16).