Desirée Mays, author of the Opera Unveiled book series will present “Wagner’s Women: Real and Imagined” on Zoom, April 13, 2025 at 2:00 PM.
Free to BWS Members — No purchase necessary for BWS members, simply email us to RSVP. info@bostonwagnersociety.org
Music is a woman... She must be loved by the poet, must surrender herself to him, in order that the new artwork of the future may be born" (Richard Wagner from Opera and Drama, 1851)
There were many female influences in Wagner's life: his mother, sisters, two wives, and numerous affaires with women some of whom were clearly Muses who provided inspiration for his work: Minna, his first wife; Mathilde Wesendonck who materialised at the time of Tristan und Isolde and Cosima who fired Wagner's imagination during the composition of The Ring.
The talk focuses on these three women with comparisons to the imagined women they inspired Senta, Isolde, and Brunnhilde.
— Desirée Mays
A resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Desirée contributes music reviews and commentary in that state as well as Colorado and locales nearby and beyond. Born in Ireland, and educated in London, Desirée came to the States and gradually became immersed in the world of opera as a speaker, storyteller, professor, radio interviewer, reviewer, and writer.
She holds a Master of Arts degree in the Humanities from the University of Utah where she taught a course, “What Is Opera,” both there and at the University of New Mexico. Desirée hosted two radio shows: “Our Arts” in Salt Lake City where she co-produced the award-winning series “Life is a Creative Process.” She also produced and interviewed arts personalities on “CenterStage” for KSFR 101.1 in Santa Fe.
Summing up her aesthetic motto as "Art Forms through Awareness", Desirée has written extensively on opera: program notes for opera companies, promotional and review pieces for journals, magazines and newspapers. She enjoys interviewing singers, directors and conductors before live audiences, on the radio or for publication, and she currently produces “Yoga Moments” for KSFR. On occasion, she takes groups of people worldwide in search of that perfect opera.
Winters find her lecturing coast to coast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to the Los Angeles Opera and San Francisco Opera in California. Desirée conducts and moderates panel discussions and leads workshops and seminars. She has spoken to Wagner Societies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Dallas, North Carolina, and Dublin, Ireland.
Desirée wrote a book every year for the last two decades called Opera Unveiled which introduced and examined in detail the five operas of each Santa Fe Opera season. She has been the resident speaker and storyteller for The Santa Fe Opera since 1996, concluding that series and her annual book in 2016.