Publications
Email: David Charlton

David Charlton is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Music at Royal Holloway. He studied at the universities of Nottingham and of Cambridge, writing his doctoral dissertation on instruments and ensembles during the French Revolution and First Empire. His publications divide into three areas: history of instruments and performance practice; history and theory of opera in France; and the musical writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann (edition issued by Cambridge University Press in 1989). Following publication in 2000 of French Opera 1730—1830: Meaning and Media, and Michel-Jean Sedaine 1719-1797 (edited with Mark Ledbury), he has recently been editing The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (2003) and is now completing, with Nicole Wild, Répertoire Musical du Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique, Paris (1762—1971). This complete descriptive source catalogue of musical theatre (including ballet) provides a fundamental platform for future research and forms the first published element of the Royal Holloway Opéra-Comique Database project. David Charlton has been editorial board member of the New Berlioz Edition since 1982, and was editor of vol. 12b of the same critical edition, which is aiming to complete its publication of all Berlioz's music by the end of 2003. He sits on the editorial board of Cambridge Opera Journal and was area advisor for The New Grove (new edition) and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He is currently Project Director of the AHRB-funded programme 'The UK Contribution to Series A/II of RISM', which is gathering and enhancing data on music manuscripts between 1600 and 1800 from secular archives in the British Isles. This is a collaborative project between the Department of Music at Royal Holloway and the RISM (UK) Trust.

The postgraduate courses to which he contributed at Royal Holloway include Opera Studies and Historical Musicology, together with 2nd- and 3rd-year undergraduate option courses on Berlioz, on the Faust legend in music, and on the French Revolution. Other taught modules centred on instrumental music of the 17th century and on Beethoven.