Study visit: Buxton Festival – historical fiction and opera

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For the third of our creative writing study visits this spring and summer, we are heading to the handsome Derbyshire spa town of Buxton in the Peak District for the Buxton Festival on Saturday 6 July. An important date in opera and music lovers’ calendars since 1979, the festival organisers introduced literary events to the programme in 2000.  
The festival, which describes itself as ‘a happy marriage of opera, music and books’, was set up to inspire the restoration of the Buxton Opera House, which was  reopened to coincide with the first festival. The festival now presents five or six operas each summer by composers as diverse as Monteverdi and Mozart, Shostakovich and Britten.
We have 10 tickets for two literary events which have been in high demand since booking opened to the public on 2 April. The first, at 10.30am, is Songs of love and death, a conversation between the academic and writer Peter Conrad and Buxton Festival Director Stephen Barlow about meaning in opera.  Their conversation last year, on Verdi and Wagner, was a sell-out. Then at  4pm, we are going to listen to the writer A. N. Wilson talking about his 2012 novel The Potter’s Hand. The book follows Josiah Wedgewood and his nephew Tom, who travels to America to buy clay for his uncle’s exquisite china.
Peter Conrad taught English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford from 1973 to 2011. He writes regularly for The Observer, the New Yorker and The Monthly (Australia). He has also written books on a wide number of subjects including the meaning of opera and the role that islands play in our dreams and nightmares. The British-born conductor, composer and pianist Stephen Barlow was appointed Artistic Director of the Buxton Festival in 2012. He was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, going on to study at Kings School Canterbury and Trinity College Cambridge, where he was an organ scholar.  He composed the cathedral opera King (2006), which relates the story of the archbishop of Canterbury, saint and martyr Thomas Beckett and Henry II of England.
The Potter’s Hand is A.N. Wilson’s first novel for five years. The narrative is driven by Josiah Wedgewood’s nephew Tom, who gets caught up in the American rebellion and falls in love with a Cherokee woman who comes to play a crucial role in Wedgewood’s Portland Vase, the famed late creation of the potter.  The making of the Wedgewood name and fortune is seen through the eyes of Josiah’s daughter Sukey, the future mother of Charles Darwin.  It is a story the writer may well have been inspired to tell as his father was managing director of Josiah Wedgewood and Sons. 
A. N. Wilson was educated at New College Oxford.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books include a biography of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and Dante in Love, a study of the world of the Italian Renaissance poet.  His novel Winnie and Wolf tells the story of a 15-year long friendship between Winnie Wagner, the English wife of a son of the composer Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler.  It was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker prize.
For students who do not have a car or who prefer to travel by public transport, there are bus services to Buxton every half hour from Derby, Chesterfield and Sheffield.  Direct trains run hourly from Manchester to Buxton and take 50 minutes.
Places on the study visit are free to OCA students.  To book, email enquiries@oca-uk.com.