David Conway

DAVID CONWAY is an Honorary Research Asscoiate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He has been at various times (and sometimes simultaneously) a stockbroker, a local politician, a manufacturer, a management consultant, and the founder and director of an international music festival ('Indian Summer in Levoca', Slovakia); from 1991 to 2017 he was a senior expert for the European Commission working on development aid programmes in the former Soviet Union. Since 2018 he has been Chair of the London opera company, HGO. In 2019-20 he will be a Polonsky Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Institute of Jewish Studies.

His book 'Jewry in Music' is the first study of how and why Jews entered, and became successful, in the music professions of Europe between 1780 and 1850, leading to Richard Wagner's splenetic expression of Jew-hatred, 'Das Judentum in der Musik'.

Based on extensive new research, and setting out a rich background, not only of music but of social change, technological innovation and political upheaval, Conway's 'Jewry in Music' tells the remarkable story, through biographies of the famous, the infamous and the forgotten, of how it was that Jews rose from being despised outcasts at the turn of the nineteenth century to being considered a gifted 'musical race'. In the process he overturns much conventional academic wisdom on major musical figures including Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Wagner.