Obituary: W. E. (Gar) Yates 1938–2021

Abstract

Austrian Studies 29 (2021), 161–65© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Obituary: W. E. (Gar) Yates 1938–2021 William Edgar (Gar) Yates, whose death on 10 March 2021 added grief to the heartache of his family during his illness in the midst of COVID-19 lockdown, is mourned by friends, former students and academic colleagues around the world, particularly in Austrian Studies. As Chair of German at the University of Exeter from 1972 to 2001, he played a decisive role in faculty and university governance, defending academic freedom and the humanities at times of pressure from central government since the Margaret Thatcher years. In the UK he was a trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association from 1980 to 2015, recipient of the J. G. Robertson Prize for distinguished work in German Studies in 1973, and (since 2002) a Fellow of the British Academy. Universally renowned as a formidable scholar, with over 150 publications, he was also a leading member of the Internationale Nestroy-Gesellschaft and a regular contributor to the annual Nestroy conferences in Schwechat, Austria. In 1995, he was elected by the Austrian Academy of Sciences as Corresponding Member of the Division of Humanities and the Social Sciences Abroad and was awarded the Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst (I. Klasse) [Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, First Class] in 2001. Gar was born on 30 April 1938 in Hove, Sussex, the son of Douglas William Yates, Professor of German at the University of Aberdeen. He attended Fettes College in Edinburgh as a Foundation Scholar in the early 1950s and Emmanuel College Cambridge from 1958 to 1963 with a Minor Open Scholarship, taking the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos in 1961 (MA 1965). Under the supervision of F. J. Stopp, he pursued doctoral research with support from the Tiarks German Scholarship fund, completing his PhD, ‘The Development of Popular Viennese Comedy from 1823 to 1923’, in 1965. Gar had already been appointed as Lecturer in German at the University of Durham in 1963, and in that year he married Barbara, herself a Modern Languages teacher, who shared his literary tastes. She read with him much French and Spanish source material for Grillparzer’s and Nestroy’s plays, and collaborated on some volumes of the Historical-Critical Nestroy edition for which Gar was responsible. One early by-product of Gar’s teaching was his richly contextualized student edition of Hofmannsthal’s Der Schwierige (Cambridge University Press, 1966), which was followed in 1968 by his edition of Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben. He capped his father Douglas Yates’s Franz Grillparzer: A Critical Biography (1946) with Grillparzer: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1972), an exemplary sequence of close readings of the major Obituary: W. E. Yates 162 plays that demonstrated not only Grillparzer’s sensitive characterization and ‘theatrical sense’, but also Gar’s own profound knowledge of European literary and theatrical traditions and poetics, and philological precision in unravelling a work’s gestation. He later returned to both authors (for example, in Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and the Austrian Theatre, Yale University Press, 1992), but by far the most significant lifelong focus of his work was Johann Nestroy and the Wiener Volkstheater. Nestroy: Satire and Parody in Viennese Popular Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1972) was greeted as the first introduction to the author in English, whereas Nestroy and the Critics (Camden House, 1994) was hailed as the first comprehensive study of Nestroy reception in any language. Gar swiftly followed this with Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which was not only the first comprehensive survey in English, but one, moreover, that did not indulge in the sentimental myth of Vienna as city of theatre. The culmination of Gar’s scholarly achievement was his central involvement in the Historical-Critical Edition of Nestroy’s complete plays. He advised on forty-three volumes of fifty-seven from 1977 to 2010, acted as editor or co-editor of ten volumes between 1981 and 2006, and as general or ‘co-ordinating’ editor from 1992 to 2012. Gar was one of a generation of scholars who were decisively influenced by Karl Kraus’s Nestroy Renaissance and its recognition...