Reaching Out: European Song Across Borders

[See below for schedule]

The history of European song is a history of crossing and ignoring borders. This study day will explore some of the ways that song has helped to define the culture of the whole continent by bringing together people and ideas. Composers of song have often been profoundly affected by travel – Mendelssohn for one pursued a literal ‘musical Grand Tour’ – which has exposed them to new literary as well as musical influences. Economic centres such as London and Paris have acted as magnets for artists and patrons, with the result that some songs have had their most welcoming reception far from their land of origin. While it is a commonplace to describe music as a ‘language that crosses borders’, the works of many poets have done so as well, such as Schubert’s settings of Shakespeare, or Schumann’s of Byron and Burns. Further border-crossings emerge, in turn, in the work of writers who allude to European songs in their novels and poems.

In our study day, prominent scholars and writers celebrate the cross-European travels of earlier musicians, and explore questions such as what happens when words are translated, or when composers seek to evoke an alien homeland.

Topics to be presented include Brahms’s and Schumann’s Translated Song-Texts, The International Transmission of French Song, Lieder in London and New York, Cover Versions of Schubert, and the international inspirations for Moscow’s ‘House of Song’. The six talks frame a lunchtime concert in which national and cultural borders are dissolved by song.

SPEAKERS:

Professor Helen Abbott (Birmingham, French)
TBA

Dr Rosamund Bartlett, Russianist, writer, and broadcaster
Musorgsky, Ravel and the International Mission of Moscow’s House of Song, 1908-1918
This talk will explore the legacy of Russia’s first true chamber vocalist. Together with her Franco-Russian husband, Maria Olenina D’Alheim introduced audiences in pre-revolutionary Moscow to Lieder, and Parisian audiences to Musorgsky, as well as organising international competitions to stimulate translations of texts into Russian and the composition of new songs, one of which was won by Ravel.

Dr Natasha Loges (Royal College of Music)
Brahms the European
Although Brahms was quintessentially German in his thinking and lifestyle, he nonetheless ranged freely across Europe through his song-writing, inspired particularly by the much-maligned poet Georg Friedrich Daumer. This talk shows how Brahms drew on Daumer’s poetic translations to evoke both the diversity and universality of Europe’s various peoples.

Dr Robert Samuels (OU, Music)
Cover Versions of Schubert
To travel across borders, songs need to be interpreted afresh and in new contexts. In popular music, reinterpretation of a song as a ‘cover version’ uses or confuses the roles of performer, composer, and original performer. This talk looks at the history of interpretation and reinterpretation of Schubert’s songs, which have lived a full an unconstrained life through transcriptions, arrangements, and translations regardless of national or aesthetic borders.

Professor Laura Tunbridge (Oxford, Music)
Transatlantic suspicion of the “amorous Teuton”
This talk will examine Anglo-American attitudes towards German art song in the aftermath of the First World War. German music and musicians had been prohibited from concert programmes during the hostilities. Attempts to reinstate them evoked the value of internationalism and Western civilization but many remained suspicious of what the critic Richard Capell referred to as the “gush” of the “amorous Teuton”.   

Richard Wigmore, writer and broadcaster
A Cook's Tour in Song
In his Myrthen, presented to Clara on the eve of their marriage, Robert Schumann stretched the geographical boundaries of Lieder while charting the fluctuating emotions they had experienced during their secret engagement. Richard Wigmore looks at the relationship between poetry and music in songs that range from Goethe's exoticised Persia and Heine's dream of India, via Thomas Moore’s hedonistic Venice, to heroism and tragedy in Robbie Burns’s Highlands.  

SCHEDULE:

11am Welcome

11.15am Three 30-minute talks

12.45pm Lunch break

1.45pm RECITAL: Songs Without Borders, Holywell Music Room (separate booking required)

3pm Three 30-minute talks