9 March 2010, 5:30-7:30 pm

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) belongs to that class of artists for whom no introduction is needed. His multifaceted personality, his biting wit, and the brilliance of his artistic genius added sparkle and glamour to late Victorian society. Wilde’s personal life was brought into the glare of public scrutiny during his trial for homosexuality, when he was humiliated, degraded, exiled from society, and sentenced to two years of forced labor. The seminar will discuss Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Strauss’s opera Salome within the context of Victorian sexuality, the rise of aestheticism, and the cultural underpinnings of Wilde’s trials.

Richard Kaye is Associate Professor in English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Virginia). He is completing a study of the figure of St. Sebastian entitled Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination and is editing a collection of essay on Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. He has published widely on Wilde and his work, most recently in an essay on Wilde and his European influence in a volume entitled Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (Ohio, 2009), edited by Joseph Bristow.

James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 60 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music’s Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. He has written program notes for all of ERC’s original productions and authored several scripts. In 2006, Mr. Melo began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer. In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center.

Free Admission, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Skylight Room, 9th floor. For more Information, contact James Melo at jmelo@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-8606.

ERC is in residence as a musicological affiliate to the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center.