25 May 2010, 5:30 to 7:30 pm

Schubert’s short story Mein Traum (My Dream), a unique text that recounts a dream in which he is repeatedly driven away by his father, offers intriguing insights into Schubert’s life and personality. Schubert’s outgoing nature often masked an undercurrent of anxiety, loneliness, and insecurity, which is reflected in the images of exile and displacement that occur frequently in his songs. The seminar will examine the biographical context for the short story Mein Traum, Schubert’s relationship with the circle of poets who provided many of the texts for his songs, and the imagery of exile in relation to the Romantic tropes of longing, nostalgia, and the figure of the wanderer. This seminar precedes the Ensemble for the Romantic Century‘s concert on Thursday, 3 June 2010, part of their Artists in Exile II series. For more details about the concert, click here.

The seminar will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Segal Theater, first floor. For more information, contact  jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606

Suggested reading for the seminar:

DEUTSCH, Otto Erich (ed.) Schubert: Memoirs by his Friends. (London: A & C Black, 1958). A fascinating collection of anecdotes, reminiscences, and memoirs by a host of Schubert’s friends and contemporaneous musicians, poets, and artists.

DEUTSCH, Otto Erich (ed.) The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1947). Still the most comprehensive selection of Schubert’s letters and other biographical writings, as well as documents pertaining to all aspects of his life. The full text of Schubert’s short story My Dream is included in this collection.

ERICKSON, Raymond (ed.) Schubert’s Vienna. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). A fascinating collection of essays addressing Schubert’s cultural, social, and political milieu from an interdisciplinary perspective.

GIBBS, Christopher Howard. The Life of Schubert. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). An up-to-date and relatively concise biography that provides a comprehensive view of Schubert’s life and times.

KRAMER, Lawrence. Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). A groundbreaking study on the relationship between Schubert’s sexuality and homoerotic subtexts in some of his Lieder.

MESSING, Scott. Schubert in the European Imagination. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006). A collection of essays addressing several aspects of the reception of Schubert’s music in Europe. Issues of Schubert’s sexuality are also examined.

SOLOMON, Maynard. “Franz Schubert and the peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini” in 19th-Century Music, 12:3 (1989), 193-206. A controversial article that opened new fields in Schubert’s scholarship by proposing that Schubert was homosexual, and that his circle of poets and musicians was part of a Viennese homosexual subculture. The study caused a sensation when it was first presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1988.

TARUSKIN, Richard. Music in the Nineteenth Century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The most recent survey of the Romantic period in music, infused with Taruskin’s sometimes controversial—but invariably stimulating—views. An entire chapter is devoted to Schubert and the development of the German Lied.

YOUENS, Susan. Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). An in-depth study of Schubert’s text setting techniques and his overall conception of the Lied, a genre that is crucial in shaping his artistic identity.