5 October 2010: Free seminar presented by the Ensemble for the Romantic Center. Speakers are Anne Swartz, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, and James Melo, ERC’s musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM.

The 14-year relationship between Tchaikovsky and his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, conducted entirely through letters, was one of the strangest stories in the history of Romantic music. Their spiritualized romance will be discussed within the context of music patronage in Russia, Tchaikovsky’s conflicts about his homosexuality, his failed marriage, and Nadezhda’s unflinching admiration for him and his music. The highly unusual pattern of Nadezhda’s patronage of Tchaikovsky will also be examined in relation to the composer’s artistic development and her influence on the direction of his career.

Date and location: Tuesday, 5 October 2010, 5:30-7:30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Skylight Room, 9th floor
For more information: jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606

Anne Swartz is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Fine and  Performing Arts at Baruch College, and a member of the faculty of the Ph.D. program in musicology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include Russian and Polish romanticism and modernism, especially the music of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, eighteenth-century women composers, and Russian piano history.  She continues to conduct archival research in Poland and Russia and is the author of critical editions of the keyboard works of Maria Szymanowska, and articles and chapters on piano artisans in 19th-century Russia.  Her recent publications include  “Music, the Economy, and Society: Szymanowska’s Career Path in Russia in the 1820s,” in Australian Slavonic and East European Studies (2009), and “Shostakovich: the Personal and Public Face of the Composer and his Music,” in The Russian Review (2009).  She is the author of the forthcoming book, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century, a project which received funding from the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and she is a contributor to the forthcoming collection, “Musique et opéra en Russie et Europe central (XIXe-XXe siècles).” She was the recipient of Baruch’s Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching, and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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.