12 May 2011: How Sad is Eros, How Anarchic is Aphrodite: Beethoven and the Sublimations of Love, a seminar presented by the Brook Center and co-sponsored by the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, will investigate the connections between Beethoven’s emotional and affective life and his creative process. Beethoven was constantly immersed in the possibility of love, but unrequited love remained the defining feature of his emotional life. Psychological and social factors seemed to have conspired to prevent Beethoven from sustaining meaningful romantic relationships, but in his music he was free to achieve those ideals. Patterns of dedication and homage in his music will be discussed as potential clues to his love life and in relation to the processes of sublimation he carried out in his works.

Harvey Sachs, music historian, biographer, and author of The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, and James Melo, ERC’s musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM, will be speaking. The seminar will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Skylight Room, 9th floor, 5:30-7:30 pm. Admission is free. For more information, contact jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606.

Harvey Sachs’s books – of which there are nearly 60 editions in 15 languages – include the standard biographies of Arturo Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein, Virtuoso, Music in Fascist Italy, Reflections on Toscanini, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, and, as co-author, Plácido Domingo’s My First Forty Years and Sir Georg Solti’s Memoirs. He also edited and translated The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TLS, and many other publications, as well as for the BBC, PBS, CBC, Arte, RAI, and other radio and television networks. He has lectured at universities and cultural institutions worldwide, has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Sachs, who lived in Europe for many years, is a former Artistic Director of the prestigious Società del Quartetto di Milano. He is currently amplifying and rewriting his classic Toscanini biography (for Oxford University Press), assisting Plácido Domingo with a book about opera performance (W. W. Norton), and collaborating with James Levine on a book on music and musicians (Alfred A. Knopf). He is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

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.

To find out more about ERC’s theatrical concerts, visit www.romanticcentury.org.