4 February 2013: The Ensemble for the Romantic Century’s second seminar held in conjunction with its 2012-13 season, MONSTERS!

We tend to think of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as the original vampire story, the progenitor of all subsequent versions right up until Anne Rice’s fictions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, and beyond. In fact, Stoker’s best-selling late-Victorian novel followed a century of vampire narratives, many of them differing from Stoker’s conception in that the vampire was frequently a devoted, although blood-sucking dopplelganger and less promiscuously menacing than Stoker’s malevolent count. (One of the earliest vampire tales was written by Byron’s doctor Polidori during the same fabled 1816 night that Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein, and dealt with a vampire who falls in love with an innocent maiden, while Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla concerned a beautiful lesbian vampire.) Stoker’s story, however, has proven the most influential of all vampire narratives, resonant as it is with Victorian and contemporary fears and fantasies concerning imperiled female virtue, beguiling aristocrats run amok, homoerotic desires, tormented immortality, blood-borne diseases, civilization reduced to primitive rituals of containment, and menacing foreign invaders. As a novel, as well as in numerous stage and film adaptations, Dracula continues to mesmerize readers and audiences. The many subtexts of the representation of the uncanny, as well as the mythology of the vampire, will be examined in relation to Romanticism’s fascination with the supernatural. Musical representations of the supernatural, involving a wealth of symbolic and metaphorical procedures, will be analyzed in connection with the enormous variety of lieder and other vocal works, as well as techniques of sound color, suggestive and coloristic harmony, and psychological associations with particular musical phenomena.

Monday, 4 February 2013, 5:30-7:30, at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Skylight Room, 9th floor. FREE ADMISSION