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Session no. 70, “Musical Responses to Goethe’s Works: Texts, Contexts,
Genres,” sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America

Organized and chaired by Tekla Babyak, tbb8-at-cornell.edu

Submission deadline: Oct. 3, 2022

This session invites proposals of approximately 250 words that explore
musical responses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works, especially in
Western art music during the long eighteenth century. Beginning in his own
lifetime and continuing into the present day, Goethe’s writings have
inspired an outpouring of musical settings and adaptations. These settings
run the gamut from short Lieder (e.g. Mozart’s "Das Veilchen," K. 476,
1785) to full-scale operas (Gounod’s Faust, 1859; Massenet’s Werther, 1887).

Certain strands of this reception history have been receiving scholarly
attention (see The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, 2019). However,
scholars have yet to map out larger trends in what we might call the genre
of Goethe settings. Some unexamined questions include: which aspects of
Goethe’s texts seem to have lent themselves particularly well to musical
settings, and how did composers rework the texts to make them fit the
music? Pertinent here are the songs in Goethe’s own novels such as Mignon’s
“Kennst du das Land,” in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96). When setting
such texts to music, to what extent did composers consider the larger
context of the literary work to which the text belongs? These issues might
profitably be considered from musicological, literary, and
music-theoretical perspectives.

For more information or to submit a proposal, please use the following
link:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdtl9cr9H0cMQFyDmvJWqHB3tBXzGBV4sr2uyIU2KOM7QRceQ/viewform__;!!PvXuogZ4sRB2p-tU!Hgr0pc4BaOPh1MgqU8SbLZhmdgV5uCIIHYSQ0axfEjyrOS54hOENrWsE6xyAAc8JmXKYVHSy3TmQAvlyFmCWmA$  

Looking forward to reading your submissions!

Best regards,
Tekla Babyak


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