Interviewee on art song for BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature

Abbott, H. (Speaker)
Sean Williams (Speaker)

Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music

Activity: Academic and Industrial events › Guest lecture or Invited talk

Description

The radio segment is hosted by Dr Sean Williams (University of Sheffield) and focuses on the sometimes mundane context and subject matter of German Lieder and literature in the 18th and early 19th centuries have surprising things to tell us about what is ordinarily viewed as the highest of high art. Prof. Helen Abbott was interviewed for the programme, including performing on an 1809 Broadwood piano to illustrate key developments in art song from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries in Germany and France.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09bx5l1

Period	29 Oct 2017
Held at	Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music
Degree of Recognition	National

Keywords

art song
Lieder

Documents & Links

Dr Seán Williams of the University of Sheffield argues that the sometimes mundane context and subject matter of German Lieder and literature in the 18th and early 19th centuries have surprising things to tell us about what is ordinarily viewed as the highest of high art. Seán explores economic and social settings in the one hundred years between Bach's Coffee Cantata and Schubert's songs, when consumerism was on the rise, and with it the middle classes and lower nobility discovered a love of ... stuff. Songs at the piano, reading novels on the sofa with a bout of indigestion, a poodle at your feet. Such were the bourgeois drawing-rooms in which Romantic yearning for the affirming power of nature and the agony of the human condition took hold of the imagination. Producer: Tom Alban.