28. November – 18:00 Uhr – Hörsaal 1 des Instituts

Nineteenth-century musicians understood cyclical, multi-part works very differently from today. Rather than expecting to perform complete opuses, musicians made their own selections, creating new narrative and dramatic trajectories for each concert. In this talk, Natasha Loges explores how musicians like Clara Schumann, the baritone Julius Stockhausen and Johannes Brahms performed song and keyboard cycles such as Schubert’s Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin, as well as Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Kreisleriana, and the implications these concerts might have for our understanding and performances of these works today.

Natasha Loges is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music. Her work has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Scouloudi Foundation. Her books are Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Anja Bunzel, 2019),  Johannes Brahms in Context (with Katy Hamilton, 2019), Brahms and his Poets (2017) and Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall (with Katy Hamilton, 2014). The book German Song Onstage (with Laura Tunbridge) will appear in 2020. She has contributed chapters and articles to Music and Literature in German Romanticism, The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, and the Cambridge History of Musical Performance; and to the journals Music & Letters, Nineteenth-Century Music Review and 19th-Century Music. In February 2019, she gave the keynote lecture in the conference The Intellectual Worlds of Johannes Brahms at the University of California. In June, she gave the keynote lecture at the conference Clara Schumann (née Wieck) and her World at Oxford University. As a pianist, Natasha has performed at venues like the Holywell Music Room and St Johns Smith Square. She broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 (Record Review and Building a Library), writes reviews for BBC Music Magazine and speaks at many festivals and venues, including the Southbank Centre, BBC Proms Plus, Wigmore Hall, Sheffield Music in the Round, the Oxford Lieder Festival and Leeds Lieder.