In October, Ph.D. Student and European Studies Council Graduate Fellow John Hoffmeyer attended the conference “Romanticism in Music: Poland in its European Context” in Warsaw, Poland. There, he presented a paper entitled “Palimpsest Dialectics: The Poetics of Translation in Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39.”
My talk was scheduled on a panel dedicated to Romantic song composition, alongside papers dedicated to Chopin’s settings of poetry by Witwicki; and Lieder composed specifically by European women composers in the first half of the nineteenth century (Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska, and Sophie Gail). Panel discussion allowed for the comparison of multinational contexts of song composition during the period attuned to the complex dynamics of national identity in Germany and Poland during the early nineteenth century, as well as the valences of gender in song writing and imaginings of “the voice” in Romantic music more broadly.
In addition to the benefits of presenting one’s research at an international conference, I had the added pleasure of discussing my paper at length with professors of musicology at a variety of institutions in Poland, Germany, England, and the United States. Musicology is a field that varies substantively in its disciplinary and institutional organization between American and European contexts, so it was crucially helpful to get this variety of perspective in feedback on my paper.
I was also able to learn from other talks given at the conference, including a remarkable paper by Prof. Dr. Arabella Pare (Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe) on Schubert’s fragmentary sonata compositions, which Dr. Pare herself had worked to completed and which she regularly performs as a pianist. Historical musicology is a far narrower discipline in the US than it is in Germany, and it was inspirational to encounter researchers at various stages of their careers pursuing ambitious projects that blend the conventionally separated practices of scholarly research and musical performance.
Finally, my time in Poland gave me the chance to visit sites of historical importance, like the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the Bazylika Świętego Krzyża, where the urn containing the heart of Chopin in immured in a pillar in the church’s sanctuary. My visit coincided with the anniversary of Chopin’s death (17 October), on which occasion there is an annual performance of Mozart’s Requiem in the church (in line with the composer’s wishes).