Song Beyond the Nation Translation, Transnationalism, Performance

Within classical music, much writing on the Western song tradition since 1800 has assumed a direct link between musical cultures and national literatures, and song has typically been interpreted as one of the means by which constructions of nationalism and nationhood have been pursued in the cultural sphere. Yet song can also be a mobile and cosmopolitan genre and form of cultural practice, able - through performance, publication, and translation - to cross boundaries between cultures and languages. This volume brings together musicologists, literary scholars, linguists, and cultural historians to examine the ways in which song creation, practice, and interpretation has been defined by, and in turn defines, conceptions of nationalism and the transnational. It focuses on four key poets - the Persian Hafiz, German Heine, American Whitman, and French Verlaine - and examines how their poems have been 'translated' into song, and how music can challenge the seemingly organic relationship between language and nation.

1 - Hafiz between Nations: Song Settings by Daumer/Brahms and Peacock/Beamish
2 - Szymanowski, a Hafiz 'Grablied', and the 'translation' of Nietzsche
3 - The German Roots of Russian Orientalism: Hafiz's Poetry in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Song
4 - Traces of Tourism and Transnationalism in Liszt's Heine Settings
5 - Performance Matters in Heine: The Case of Pauline Viardot's 'Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter'
6 - 'Once again...speaking of' Heine, in Song
7 - Why song in Verlaine's Verse is Always Already Beyond the Nation
8 - French Impressions: The Transnational Afterlives of Verlaine's 'La Lune blanche' in Song
9 - Paul Verlaine in Parallel: Loeffler, Fauré, Debussy
10 - Song Just Beyond the Nation, or Debussy via Verlaine
11 - Johanna Müller-Hermann's Lied der Erinnerung: Austria, America, and Beyond
12 - The Émigré Walt Whitman: Songs of Mourning, 1943-48
13 - A Song, the Sea, and a Listening Boy: Whitman - Swinburne - Delius
14 - Whitman and Stevenson: Singing the Nation from Scotland to Samoa via Ohio and Hawai'i

Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College. As well as teaching at the University of Wales, Bangor, and University College, London, he has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. Laura Tunbridge is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine's College. She taught at the Universities of Reading and of Manchester. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, and Columbia University, New York, and currently holds a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.