First Edition – New Books seminar with Professor Mark Everist, University of Southampton Seminar

Time:: 14:30 - 15:30
Date:: 9 February 2022
Venue:: Online event (Microsoft Teams)

Event details

The Music department at the University of Southampton invites you to join us for the next installment of our 'First Edition – New Books' seminar with Professor Mark Everist. This public online event will take place on Microsoft Teams. If you are not a staff or student at University of Southampton and would like to attend, please contact Hettie Malcomson at h.malcomson@soton.ac.u

Mark Everist has recently published two books:
• Genealogies of Music and Memory: Gluck in the 19th-Century Parisian Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
• The Empire at the Opéra: Theatre, Power and Music in Second Empire Paris, Cambridge Elements of Musical Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021
that problematize issues of power and reception in music on the Parisian stage in the nineteenth century.

Genealogies of Music and Memory poses searching questions about the ways in which one of the Titans on eighteenth-century opera was received in the nineteenth – was Gluck really completely ignored until the 1859 production of Orphée at the Théâtre-Lyrique? The answer is that, no, Gluck's music and aesthetics were received in many different forms in the half century after his works left the stage, forms that reveal much about the culture of opera off the stage in the period.

The Empire at the Opéra picks up from Everist's article 'The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre, 1806-1864'. Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014), 685-73 to show how, during the Second Empire, the French State managed to close down the various routes to power that the Opéra and other institutions had enjoyed in the previous half century and took over all aspects of its management. It was as if the Royal Opera House had been taken over by Johnson, Raab, Patel and Gove.

The session will consist of a short presentation by the author of the principal issues raised in the two books as the basis for a wide-ranging discussion of the issues raised.

Speaker information

Professor Mark Everist, is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on the music of western Europe in the period 1150-1330, Opera in France in the nineteenth century, Mozart, reception theory, and historiography. He is the author of Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France (1989), French Motets in the Thirteenth Century (1994), Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828 (2002), Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2005), Mozart's Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (2013) as well as editor of three volumes of the Magnus Liber Organi for Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre (2001-2003). In addition, he has published over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and collections of essays. The recipient of the Solie (2010) and Slim (2011) awards of the American Musicological Society, he was elected a fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2012. Everist was President of the Royal Musical Association from 2011-2017, and was elected a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society in 2014. His monograph, Discovering Medieval Song: Latin Poetry and Music in the Conductus was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018, as was The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, co-edited with Thomas Kelly. A retrospective collection of essays, Opera in Paris from the Restoration to the Commune was published in 2019 from Routledge, and two monographs of forthcoming early in 2021: one on Gluck reception in the nineteenth century from Oxford University Press, and one on music and politics in the Second Empire from Cambridge University Press. Future publications include monographs on the origins and early history of opérette and on the history of music in Europe between 1160 and 1320.