Goethe: Musical Poet, Musical Catalyst

Recent works include: the piano-piece Chiaroscuro, premiered at the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition (2000). A Sinfonietta commissioned and premiered by the Irish National Youth Orchesta and included in their millennium tour of Ireland and Germany ending with a performance at the Konzerthaus, Berlin (2000). The first performance of Earlsfort Suite for mezzo Bernadette Greevy and orchestra, National Concert Hall, 2000. More recently: News from Donabate, a fifty-minute work for solo piano (2001); An Exchange of Letters for solo piano (2002) performed by Rolf Hind in the NCH; After Great Pain, song-cycle (2002) performed by Aylish Kerrigan (mezzo soprano) and Gabrielle Schimmerling (piano) in Stuttgart.

Seóirse Bodley’s first Goethe setting, that of Wandrers Nachtlied, was performed last year, leading on to his song-cycle Mignon und der Harfner, first performed in March 2004 at the conference, ‘Goethe: Musical Poet, Musical Catalyst’, NUI Maynooth. This cycle was the first of three new compositions premiered in the early months of 2004; the others are Metamorphoses on the name Schumann for orchestra, premiered at the National Concert Hall Dublin by the National Symphony Orchestra under Gerhardt Markson and the third string quartet Ave atque Vale, performed by the Vogler Quartet in Sligo.

Nicholas Boyle was born in London in 1946 and was brought up in Malvern and Worcester. He studied Modern Languages at Cambridge in Magdalene College, of which he has been a Fellow since 1968, and apart from spells working in Göttingen and Berlin he has taught German in Cambridge ever since. He was made Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History in 1993 and Professor in 2000 and from 1996 to 2001 was the Head of the Department of German. He is probably best known for his biography of Goethe, still in progress (volume 1, 1991, volume 2, 2000), which has been translated into German and has won several prizes. He is also the author of Who Are We Now?; Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney, a volume of essays on the contemporary world, and in 2002-03 delivered the Erasmus Lectures at Notre Dame University on Sacred and Secular Scriptures: a Catholic approach to literature, published in 2004. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2000 was awarded the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institute. In 1983 Nicholas Boyle married Rosemary Devlin, a lawyer, and they have four children.

Dr Byrne’s book on Schubert’s Goethe Settings was published by Ashgate in 2003. Her piano reduction of the Schubert/Goethe Singspiel, Claudine von Villa Bella, was published by Carysfort Press in December 2002 and the first stage performance in English of this Singspiel took place in Dublin in April 2003. She is co-editor of Goethe and Schubert: Across the Divide (Dublin: Carysfort Press, December 2003), and is currently completing a critical translation of the discussion of music in Goethe’s letters to the composer, Zelter.

Dr Byrne has lectured extensively and internationally including Rhodes College, USA (2003); English Goethe Society, King’s College London (2003) and St Petersburg (2004). Her edition of Claudine von Villa Bella will be performed at the conference, Schubert and the Unknown, University of Regina, Canada in December 2004. She is keynote speaker at this conference and at the RAM Schiller Symposium in London, 2005.

Claus Canisius was born in Kolberg (Ostsee), Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and at Heidelberg University (Music, Musicology, Anglistics, Psychology). He wrote his doctoral thesis at Heidelberg on Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. In his professional career he has worked with Pierre Boulez in Basle. He has been a lecturer at Heidelberg University in Music and Literature, and editor of classical and contemporary music at the Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden and the Süddeutsche Rundfunk, Studio Karlsruhe. He is working at the Badisches Konservatorium für Musik, Karlsruhe and for Deutschland Radio, Berlin.

Dr Canisius’s publications include: 100 Jahre Badisches Konservatorium Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe, 1984); Ludwig van Beethoven, Sehnsucht und Unruhe in der Musik (München, 1992); Goethe und die Musik, Gast in einer fremden Wohnung (Munich, 1998); Goethes Anverwandlungen mündlich überlieferter Poesie (Frankfurt, Oxford 2002); 200 Broadcasting Essays: Musik und Kommentar (SWR, Karlsruhe).

John Feeley Described by the Washington Post as ‘Ireland’s leading classical guitarist’ and by Michael Dervan in the Irish Times as ‘a trailblazer […] when it comes to the guitar and guitar-playing in Ireland’, John Feeley enjoys a very active performance career. In addition to solo and chamber concerts he has performed widely with numerous orchestras including the American Symphony Orchestra and the National Chamber Orchestra, Washington DC. He regularly performs at many international guitar festivals.

A graduate in music from Trinity College, Dublin and Queens College of the City University, New York, he has held teaching positions at Memphis State University and the Conservatory of Music, Dublin Institute of Technology. He has won a number of prizes in international competitions, including the special Award for interpretation in the Mauro Giuliani competition in Italy. He is also highly regarded for his performances of new works by Irish composers.

Feeley’s CD recordings, with K-Tel, Gael-Linn, CBA Classics, Ossian Records, Castle Communications and Blackbox Records have received international critical acclaim. He is also renowned for his guitar arrangements of Irish music, which appear on several of his many recordings. Concerts have taken him around the world and include appearances at the Sydney Opera House, the Old Opera House, Frankfurt, the L’Arena in Verona, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. He has also recorded with the Chieftains and famous Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballes.

Amanda Glauert has studied at Clare College Cambridge and Goldsmiths’ College (University of London), and held lecturing posts at the music departments of Trinity College Dublin and Colchester Institute. She is now Head of Research at the RAM. Having published with CUP on the songs of Hugo Wolf (Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance), she is now completing a book on Beethoven’s relation to Herder’s aesthetics of the Lied (Beethoven and the Lyrical Impulse).

Julian Horton is a College Lecturer in Music at University College Dublin. He completed his doctoral research at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also held a Research Fellowship in Musicology from 1996-2000, and has taught both at the University of Cambridge and at King’s College, London.

Derek McCulloch lectured in German for thirty-six years at the University of Surrey. Simultaneously for some time he was counter-tenor lay-clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and was to be heard as soloist on various recordings with Roger Norrington and Helmuth Rilling, as well as with his own ensemble Collegium Sagittarii. Since 1985 he has directed Café Mozart in performances of late 18th century music on period instruments, recording for BBC Radio 4 political songs c.1800. He has also broadcast on such people as Heinrich Schütz, Johann Rosenmüller, the Bach family, the Earl of Abingdon, Emma Hamilton and Jane Austen, whose family music library he researched and catalogued in 1996 – winning in the process a Classic FM Joie de Vivre award. In retirement he continues to research, and is currently considering the music written to commemorate the death of Nelson in 1805. His main focus remains ‘Haydn in England’, a theme on which he has written extensively. His latest CD Goethe   the Guitar, recorded with Café Mozart, has been enthusiastically received in the early music press and by such august bodies as the Haydn, Schubert, and Spohr Societies in the UK.

Moray McGowan, born in 1950, B.A., M.A. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Dr. phil. (Hamburg), taught at the Universities of Siegen, Kassel, Lancaster, Hull, Strathclyde. From 1989-2000 he was Professor of German and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies, Sheffield, UK. Since September 2000 he has been Professor of German and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies, Trinity College Dublin. He is currently working on German theatre and drama and its relationship to the fall of the GDR and to German unification, on Turkish-German writing, and on ideas of Europe in German-speaking culture. Publications include: Marieluise Fleißer (Munich, 1987); ‘German writing in the West (1945-1990)’ in the Cambridge History of German Literature (1997); numerous essays on modern and contemporary literature and culture, including Heinrich Böll, Volker Braun, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Ulrike Meinhof, Heiner Müller, ‘Neue Subjecktivität’, Zafer Şenocak, Botho Strauß, metaphors in Turkish-German writing and its reception, and the theatre and drama of the ‘Wende’ period.

Micheal O’Siadhail, a full-time writer, has published ten collections of poetry. He was awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1982, the Marten Toonder prize for Literature in 1998 and was short-listed for the 2003 Wingate Jewish Quarterly Literature Prize. His poem suites, The Naked Flame, Earlsfort Suite (with Seóirse Bodley) Summerfest (with Colman Pearce) and Dublin Spring (with James Wilson) were commissioned and set to music for performance and broadcasting.

O’Siadhail’s collections of poetry are The Leap Year (1978), Rungs of Time (1980), Belonging (1982), Springnight (1983), The Image Wheel (1985), The Chosen Garden (1990), Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), A Fragile City (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), Our Double Time (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), Poems 1975-1995 (Bloodaxe Books, 1999) and The Gossamer Wall (Bloodaxe Books/Time Being Books, 2002). His work has been translated into several languages including books in German and Japanese.

Micheal O’Siadhail has given poetry readings and broadcast extensively in Ireland, Britain, Europe, North America and Japan. In 1985 he was invited to give the Vernam Hull Lecture at Harvard and the Trumbull Lecture at Yale University. He represented Ireland at the Poetry Society’s European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He was writer-in-residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991.

O’Siadhail has been a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Among his many academic works are Learning Irish (Yale University Press 1988) and Modern Irish (Cambridge University Press 1989). He was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1988-93) and of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989-97), a founder member of Aosdána and a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He was the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange).