This lecture series takes you through the history of 19th-century music through the career and experiences of the singer, composer and pedagogue Pauline Viardot. She collaborated closely with many canonical figures including Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz, the Schumanns, Brahms, Fauré, and Massenet. A superb musician, she advised closely on the creation of many successful works for the concert stage and theatre. Her own compositions were fundamental to the creation of European musical culture from Russia to Spain. Her superb voice, her ability to sight-read orchestral scores at the piano, and to speak six languages made her centrally important to many male creators.

Exploring Viardot's legacy allows us to:

• consider music beyond narrow national boundaries
• rethink composition as a collaborative activity
• reassess the significance of arrangement and translation in repertoire transfer
• learn how opera and concert life worked
• understand the possibilities and limits available to 19th-century musical women.

This class will be relevant to anyone interested in opera, song, chamber music, piano music and gender.

Lectures take place weekly at 12-2pm on Tuesday in the Lecture Hall Room 1119 in the Musikwissenschaft Seminar, University of Freiburg.

This class can be taken for Einfuehrung in die Musikwissenschaft with an exam (Klausur).