Opening Lecture

Description

Bloch Lecture Series
Peter Franklin, 2010 Ernest Bloch Distinguished Visiting Professor
Distant Sound—Singing Devil: The Politics of Musical Passion
in the Age of Leverkühn
Seeking a different take on the history of music during the fictional life-span of the fated composer hero, Adrian Leverkühn, of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Dr Faustus, Prof. Franklin will consider both the reasons for and the problematics of the ambivalent relationship of composers such as Mahler, Delius, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Sibelius, and Puccini with both the dominant Germanic aesthetic ideology of high art and the mass-culture audience they would encounter in the cinema.


Peter Franklin is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of
St Catherine’s College. His research areas are Gustav Mahler and the post-romantic symphony, early twentieth-century Austrian and German opera (including Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker) and Hollywood film music (concentrating on European émigré composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner in the 1930s and ’40s). Publications include the books Mahler. Symphony No.3
and The Life of Mahler; film music writing includes Essays in Film Music. Critical Approaches (ed. Donnelly, 2001) and Beyond the Soundtrack. Representing Music in Cinema (ed. Goldmark, Kramer and Leppert, 2007). His book Seeing Through Music. Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores is due to be published by OUP next year.