Dear music and literature lovers,
Most recently, on March 23, 2019, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the death of the famous playwright and writer August von Kotzebue. Well, to mark the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, musicologist Dr. Axel Schröter and the pianist Yizhuo Meng, who also teaches at the Musikstudio, prepared a very interesting program for us.
During Beethoven’s time it was not uncommon for the most famous composers of this epoch to write music for August von Kotzebue. After all, August von Kotzebue was a world celebrity in his day and the opportunity to devote ones own music to his works promised great fame!
Kotzebue and Beethoven
In the course of the monumentalization and heroization of Beethoven in the 19th century, which coincided with Kotzebue’s literary and national dismantling, it is easy to forget that Beethoven not only read and sometimes set to Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare, but that he probably often fell back to writers which are much more marginalized today.
The most prominent of these was August von Kotzebue, who enjoyed a much greater popularity as a playwright than the Weimar classics. Kotzebue’s texts apparently inspired Beethoven to such an extent that after composing the acting music for “King Stephan” and “The Ruins of Athens” he approached Kotzebue with the request that he also write an opera libretto for him.
As is well known, this did not happen. Nevertheless, it can be stated that the drama music for Kotzebue’s “The Ruins of Athens” has become its most extensive. Why they had to be forgotten in the context of a later high-culture thinking, about which the educational elites increasingly defined themselves, and why even the revision of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s or Liszt’s fantasies about “The Ruins of Athens” changed, will be addressed in this lecture.
Look forward to a literary as well as a musical treat!
Saturday, February 29, 2020
17:00 pm
at
Musikstudio & Galerie: Gabriele Paqué
Blücherstraße 14
53115 Bonn
–
Program:
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Marcia alla turca (The ruins of Athens)
Lecture by Dr. Axel Schröter
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Sonata No. 26 in E flat major, op.81 a
I. Farewell
– Adagio
– Allegro
PAUSE
Lecture by Dr. Axel Schröter
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
About motifs from Beethoven’s “The Ruins of Athens” for piano
Allegro moderato
Dr. Axel Schröter
born 1965, Wolfhagen (Hesse)
Studied musicology, school music (instrumental major: piano), German philology, philosophy and education at the University of Music Detmold / University of Paderborn and at the University of Kassel
Teacher: Prof. dr. Detlef Altenburg, Prof. dr. Arno Forchert, Prof. dr. Adolf Nowak, Prof. dr. Klaus Kropfinger (musicology); Prof. Dr. H.-G. Bastian, Prof. dr. W. Fischer (music education); M. Keönch, Birgitta Wollenweber (piano); Prof. Dr. F. Apel (German Philology); Prof. Dr. R. Piepmeier (Philosophy)
Ph.D. phil., Detmold-Paderborn 1996
Traineeship for teaching at grammar schools, Wiesbaden 1996-1998
Research assistant in the Liszt project of the University of Regensburg 5 / 1998-4 / 1999; Carrier: University of Regensburg
Employee at the Sudeten German Music Institute Regensburg 5 / 1998-4 / 1999; Carrier: District Upper Palatinate
Music editor in the editing department of Orfeo International Munich 5 / 1999-4 / 2000
Research assistant at the Thuringian State Archive Rudolstadt, Schloss Heidecksburg 5 / 2000-10 / 2004; Carrier: State of Thuringia
Researcher in the Collaborative Research Center 482 of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, subproject C 8: Music and Theater 7 / 2001-6 / 2004; Carrier: German Research Foundation DFG
Researcher in the archive of the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar / Thuringian State Music Archive 11 / 2004-2 / 2010; Carrier: German Research Foundation DFG
Research assistant in the DFG project “Theater and Music in Weimar from the Hummel era to 1918”, 5 / 2009-9 / 2012; Carrier: German Research Foundation DFG
http://www.theaterzettel-weimar.de/projektpartner.html
Research associate in research, teaching and administration at the Institute of Musicology Weimar | Jena (Chair Prof. Dr. D. Altenburg), 3 / 2010-9 / 2012; Carrier: HfM FRANZ LISZT Weimar
Academic Council a. Z. for historical and systematic musicology at the Institute of Musicology and Music Education, University of Bremen, since 10/2012; Carrier: University of Bremen
Habilitation: studies and sources on music and theater at the Weimar court
Venia legendi for the Department of Musicology
Private lecturer at the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar
Yizhuo Meng
Yizhuo Meng was born in 1996 in Hebei, China. At the age of five she received her first piano lesson. Already at the age of eight, she took the first place at the “XingHai”piano competition in Zhangjiakou. In 2008, Yizhuo Meng deepened her musical skills at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. During this time she won competitions in China, ia. the 3rd place of the “Thomas and Evon Cooper Competition” in Beijing.
Four years later Yizhuo traveled to Germany to receive further musical impulses. She studied at the International College of Music in Hamburg with Prof. Delphine Lizé in the period between 2012-2013. In the further course she was accepted 2013 at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne, where she still works together with Prof. Gesa Lücker. During her studies she expanded her knowledge in the field of Early Music with Prof. Gerald Hambitzer and also New Music with Tamara Stefanovich and Prof. Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
She has also deepened her musical skills at numerous masterclasses (Jerome Rose, Fabio Bidini, Eduard Zilberkant, Dimitri Alexeyev, Alexander Kobrin and others). In June 2015, Yizhuo played her first solo concert at the Rubinstein Academy in Dusseldorf. During the same period she won the second prize of the “International Piano Competition” in Val Tidone (Italy). In 2016 she won the 5th Prize of the “Karlrobert Kreiten Piano Competition” at the Cologne University of Music and Dance and the 2nd prize of the “McKenzie Award” in New York City. Most recently she won the 2nd prize of the “Piano Loop Competition” in Split, Croatia, in 2019.
Yizhuo Meng is a scholarship holder of the “Live-Music-Now Köln eV” as a piano-duo ensemble with Franziska Staubach since April 2016. Since October 2017 she studies “Master of Music” with main piano in the HfMT-Cologne with the Hungarian pianist István Lajkó and also as a private student with the Italian pianist Gabriele Leporatti.
I am looking forward to your visit!
Sincerely,
Gabriele Paqué
Note on parking!
Parking spots in Bonn-Poppelsdorf, about a 10 minutes walk from the Blücherstraße!
CANCELLED
The next concert will take place on March 21, 2020 at 17:00:
Joanna Sochacka (piano) plays works by L. v. Beethoven, B. Bartók and F. Chopin
Current exhibition: Natalia Simonenko presents “A Song of Dreams”
The gallery is open on Saturdays from 2 – 6 pm.
By appointment, the exhibition can also be visited at other times.
Blücherstr. 14, 53115 Bonn
Telefon: 0228-41076755