festival

Encounter I

Das Land ohne Musik and the Search for English Musical Identity
with R. Larry Todd

Saturday, July 24, 7:30 p.m.
Martin Family Hall, Menlo School
Tickets: $42 adult; $20 student

In 1904, the German scholar Oskar Adolf Hermann Schmitz published Das Land ohne Musik, a musicological treatise (and tacit assertion of Germany’s cultural superiority) summarizing the perception, widely held across the continent, that England’s musical identity had once and for all collapsed before the mighty Germanic art of Wagner and others. In response, Edward Elgar, William Walton, and other leading English composers of the early twentieth century steadily rebuilt their country’s musical profile and ultimately shook the “land without music” epithet. Acclaimed author and lecturer R. Larry Todd leads this season’s first Encounter and examines “The English Voice,” the summer’s second Concert Program, in the context of England’s musical renaissance.

Prelude Performance*
5:30 p.m., Stent Family Hall
Free Admission

*Learn more about Prelude Performances »

Image: Paul Windsor (b. 1937). Big Ben. Private collection/© Special
Photographers Archive/The Bridgeman Art Library