GIOVANNI INSOM: GOETHE’S LIFE THROUGH MUSIC – EMOTIONS, ENCOUNTERS AND REFLECTIONS

PRESENTATION OF THE BOOK AND CONCERT

Event in Italian language

All seats are unfortunately already reserved. 

Music by Willem de Fesch, Domenico Cimarosa, Ferdinando Paër, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian Bach
Performers: Arabella Kramer, soprano – Fabio Aureli, tenor – Stephen Kramer, piano

The book traces Goethe’s life through all his experiences that have a connection to music: from his first hearing at home in 1753 at the age of 4 to his last conversation with Eckermann on 11 March 1832. In these almost eighty years, Goethe had the most diverse musical experiences, managed the theatre in Weimar for 26 years, and met, and sometimes cultivated contacts with some of the leading musicians, composers and singers of that period, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Carl Maria von Weber, Spontini, Angelica Catalani, Henriette Sontag, etc. Although he never explicitly wrote any texts on music, this art is present in all his work: mainly in his letters, but also in travel accounts, poems, novels, essays, maxims and more. Added to this are the testimonies of his contemporaries who shared musical experiences with him.
In the course of this presentation, we will offer a live performance of some of his vocal and piano compositions that he listened to and commented on.

Giovanni Insom (Rome, 1959), a graduate in Germanistics and musicology, has worked on computerised cataloguing of manuscripts and music editions since 1988. In 1992, he published a collection of Goethe’s writings on music. In 2005, he edited the catalogue of the Music Fund of the Montecassino Abbey Archives and that of the Music Fund of the ‘S. Domenico’ Diocesan Library in Ortona. He has been living and working in France since 2006 and deals with the subject of Goethe and music, of which this book is the result.