Music Graduate Colloquium: Kristin M. Franseen (Western)

Presented by Graduate Studies in Music, the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium series includes lectures by distinguished guests, Western faculty members, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.

All are welcome to attend. No advance registration or tickets required. End times are approximate. 

Kristin M. Franseen (Postdoctoral Associate, Western University): “Flattered, fêted, extolled, nay, almost deified”: Canonical Anxieties and (Mis)reporting Salieri’s Decline in the Media Landscape of 19th-Century Europe

Bio

Kristin M. Franseen is a postdoctoral associate in musicology at Western University. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University, where her research was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). She received her PhD in musicology from McGill University with a dissertation on early 20th-century queer musicological approaches to 18th- and 19th-century opera, symphonic music, and composer biography. Her first book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson, was published by Clemson University Press in 2023. Articles stemming from this research also appear in 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Theoria. read more

Abstract

In a footnote to an article on the present state of Viennese musical life published in the January 1824 issue of the British music magazine The Harmonicon, editor William Ayrton remarked upon the then-recent hospitalization of Antonio Salieri, lamenting that “so celebrated a musician…should now be compelled to seek refuge under a roof supported by charity” as “such an impeachment of the generosity, of the justice, of those classes that enjoyed the fruits of his genius, that we cannot find terms sufficiently strong to express the indignation which such a fact rouses.” Salieri was a regular topic of the magazine’s international coverage throughout its decade of existence (1823-1833), including a detailed obituary, frequent reports on his hospitalization and mental state reprinted from similar news items in Leipzig and Paris, and speculation about his musical legacy. Under the heading “Curious Documents,” The Harmonicon even printed a much-abridged translation of Giuseppe Carpani’s famous 1824 defense of Salieri, reflecting the international circulation of (and public interest in) both legitimate composer biography and more dubious biographical anecdote and gossip. Yet while both the magazine’s tone in the 1824 editorial note and the preface to Carpani’s letter were sympathetic to Salieri, other mentions of him and his work frequently take on a more critical tone. One negative review of a new English translation of his opera Tarare, for example, accuses audiences and the musical press of poor taste in having preferred Salieri’s operas to Mozart’s. read more