Event details

The Program in European Cultural Studies (ECS) is pleased to announce that Peter Sellars will deliver this year’s annual Carl E. Schorske Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, April 15.

A reception will follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.

In 1909, already fatally ill, Gustav Mahler chose the words of the Chinese Tang Dynasty Buddhist poet, Wang Wei, to describe in his “Das Lied von der Erde” (Song of the Earth) what he felt and imagined to be the last disintegrating months of his life and the final collapse of the Western symphonic tradition. In the same month, another visionary Viennese composer, Mahler’s student and friend Arnold Schoenberg, created “Erwartung” (Expecting), his opera of the future for a single female voice that signaled the birth of a new symphonic universe. Both men were writing music that was artistically revolutionary, and that also powerfully prophesized pogroms, holocausts, and atrocities of the coming century while engaging spiritually inflected strategies of political resistance and transcendence.

In honor of Carl Schorske, one of the preeminent scholars of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, this talk will recontextualize the Orientalisms and Expressionisms of both Mahler and Schoenberg in the light of contemporary global struggles, contradictions, setbacks, and cross-cultural creative initiatives.