Jacob Derkert An empire in decline! 26 September 2017

Programme

Before the performance of Nicht Schlafen, musicologist and doctor Jacob Derkert gives a lecture on Gustav Mahler and an empire in decline. The lecture is about Gustav Mahler's music and a society in ferment before the First World War. Gustav Mahler is the epitome of an Austrian artist and intellectual around 1900. He experienced various forms of exile, and wrestled with collective and individual questions of identity. Although he was, along with Strauss, the last great Romantic composer in a primeval German tradition, his symphonies realised a modern fragmented worldview, which contemporaries perceived as a mixture of high and low. This combination of romanticism and shifting diversity is probably the key to his contemporary relevance. Gustav Mahler's music and the society he lived in were the starting points for choreographer Alain Platels in the creation of the performance Nicht Schlafen.

Jacob Derkert is a music researcher at Stockholm University, who has mainly worked on various aspects of musical avant-gardism 1880-1980, in a broad perspective of musical techniques and artistic approaches on the one hand, and the social conditions of music and the history of ideas on the other.

Tickets for the talk can only be purchased in conjunction with the purchase of a ticket for the performance. Not sleeping 26 Sep at 19.