Katherine R. Larson

Voicing Lyric: The Songs of Mary Wroth

Music—and vocal music in particular—is central to an understanding of Mary Wroth’s writings. Wroth received excellent musical training, as the well-known portrait depicting her or one of her younger sisters with a theorbo attests, and displayed considerable proficiency as a lutenist.1 She participated in musical performances and had her lyrics set to music by contemporary composers. Like her father, she also wrote poems in response to popular songs that display her sensitivity to the emerging declamatory vocal style.2 Her writings draw explicitly on her musical training and interests, revealing the extent to which she was thinking musically when she wrote. In particular, they demonstrate her fascination with the affective power of song, its relationship to specific spaces of textual circulation and musical performance, and the dynamism of the singing body. Song pervades all of Wroth’s extant writings. The games played by the shepherds and shepherdesses in Love’s Victory include a lively singing competition. Song constitutes a crucial narrative practice for Wroth’s protagonists as they struggle to articulate their passions within Urania’s gardens and chambers. Songs are also interspersed throughout the manuscript and print versions of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. With few exceptions, however, those scholars who have engaged with Wroth’s songs do so from a literary, rather than a musical, perspective.

Politics, Creativity, and the Aging Artist: Narrativising Richard Strauss's Last Years

The numerous and often contradictory accounts of Richard Strausss final years and final works speak to the difficulty biographers have had producing a convincing narrative of the German composers life. By examining how a sampling of German and English-language biographies tackle the controversies, political and musical, that colored Strausss last years, we investigate here the interaction of models of aging into old age with the biographical project of narrativising a particular, and particularly impenetrable, life. We focus on Strausss ambiguous relationship to Nazism, before moving to the conflicting biographical readings of the composition and performance of Metamorphosen, a work of quasi-program music commissioned during the war years and completed when Strauss was in his eighties, and which bears the enigmatic inscription, ‘In Memoriam.’ Preconceived notions of aging and old age often influence and even determine the meaning of a particular life narrative. The competing claims of Strausss biographers attest to the arbitrariness of life course models, which belie the complexity, contradiction, and multiplicity of human lives. Our comparative study of the biographical treatments of Strausss last years demonstrates that narrativization of the life course risks overdetermining interpretations of aging persons and of aging more generally.