Associate Professor Marjorie Hirsch's work published once again!

Associate Professor Marjorie Hirsch has recently completed her second book, Romantic Lieder and the Search for Lost Paradise, published by Cambridge University Press. 

The archetypal myth of lost paradise, found in both civilized and primitive cultures throughout history, was central to Enlightenment and Romantic thought, affecting philosophical, literary, artistic, and musical works.  Hirsch’s book explores manifestations of the lost paradise myth in Lieder by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and other nineteenth century composers. Through a series of autonomous yet interrelated studies, the book traces the myth’s influence on the origins and development of the Romantic Lied.  Particular attention is granted to works conveying nostalgia for classical antiquity, childhood, and folksong. 
 
Hirsch’s first book, Schubert’s Dramatic Lieder (Cambridge, 1993), investigates the composer’s introduction of dramatic poetic and musical elements within the framework of the Lied, revealing the influence of opera.

Professor Hirsch is currently teaching a new interdisciplinary course entitled Myth in Music, an outgrowth of research undertaken for her second book.  In this course, students explore how composers over the last four centuries have portrayed such mythological figures as Orpheus, Don Juan, Prometheus, Siegfried, and Faust in operas, ballets, art songs, symphonic poems, Broadway musicals, and films.

She also teaches courses in Classical and Romantic music, music appreciation, storytelling in music, American music, women in music, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, and Verdi.   

Hirsch received her B.A. in Music and English from Yale University in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Music History from Yale in 1989.  She has taught at Williams since 2001.