Date/Time
Fri, Feb 13, 2026
2:30 pm EST - 4:00 pm EST
In August 2026, the longstanding Bard Music Festival turns its attention to Mozart, which includes the publication of Mozart and His World (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming late spring/summer 2026), edited by Simon P. Keefe. In this session, the volume editor and three of the contributing authors introduce their chapter topics. Dorian Bandy views Mozart’s chamber music and to a lesser extent operas through the lens of the “system,” previously associated only with scientific and philosophical texts from the Enlightenment. This includes situating issues and ideas previously characterized as “coherence” and “unity” in their own specific intellectual climate. Adeline Mueller probes the careers of three of the most prominent and esteemed women instrumentalists with whom Mozart worked during his decade in Vienna, Josepha Auernhammer (piano), Regina Strinasacchi (violin) and Marianne Kirchgessner (glass harmonica), focussing on their engagement with Mozart and on their other musical activities, as well as the gendering of their reception. Keefe re-evaluates the reception of the French parody of The Magic Flute as Les Mystères d’Isis (Paris Opéra, 1801), by Étienne Morel de Chédeville and Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith. Initially revered then long reviled, this grand opéra’s complicated genesis and cultural environment in Napoleonic France, and its crucial role as a springboard for nineteenth-century reception of Mozart in France, demonstrate the power of publically popular events and works to exert a profound influence on a wide range of reception-related activity. And Edmund Goehring offers a wide-ranging, revisionist interpretation of The Magic Flute, linking it to the ethos of the Counter-Reformation and to a Baroque culture of ceremonial piety. Moving beyond ideas such as spectacle and ritual impeding Enlightenment, and conflict between rationality and irrationality existing at the opera’s core, Goehring sheds light on heroism and sensibility among the main characters, and on Mozart’s creation of counter-reformation music, in the process drawing parallels between Mozart and Dante.
Registration:
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Biographies:
Simon P. Keefe is J.R. Hoyle Chair of Music at the University of Sheffield, President of the Royal Musical Association, and elected life member of the Academy for Mozart Research at the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg. The most recent among his five monographs are Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (2012), Mozart in Vienna: the Final Decade (2017), and Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century: Parallel and Intersecting Patterns of Reception (2023), all published by Cambridge University Press.
Edmund Goehring teaches music history at the University of Western Ontario. He writes primarily on the music of Mozart and how it contributes to our sense of history, criticism, and creativity. His three monographs are Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: the Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in ‘Così fan tutte’ (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past: An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and Mozart, Genius and the Possibilities of Art (University of Rochester Press, 2024). Ed has also published essays on film (In Bruges, Don Jon, and Ratatouille), and on reductive tendencies in scientific explanations of the arts.
Dorian Bandy is associate professor of musicology and historical performance at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He is the author of Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art (Chicago, 2023) as well as articles on a wide range of topics in 17th- through 19th-century music. His most recent solo recording, of Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola, was released in 2025, and two further recordings—of Mozart’s late Viennese violin sonatas, and of oboe quartets by Mozart and his contemporaries—are forthcoming in 2026.
Adeline Mueller is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in opera and art song by Mozart and his contemporaries, particularly in German-speaking Europe, with additional research interests in music and childhood, music and disability, and marginalized composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press, and she has also published articles in (for example) Eighteenth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, Frontiers of Communication, The Cambridge Companion to ‘The Magic Flute’, and The Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century (forthcoming).