Date/Time
Fri, Dec 4, 2026
4:00 pm EST - 5:30 pm EST
Presenter: Kathryn L. Libin
This Encounter is with a nobleman at the turn of the nineteenth century who is known almost exclusively for his support of Beethoven, who first rehearsed the Eroica Symphony in his Vienna palace. The 7th Prince Lobkowitz and his descendants preserved an extraordinary wealth of materials – music, archival records and documents, instruments, family correspondence – that taken together tell a story of a dense network of musical activity and broad cultural impact, reaching well beyond a patron’s support of a single composer. The peculiar fate that befell this legacy in the twentieth century, when the turmoil of war and social rupture exiled the Lobkowicz family and scattered its possessions, has made the construction of a coherent historical narrative very challenging. This talk will focus in part on the new portrait of Prince Lobkowitz that emerges from research among all these materials, made possible after the restitutions of aristocratic property in the Czech Republic in the 1990s; but also on the many difficulties, both pre- and post-restitution, that have complicated scholarly research agendas and made it hard to assess the full extent of Lobkowitz’s contributions to musical culture.
Registration:
Check back in November for a registration link. Registration is free but required to receive the zoom link.
Bio:
Kathryn L. Libin is Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music at Vassar College. During the past thirteen years she has led research teams, including several generations of Vassar students, that have catalogued the Lobkowicz Music Archive, and most recently the Loreto Music Archive of sacred music. She co-curated the new music galleries in the Lobkowicz Palace museum in Prague, and has published two volumes in The Lobkowicz Collections Music Series, on its musical highlights and on its Beethoven sources. Currently she is finishing a book, Beethoven’s Backer – Prince Lobkowitz and Musical Culture, to be published by Cambridge University Press. She has served as president of the Mozart Society of America and the American Musical Instrument Society, and as a board member of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music.