A public event on “Baudelaire and the mélodie” will be held on Friday 20 May, 2.30-4.00pm, in the Piano Gallery at the Royal Academy of Music.

Please see the Royal Academy of Music website for more details.

Assisted by Academy vocal students, Dr Roy Howat, Dr Emily Kilpatrick and Dr Helen Abbott explore Fauré’s three Baudelaire song settings of 1870–71 together with Chabrier’s and Duparc’s 1870 settings of ‘L’invitation au voyage’. The session will examine these settings relative to the new edition in progress of Fauré’s songs (a project funded by the AHRC and led by Dr Roy Howat), examining the composers’ responses to Baudelaire’s complex poetry and the challenges the songs pose for the performer and the editor.

Bringing together the specialist research expertise of a Musicologist (AHRC Research Grant holder Dr Roy Howat, Royal Academy of Music) and a French literature scholar (AHRC Early Career Fellow Dr Helen Abbott, Bangor University) this research event came about after both award holders discovered how closely their research areas intersect. Dr Howat’s project “The songs of Gabriel Fauré: New critical edition” will lead to a new publication of Fauré’s songs, including his settings of Baudelaire which have received little critical attention to date. Dr Abbott’s project “Killing Off Poetry: Baudelaire Revisited” will lead to a monograph on early song settings of Baudelaire, especially of his sonnet ‘La Mort des amants’. After meeting at one of Dr Howat’s research events at the Royal Academy of Music in October 2010, Howat and Abbott then bumped into each other at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris in January 2011, where they were both studying manuscripts of nineteenth-century French song settings. Realising that there were some important gaps to fill in the critical scholarship, they have put together this joint research event on song settings of Baudelaire in 1870-71 to share the important new insights that each has unearthed during the course of their respective AHRC-funded projects.

For more information, see:
http://www.ram.ac.uk/songs-of-faure
http://www.ram.ac.uk/events?event_id=669
http://www.royhowat.com/
http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ml/staff/Abbott.php