Music in the Waters – Professor David Clay Large

October 14, 2017  1:00 p.m.

JCC-SF

3200 California Street

San Francisco, CA

 

 

Music in the Waters

Composers and Conductors at the Grand Spas of Central Europe, 1810-1914

At the height of their influence in the 19 th century, the grand spa-towns of Central Europe – gilded refuges such as Baden-Baden, Bad Ischl, Marienbad, and Baden-bei- Wien – were primary

go-to places not only for medical care but also important centers of high culture, especially music. The rigorous cure ritual was lightened by regular musical entertainment of high quality,

and leading composers and conductors of the day used frequent visits to the grand spas to work as well as to heal. Focusing on six major figures of the era – Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner,

Berlioz, Brahms, and Mahler – the talk will examine the role that these musicians played in the life of the spas, and the meaning that the spa experience had in their artistic work. This lecture

will thus explore a new corner of the old inquiry into the relationship between place and creative production.

 

Professor David Clay Large

David Clay Large is currently a professor at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, U.C. Berkeley.  Previously he has taught at Berkeley, Smith College, Montana State University, and Yale University, where he was also Dean of Pierson College.

A specialist on the history of Modern Europe, especially Germany and Austria, Large has published widely in that field.  Among his major book publications are The Politics of Law and Order: A History of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr (1980); Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (1984); Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich (1992); Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s(1993); Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (1996); Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (1997); Berlin (2000); And the World Closed Its Doors: One Family’s Abandonment to the Holocaust (2003); Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (2007); and Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror and Triumph at the Olympic Games (2012).  Presently Large is completing a cultural and social history of the major Central European spa-towns, to be published in 2015.

Over the course of his forty-year career as a teacher and scholar, Large has been awarded major fellowships from many institutions, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Morse Faculty Fund of Yale University, and the German Marshal Fund.

 

Members are free. Guests are welcome – a $10 donation is suggested