Proserpina by Goethe and Seckendorff had not been performed since its 1778 premiere in Weimar. But on October 14 it was heard again on the Weis Center Stage at Bucknell University along with a new electro-acoustic composition on Goethe’s text by Paul Botelho. This is all part of GSNA member Annie Randall’s project Proserpina: Two Monodramas (1777 and 2016).
Here’s what Proserpina looks like in the Goethe/Seckendorff version of 1777-78—not seen by anyone since that time (!!)—played by the New York Baroque Orchestra: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmpfI0A2d0s. And here’s what she looks like in the 2016 electro-acoustic version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqL2hhyNLSs.See an overview of the project.---In other news, we are pleased to announce that Past President W. Daniel Wilson has been awarded the Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Supported by the German Foreign Office and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the award carries a prize of 60,000 euros. It also entails an invitation to collaborate with other scholars at the University of Göttingen and the Foundation for Weimar Classicism.Dan Wilson’s research focuses on literature, culture and society of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany. He is currently researching a book on the politics of the Goethe-Gesellschaft in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He reports that he has come across some interesting things about the Goethe Society of America (in New York), which was an Ortsgruppe of the Goethe-Gesellschaft. It turns out that the American “branch” was very important for Nazi cultural politics. More to come!www.royalholloway.ac.uk/aboutus/newsandevents/news/newsarticles/danwilsonmajoraward.aspx