Blattner Series Lecture and Zoom chat with Kate van Orden, bassoonist and Harvard University’s Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music

Love and Longing

The festival theme beautifully captures the essence of Romanticism, both the Endless Longing from which any True Romantic necessarily suffered and the dark, unsettled quality of the music. In this year’s final talk, Kate van Orden discusses the nineteenth-century cult of emotion, the musicians, poets, and artists who lived by it, and how it was that music became a model for all the arts and Romanticism itself an infinite striving toward the unattainable.