This day of lectures will explore how music came to express cherished hopes and beliefs in three different cultural and political environments in 19th and early 20th-century Europe. The first lecture explores what it was to be Hungarian when the new capital city of Budapest was created in 1867, and why Liszt’s younger contemporary Bartók later challenged his view of the national musical style.

The second lecture follows the trailblazing paths of the Czech composers Smetana, Dvořák and Janáček when Bohemia and Moravia were still part of Habsburg Austria, and the last explores how composers like Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky fought against the prejudices of Imperial Russia's westernised elite to establish a national musical tradition rooted in folk song. The three lectures will be illustrated with excerpts from the works of all these composers, as well as paintings from the period in which they lived and worked.

Lecturer

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator.  Her work ranges across the arts, from painting to music, and across cultures, from Italy, France and Germany to the countries of Northern and Eastern Europe. She began her career as an academic in Slavic studies after completing her doctorate at Oxford, and has held fellowships both in the UK and at the European University Institute in Florence. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Modern Languages in Oxford, and in 2024 became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College.

The author of several books, including biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and a study of Wagner's influence in Russia, she is also well known as a translator - her publications include acclaimed editions of Anna Karenina and Chekhov's stories for Oxford World’s Classics. 

Over the years she has written on music, literature and drama for institutions including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Salzburg Festival, and about art for Apollo and The Burlington Magazine. She is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Russia, and its connection to modernist developments in Western Europe.

She has led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where she lives, to the Harriman Institute in New York, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.