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Captivated by Heine: Youens Awarded 4th NEH Fellowship
A four-time recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships, as well as Guggenheim and National Humanities Center grants, Susan Youens, J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music, focuses on the relationship between poetry and song in Germany’s long 19th century, from the French Revolution to World War I. In particular, she examines songs as social artifacts—as windows onto the customs, manners, gender roles, nationalistic sentiments, politics, and religious life of the period.
For Youens’s current NEH-funded research, she is writing a book about the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, whose poems have been set to music over 8,000 times. His work had “a mammoth effect on music history,” Youens says, and she seeks to discover why composers were so attracted to his verse and to analyze musicians’ changing attitudes to this famous body of poetry.
In addition, Youens is fascinated by the political afterlife of songs to texts by Heine during the Third Reich. The Nazis, determined to extol the great German composers as superior to all others, somehow had to account for these musicians’ attraction to poetry by the Jew Heine, whose books were banned and burned.
Youens shares her passion for music and poetry with her students in the Department of Music, where she especially enjoys teaching Music History III, a survey of music from early Haydn to Brahms.
Youens’s forthcoming book will be published by Cambridge University Press, which has published five of her previous seven books, and will be entitled Heine and the Lied: The Early Years.