Nimrod Reitman
Undoing Lamentation. From Monteverdi to Mahler
and
Tehila Nini Goldstein, Soprano, Berlin
It is not clear whether poignant and pained acts of utterance, such as those contained by lamentation, belong to performance or rather indicate the refusal of performance. By its very nature lamentation must disavow its performative value, for no rhetoric is adequate to the sorrow that it seeks to carry. And yet, both music and language paid particular attention to the lament. The lament became a rhetorically and musically contested site where poetry and music seem to collide, despite themselves, constantly interfering with each other.
Spanning from Claudio Monteverdi to Gustav Mahler laments have repeatedly recorded an impossible yet necessary death wish. My talk will concentrate on a particular family of laments that are premised on the death of children and even the terrible phantasm of infanticide. Using Monteverdi and Mahler as a basis for an analysis of infanticide initiated by the faux-alliance of poetry and music, the talk will explore modalities of the musical lament and the way it constantly undoes itself.
The lecture will be in the form of a lecture-concert and will demonstrate the various forms and haunting effects laments have on both music and language to this day.
Tehila Nini Goldstein was born in New York and grew up in Israel, is an emerging young soloist and passionate chamber musician. Her repertoire includes classical opera as well as baroque, contemporary and Israeli music. She is has been the winner of the Tel Aviv Music Academy Singing Competition, received a scholarship from the America Israel Cultural Foundation and was also a prize winner in the prestigious Liederkranz Foundation Competition in New York. At the Innsbrucker Festwochen in 2011, she won second prize in the International Singing competition for Baroque Opera Pietro Antonio Cesti.
Nimrod Reitman received his Ph.D. from the department of German at New York University in June 2015 and is currently the 2016 Albert Einstein Fellow at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. The historical and philosophical frameworks of his research aim at marking disjunctions in figuration as seen both in the philosophy and the history of thought in Romantic and Modernist poetry. His dissertation, entitled: “On the Serious Motherhood of Men: Dissonance in Music, Rhetoric, and Poetry,” describes covert maternal tropologies and disruptions effected by femininity in theories of subjectivity and the history and rhetoric of lamentation in German, Italian, and Hebrew literature. He is currently completing a book project on the rhetoric of the musical lament and a monograph on the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.
In addition to his research, he has been working as an art curator and has curated a number of exhibitions in Israel, and Germany, to which he also contributed catalogue entries. Reitman is a classically trained pianist who has performed as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, Israel and the USA.
Markus Messling ist Stellvertretender Direktor des Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin.
Eine Gemeinschaftsveranstaltung mit der Daimler und Benz Stiftung, Ladenburg/Berlin
