May 1, 2000
RELEASE ON RECEIPT

Guest Lecture on Musorgsky and the Russian Art Song May 6 at Oberlin

OBERLIN-- "Musorgsky and the Russian Art Song" is the title of a lecture-recital to be given by Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

Emerson's latest book -- a biography of Russia's greatest musi-cal dramatist, titled The Life of Musorgsky -- has been published by the Cambridge University Press as part of its "Musical Lives" series.

Musorgsky (1839-1881) is known the world over for his opera Boris Godunov, his innovative realistic art songs, and his pianistic work Pictures at an Exhibition. Yet during his life Musorgsky had no institutional connections, no 'degree', no family of his own, not even a permanent address.

Emerson's book emphasizes the psychological and economic factors that contributed to the composer's remarkable autodidactic rise and tragic, premature end. When he died in 1881 in St. Petersburg at the age of 42, in poverty and relative obscurity, he was known for a single opera, Boris Godunov, and a handful of eccentric "realistic" songs."

Emerson has written extensively on 19th and 20th-century Russian music, including, with musicologist Robert William Oldani, "Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconstructions." She is also a specialist in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin

Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli 5/1/00 #87 bg