Pauline Pocknell

Background

Pauline Pocknell was born in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of John Reed and Annie Reed.

Education

Pauline Pocknell earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors from the University of Manchester. She earned a Master of Arts from McMaster University. Her thesis was on Arthur Rimbaud. Pocknell earned a Bachelor of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Career

In 1979, Pauline Pocknell became a sessional lecturer in French at McMaster University. In 1994, she became a committee member of the Great Romantics Festival. She also worked as a freelance translator from French into English.

Pauline Pocknell was a contributor to books, including Analecta Lisztiana II: Liszt and His World, edited by Michael Saffle, 1997; Liszt 2000: The Great Hungarian and European Master at the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century, edited by Klara Hamburger, 2000; and Analecta Lisztiana III: Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe; Music as a Mirror of Religious, Political, Social, and Aesthetic Transformation, edited by Michael Saffle and Rossana Dalmonte, 2002. She contributed to periodicals, including Liszt Society Journal, Journal of the American Liszt Society, and Liszt Saeculum.

Pocknell worked as a research assistant and translator for Dr. Alan Walker, author of a biography of Franz Liszt, because of her French and research skills. It was not hard for her to move the focus from writers to musicians in that century; what was a revelation was a large amount of primary material in archives worldwide, written in French, never published, which changed entirely the myths about these musicians and their world. Pocknell's field of research switched in 1985. She got curious about a detail that didn't fit - a person close to a musician about whom little is known, a batch of unpublished correspondence in an obscure archive. She was a translator, editor, annotator, and author of the introduction to Franz Liszt and Agnes Street- Klindworth: A Correspondence, 1854-1886, published in 2000.

Achievements

• Pauline Pocknell contributed to several books and periodicals. She had one book published.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: A Correspondence (1854-1886)

    (Franz Liszt's liaison with Agnes Street-Klindworth was a ...)

    2000

Views

Quotations: "My primary motivation for writing is curiosity - a great wish to "get things right," particularly in biographies of nineteenth-century figures who can no longer speak for themselves, but get spoken about anyway."

Membership

• American Liszt Society , United States

• Pauline Pocknell was a corresponding member of Istituto Liszt.

  Istituto Liszt , Italy

Interests

• reading, walking, traveling, visiting art galleries

Connections

Pauline Pocknell's ex-husband was Brian Pocknell. She had two children: Annabella and Oliver (July 16, 1966 - September 11, 2015).

Father:

John Reed

Mother:

Annie Reed

Daughter:

Annabella Pocknell

Son:

Oliver Matthew Bennett Pocknell

Ex-husband:

Brian Pocknell

colleague:

Alan Walker

Alan Walker is a Professor Emeritus of Music at McMaster University, Canada, where he taught for 24 years. He was on the staff of the Music Division of the British Broadcasting Corporation in London. He has broadcast for the BBC, for the CBC, and for CJRT - FM (Toronto), and gives regular public lectures on the music of the Romantic Era, a period in which he specializes. His thirteen published books include A Study in Musical Analysis, An Anatomy of Musical Criticism, and symposia on Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, and he is the recipient of the Music Teachers National Association 2010 Achievement Award.

Alan Walker is also the author of a three-volume, prize-winning biography of Franz Liszt, a project which took him twenty-five years to complete, and for which the President of Hungary bestowed on him the medal ProCulturaHungarica. The biography also received the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, presented by HRH The Duke of Kent in London, and in January 2012, the Government of Hungary bestowed on him one of its highest honors: the Knight's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.