Reinhard Strohm

Background

Reinhard was born on August 4, 1942, in Munich, Germany.

Education

Reinhard attended the University of Munich. He also studied at Technical University, Berlin and received his Ph.D. in 1971.

Career

Reinhard started as an assistant editor at Richard-Wagner-Ausgabe and worked there during 1970-81. Later he worked at King’s College, University of London, as a lecturer during 1975-83, as a reader in music during 1990-91, as a professor of historical musicology during 1991-96, as a director of Institute for Advanced Musical Studies, beginning from 1991.

From 1983 he changed the location and worked at Yale University. He was a professor of music history during 1983-89. At Oxford University he was a Heather Professor of Music and Fellow of Wadham College from 1996, but terminated in 2007.

Strohm’s debut book, Italienische Opemarien des fruehen Settecento: 1720-1730, appeared in 1976 and “made an important contribution to opera of the primo settecento,” appraised Sven Hansell, claiming in a Notes review that “it belongs with the best writing of the twentieth century... Strohm establishes himself as a leader in eighteenth-century studies.” Hansell praised tire study, noting that “Strohm uses a resourceful imagination informed by admirable scholarly caution to come to grips with the early eighteenth-century Italian aria. By paying closest attention to textual details such as syntax, meter and, of course, the meaning of individual words, he throws wide the door to a flood of intriguing observations that let him deal with the organization of arias on all levels.”

Strohm again addressed the Italian opera in a number of essays written from 1975 to 1984 and collectively published in his 1985 book Essays on Handel and Italian Opera. “In his pleasant and modest Preface to these essays ... Strohm remarks that he feels a sense of gratitude for having been a witness to the great advances made in Handleian research during recent years. But he is far more than a ‘witness.’ These essays ... presented here for the first time in English, demonstrate that he belongs among those who created this flourishing of scholarship,” commended Paul Henry Lang in Musical Quarterly. Martin Cooper translated the essays; however, his translations were edited by Strohm before being published.

Reinhard's Dramma Per Musica is a collection of previously published essays and studies. As such, it is similar to Essays on Handel and Italian Opera in its structure, but with “a more obvious sense of purpose,” determined Keates. The volume, according to Keates, gives readers “a sense of eighteenth-century opera seria as something suspiciously like a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which cooperation between musicians, poets, scenic artists, audiences and even singers was, if not deliberate, then often profoundly intuitive.”

The Rise of European Music, 1380-1500 “deserves the attention of any serious historian of the period,” asserted Michael Eckert in an Antioch Review assessment that noted that Strohm “incorporate(s) much recent research in considerable detail, though at the cost of some unevenness.” Adelyn Peck Leverett, writing in Speculum, was disappointed that Strohm’s text excludes some readers from information that they probably would have enjoyed had the book not been written at the author’s own unparalleled level. However, Leverett, in general, was extremely favorable in review which concluded: “The Rise of European Music stands as a major and thought-provoking contribution to historical writing on music.”

Achievements

• Reinhard Strohm is a well-known Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in music history of the 14th to 18th centuries, opera, and postmodern views of musicology. He is the author of Music in Late Medieval Europe, La camera di un librettista: Pietro Pariati da Reggio di Lombardia and others.
  
  In addition to his numerous publications, he has contributed 36 articles on opera composers to Pipers Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Rise of European Music 1380-1500

    (This is a detailed and comprehensive survey of music in t...)

    1993
  • Music in Late Medieval Bruges 1985
  • Dramma Per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century 1997
  • Essays on Handel and Italian Opera 1985
  • Die italienische Oper im 18. 1976
  • Rienzi: Overture to the Opera 1990

Membership

Reinhard Strohm is a member of American Musicological Society; Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Interests

• travel, mountaineering

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 181
  2000