Four Texts, Many Songs: Mignon Settings in Interdisciplinary Dialogue

24-26 September 2027, Weimar

Call for Papers

A conference organized by the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar (Maren Bagge, Nina Noeske) and the University of Erfurt (Anna Magdalena Bredenbach), in cooperation with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

International Conference ()

Mignon, a character from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ranks among the most influential and multifaceted literary figures in the history of European literature and music. Since the late 18th century, this enigmatic and androgynous character has generated a rich and varied reception history in which aesthetic, cultural, and social meanings and attributions overlap.

The conference focuses on the four songs sung by Mignon in the novel –
“Kennst du das Land,” “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,” “Heiß mich nicht reden,” and “So lasst mich scheinen” – and on their manifold musical settings from 1795 to the present. “Kennst du das Land” also evokes the topos of longing for Italy, which recurs as a leitmotif throughout Mignon’s reception history . With more than 150 compositions, including works by Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Carl Loewe, Franz Schubert, Fanny Hensel, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Josephine Lang, Hugo Wolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Alban Berg, this repertoire constitutes a rich corpus that illuminates the diversity of the genre in its historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts.

Against this background, the conference asks how Mignon’s songs can beunderstood at the intersection of genre history and genre aesthetics, and how they undergo transformations and shifts. How do individual musical settings relate to the song traditions of their time – and how do they respond to one another? Which cultural topoi – longing for Italy,
androgyny, childhood, otherness – are brought to the fore (or obscured) in the various settings? How does our perspective on the texts change when their musical settings are not considered as isolated individual works, but as a dialogue unfolding over many decades? Focusing on four texts that have been set to music repeatedly enables a close integration of literary and musicological perspectives.

Possible thematic areas include:

- the relationship between words and music, the relation between voice and piano, and the musical characterization of the figure of Mignon within the art song;

- the compositional design of Mignon settings between individual song and song cycle;

- the negotiation of gender and androgyny as aesthetic categories in the literary texts and their musical settings;

- historical and media-historical contexts, as well as intertextual and transcultural dynamics, particularly in connection with translation, multilingualism, and cultural transfer;

- questions of canonization and decanonization in the Mignon repertoire, as well as the historical and contemporary performance and reception of the settings;

- transgressions of genre boundaries and intermedial transformations of the Mignon material – for example in opera and music theater – as comparative perspectives on the aesthetic specificity and limits of the art song.

Taken together, the conference seeks to develop a multifaceted panorama of song history: one that does not follow a linear model of progress, but instead makes visible the diversity of the genre's manifestations within their respective contexts.

Formats:

We invite contributions from musicology, music theory, literary studies, and related disciplines. Both comparative approaches and case studies of individual works are welcome. Contributions on lesser-known or previously overlooked works, as well as interdisciplinary papers, are especially encouraged. In addition to individual papers, we also welcome alternative presentation formats. These may include dialogic formats – for example, joint papers that combine literary and musicological perspectives, or intergenerational co-presentations – as well as source- or listening-centered discussion formats. Contributions from the field of artistic research (e.g. lecture-recitals) are also welcome.

Organizational Information and Submission:

- Dates: September 24–26, 2027

- Venue: Stadtschloss Weimar

- Length of papers / artistic-scholarly presentations: 20 min. + 10 min.
discussion

- Conference languages: German and English

- Proposals (title, format, abstract of approx. 350 words, short biography of approx. 150 words per person) should be sent by September 30, 2026

- Notification of acceptance: October 2026

A publication of selected contributions is planned.

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Dimanche 6 Septembre, 2026