Anna Vilenskaya in Luxembourg 14 March 2025

Anna Vilenskaya is a musicologist, lecturer and researcher of contemporary music. She has changed the approach of telling about music towards visualization, simplicity, emotionality and practical benefits for the listener.

Lecture topic: The Romantic Era: How to Listen and Understand

Paradox: Mozart wrote symphonies and sonatas, and Schubert wrote symphonies and sonatas; they all sound stunningly beautiful and sound quite similar to each other. But we think of Mozart as classical and Schubert as romantic.

Why? Who drew this line? At the lecture we will talk about it, and then try to decompose Romanticism into atoms and understand how the style in music changed then. We'll find out what Liszt and Grieg have in common; we'll see if a classicist and a romantic could have lived in the same country at the same time; we'll learn how to distinguish classicism from romanticism by ear. You don't need to know any music beforehand.