Conference: Music & Psychoanalysis 4




Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts show

Summary: <br> Stephen Gee: Michael Tippett: From Persecution to Paradise<br> <br> <br> Beate Perrey: Mixing memory and Desire: The Voice of Freud, Schubert and Schumann<br> <br> <br> Stephen Gee: Michael Tippett: From Persecution to Paradise<br> Michael Tippett’s musical output spans the decades from the early 1930s to the 1990s. It is by turns exuberantly lyrical and vibrantly modernist. He was that rare person in England, an intellectual whose life and work was engaged with the times he lived in. In the 1930s his development as a composer went alongside a passionate commitment to the politics of the Left. His personal life and psychic freedom were also at stake. Like Auden and Britten, Tippett was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal and its social expression unthinkable. He turned to a Jungian analyst, John Layard, and his sessions with him together with his own dream analysis helped him to find enough emotional and psychic freedom to release his creative imagination.<br> <br> <br> Beate Perrey: Mixing memory and Desire: The Voice of Freud, Schubert and Schumann<br> Freud didn't discover the unconscious; rather, his whole way of thinking and style of writing are imbued with the ideals and affective investments of his visionary predecessors, the Early Romantic generation of writers and poets such as Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Brentano and Eichendorff. Nor was Freud much of a musician, or even known as a music lover. And yet, Freud’s ideas, concepts and metaphors can bring a whole new intensity both to our perception and understanding of that special sound world which is the German Lied. I shall, in a few chosen songs by Schubert and Schumann, explore their idiosyncratic beauty and multilayered meanings.<br>