2022: Celia Applegate, “Music and Work 01, Working at Music: The ‘Work-Play Dilemma’ in Modern German Musical Culture”

December 5, 2022

Celia Applegate, “Music and Work 01, Working at Music: The ‘Work-Play Dilemma’ in Modern German Musical Culture”

George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/program/

Monday, 5 December 2022, 18:00 IDT

This series of Jerusalem Mosse Lectures was originally scheduled for December 2020 but was postponed two years due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

This lecture series was published as The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany’s Long Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2025).

Applegate, The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany's Long Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2025).

Maiersdorf Faculty Club and Conference Center
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 9190501
ISRAEL

Chair: Aya Elyada (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Global Mosse Lecture Series
Hebrew University Department of History
Koebner-Minerva Center for German History

Lecture Overview: Long before there was Muzak and AirPods, workers would often sing as they worked. This lecture will spread out from fields and factories and army barracks to the organized activities of workers in factory bands and workers’ festivals, and of soldiers at war. This was music not for listening but for playing and singing, accompanying work and after work. Rather than professional musicians, this lecture will focus on amateurs and their self-organization.

Celia Applegate studies the culture, society, and politics of modern Germany, with particular interest in the history of music, nationalism, and national identity. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), the co-editor (with musicologist Pamela Potter) of Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2000), the author of Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Cornell, 2005), winner of the DAAD/GSA Book Prize, and of The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto, 2017). She is currently working on comprehensive interpretation of musical life in Germany from the seventeenth century to the present, titled “Music and the Germans: A History.” She is Past President of the German Studies Association, Past President of the Central European History Society, and incoming chair of the AHA’s Modern European section. Professor Applegate teaches courses on modern European politics, society, and culture; the history of the Holocaust; and the history of European nationalism and ethnic conflicts.

Aya Elyada’s fields of interest are German and German-Jewish history and culture; Christian-Jewish relations; the history of the Yiddish-German encounter; and the social and cultural history of language and translation. Before joining the Hebrew University in 2012 she spent five years as a visiting PhD student at the University of Munich, and another three years as a visiting post-doctoral fellow at Duke University.

Her first book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, appeared in 2012 with Stanford University Press. The book explores the unique and unlikely phenomenon of “Christian Yiddishism” in early modern Germany, namely the Christian interest in and engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century.

Her second book, A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938, appeared in 2026 with Stanford University Press. The book explores a relatively unknown chapter in the German-Jewish “romance with the past,” namely the engagement of German-speaking Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage.