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Paul Bertagnolli

Associate Professor of Musicology

Paul A. Bertagnolli (Musicology) completed his Ph.D. in musicology at Washington University in Saint Louis with a dissertation on the orchestral and choral music that Franz Liszt composed to accompany a play by the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment author, Johann Gottfried Herder. He also earned an M.A. in music criticism at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, an M.M. in performance at Yale University's School of Music, and bachelor's degrees in performance and music education in his home state at the University of Wyoming. A nineteenth-century music specialist, Bertagnolli is the author of Prometheus in Music: Representations of the Myth in the Romantic Era (Ashgate, 2007). The book comprises chapters on Beethoven's ballet; three lieder by Reichardt, Schubert, and Wolf; Liszt's incidental music; four nationalistic French choral works; an atheistic cantata by Hubert Parry; and concert overtures by Bargiel and Goldmark. His articles have appeared in periodicals such as Nineteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the American Liszt Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Journal of Musicological Research. His contributions to edited volumes include chapters in Franz Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe, Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, Liszt's Legacies, and the Oxford Handbook of Atheism. Bertagnolli has presented papers at conferences throughout North America and Western Europe. Currently his research focuses on the piano music of American composer Edward MacDowell. Bertagnolli's regular rotation of course offerings includes graduate seminars on Liszt, Schubert, Wagner, Classical and Romantic Performance Practice, and French Music (the latter divided into two parts that correspond to stages in French political and cultural history, the first extending from 1830 to 1870, the second from 1870 to 1914). In addition, more traditional surveys for master's and undergraduate students cover the romantic period (again divided into two parts by the revolutions of 1848-1849), chamber music, and the third part of the undergraduate music history sequence, the latter encompassing the Enlightenment, the classical period, and much of the romantic period.