Music & Literature: Schubert's Schwanengesang
Literature
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Music & Literature: Schubert's Schwanengesang
Franz Schubert is well known as one of the first great masters of the Romantic song, and his late song cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is without exaggeration one of the most outstanding works of the genre in the 19th century. The masterpiece, set to, among others, poems by Heinrich Heine, can this time be heard in a thoroughly fresh and novel performance by a dazzlingly talented and extravagant young singer, Shannon Keegan, who emphasizes the topicality and personal relevance of Schubert’s songs. Complementing the poems that provide the texts of the songs, the deservedly popular Juhász Anna Irodalmi Szalon poetry program completes the evening.
Shannon Keegan, an American mezzo-soprano of Hungarian descent, earned her degrees at the University of Cincinnati and Rice University; she was also a member of the Studio of the Stuttgart State Opera between 2022 and 2024 and studied in Renée Fleming’s masterclass. In 2023 she gave her first concert with the Berlin Philharmonic in Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elias, conducted by Kirill Petrenko; in 2024 she made her debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in Parsifal, and in the same year portrayed Rosina in The Barber of Seville, and also sang in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. She has won first prizes, among others, at the Ottavio Ziino International Opera Competition, and has appeared in competitions of the Jensen Foundation, the Rochester Oratorio Society, Opera Ithaca, and the Gerda Lissner Foundation. At the 6th Éva Marton International Singing Competition she received the special prize of the House of Hungarian Music; she first sang Schubert’s Schwanengesang in Antwerp in the spring of 2025.
The Juhász Anna Literary Salon celebrates its fifteenth anniversary in 2025. The initiative aims to forge a community of lovers of classical and contemporary literature. Their monthly gatherings – with staged readings, conversations, and music – are realized based on the ideas and hosting of the salon’s namesake, writer and cultural manager Anna Juhász, and typically feature the participation of outstanding domestic performers.
Rock Troubadours (US, 70s): CSNY, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Roy Harper
