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General admission: $15
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Featuring Ryan Nash, tenor, and Aubrie Jacobson, fortepiano
Performing the complete song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin”

Tickets include access to a pre-concert lecture with Susan Youens, one of the world’s foremost Schubert scholars
Pre-concert lecture: 7 pm in Collins Recital Hall
Concert: 8 pm in Collins Recital Hall

Susan Youens, lecturer
Ryan Nash, tenor
Aubrie Jacobson, fortepiano

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Program

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Pianists Martha Fischer and Bill Lutes will host the 11th annual Schubertiade featuring faculty and students of the Mead Witter School of Music on January 26 and January 28. These concerts are given in the spirit of those legendary evenings that took place in Vienna in the homes and salons of Franz Schubert’s friends and supporters, where they gathered to hear his glorious music, often with the composer himself at the piano.

This year’s Schubertiade encompasses two events, both of which focus on the period between 1822-24, a time when Schubert experienced a terrible crisis in his life, but also composed many of his greatest works. These included the song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin,” settings for solo voice and piano of 20 poems by Wilhelm Müller, describing the love of a young miller for the “beautiful miller girl” who ultimately rejects him. School of Music graduate students Ryan Nash, tenor, and Aubrie Jacobson, piano, will perform the complete cycle on Friday, January 26 at 7 pm.

On Sunday, January 28 at 3 pm, the Schubertiade will be devoted to other songs, vocal ensembles, and chamber music from the same period as the “Müllerin” cycle featuring Martha Fischer, Bill Lutes, and guests.

Schubert was becoming increasingly well-known and his songs were being published and included in public concerts. Then, late in 1822 and the winter of 1823 he was diagnosed with a terminal illness and was hospitalized. Despite this setback, Schubert continued to give the world an extraordinary body of beautiful music, right up to the time of his death at the age of 31. This Schubertiade weekend promises to be a sampling of the richness, intensity, and variety of Schubert’s writing at this pivotal time in his life.

A special feature of this pair of concerts will be the opportunity to learn more about Schubert and his music from Susan Youens, one of the world’s foremost Schubert scholars. She will give pre-concert lectures prior to both events.

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Susan Youens, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976, is the J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught from 1984 to 2018. She is the author of eight books on German song—Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Cornell UP, 1991), Schubert’s poets and the making of lieder (Cambridge UP, 1996), Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (Cambridge UP, 1992), Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music (Princeton UP, 1992), Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs (Cambridge UP, 2001), Heinrich Heine and the Lied (Cambridge UP, 2007), and Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin(Cambridge UP, 1997), as well as 80 scholarly articles. 

She is a recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and has taught at the Aldeburgh, Bard, Marlboro, LaJolla, and Santa Fe festivals, among others. She has delivered lectures in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, England, and Ireland, and she wrote program notes for Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera until 2019. She is currently working on A Social History of the Lied.

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Raised in Massachusetts, Ryan Nash is a second year graduate student pursuing his Master’s degree in voice performance at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Mead Witter School of Music. He is currently studying under Dr. Julia Rottmayer. During his time at UW–Madison, Ryan has performed with the UW-Madison Opera as Albert in Albert Herring, Mercurio in La Calisto, and Gastone in La Traviata. Before this he received his Bachelor’s degree in vocal performance from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This past summer Ryan was seen performing with the Madison Savoyards as Fredric in their production of The Pirates of Penzance.

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Madison-based collaborative pianist Aubrie Jacobson earned a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from Viterbo University in 2019 and a master’s degree in collaborative piano from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mead Witter School of Music in 2021. Aubrie is now pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at UW-Madison and a doctoral minor in arts administration from the Bolz Center at the Wisconsin School of Business.

Aubrie is currently a collaborative piano teaching assistant at UW-Madison, instructing undergraduate pianists and working with student instrumentalists and singers on repertoire from a variety of genres. She also serves as Music Assistant for Madison Opera, a piano instructor at Madison Conservatory, and a church musician at Glenwood Moravian Community Church. Aubrie previously worked within the university’s opera department on opera scenes programs and productions of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

As an advocate of celebrating music by living composers, Aubrie recently collaborated on a recording project of Reza Vali’s “Love Drunk (Folk Songs, Set No. 16b)” with violinist Ava Shadmani, premiered a new work by composer Cory Brodack with clarinetist Gretchen Hill, and took part in Source Song Festival’s MNDuo program with mezzo-soprano Lindsey Meekhof, creating a world-premiere recording of a new art song by composer Molly Hennig. Aubrie also presented about expanding the collaborative piano canon through creative and personal recital programming at the 2022 International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society conference.

Aubrie is a student of Professor Martha Fischer.