It was with great pleasure that scholars, performers and alumni gathered in September 2016 at the University of Oxford for a one-day conference that celebrated the work of our respected colleague Susan Wollenberg. The close of the 2015–2016 academic year marked the retirement of Professor Wollenberg from her University Lecturership in Music, a position which she had held continuously since 1972. Her significant and continuing contribution over four decades as teacher and scholar was attested to by the presence of an international contingent of researchers, including both well-established figures within the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship, many of whom she had taught as undergraduates, and her current graduate students. Equally of note in the papers and in discussions was an awareness of the close connection between research and teaching, something typical of Wollenberg's own outlook. It was a connection found not least in her own paper (‘Haydn's Humour’), in which sensitivity to Haydn's dialogic wit was presented by one who has spent years examining this style as analyst, historian and, of equal importance, as teacher.

The limits of the ‘long’ eighteenth century were purposely stretched to their fullest in order to reflect the breadth of Professor Wollenberg's interests, which range from the keyboard music of Gottlieb Muffat and his contemporaries, the subject of her doctoral dissertation, through to various genres in the nineteenth century, as exhibited in a number of monographs and co-edited volumes. These include Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and several volumes under the impress of Ashgate in Farnham: Schubert's Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (2011), Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied, co-edited with Aisling Kenny (2015), The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, co-edited with Therese Ellsworth (2011) and Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, co-edited with Simon McVeigh (2004).

In light of Professor Wollenberg's work and the celebratory nature of the conference, it was to be expected that the first session of the day, ‘Song’, would include consideration of Schubert's lieder. Indeed, examples from his oeuvre served as a unifying thread in this session, with each of the three papers adopting an intertextual approach to the subject matter. Briony Cox-Williams (Royal Academy of Music) opened the session with an examination of three settings of Goethe's ‘Erlkönig’ by Schröter, Reichardt and Zelter, bringing them from the periphery of scholarship into a more central position alongside Schubert's well-known setting of the text. In doing so, she addressed pertinent questions about the status of song in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and demonstrated that performance practice provides an appropriate lens through which to challenge received ideas about this repertory. Similarly, Melanie von Goldbeck (University of Oxford) relocated Schubert's well-known setting of ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ within a constellation of works, including settings by Spohr and Loewe, that to varying degrees emphasize the associations between spinning and female virtue latent within Goethe's source material. Setting the scene for her enquiry, von Goldbeck first devoted attention to the historical context of the spinning-wheel metaphor, moving subsequently to a close reading of its representation in the three songs and its role within each musical drama. Xavier Hascher (Université de Strasbourg) concluded the session with a paper exploring the poetic content of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin. He illuminated numerous tropes within the cycle, including the wanderer figure, dream imagery and intimations of death, taking into consideration not only their musical depiction in individual songs but also their broader literary and philosophical significance. Collectively the papers in this session struck an attractive balance between offering new interpretations of much-discussed repertory and rehabilitating songs that have been neglected in the existing literature.

The second session, ‘Schubert’, consisted of three papers addressing the stylistic and expressive worlds of the composer's late oeuvre. James William Sobaskie (Mississippi State University) presented an analytical account of the Kyrie and Gloria from the Mass in A flat major, d678, elucidating the dramatic profiles of these movements through consideration of their structural features and harmonic processes. His paper yielded insights into Schubert's personalization of the sacred texts and offered broader reflections on the work's aesthetic qualities in relation to the evolution of the orchestral mass genre. In the next presentation Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Maynooth University) focused on Italian influences in Schubert's music. After exploring the cultural context of Schubert's italianità, she offered a welcome reappraisal of his Drei Gesänge, d902, mapping out a framework for understanding their Italianate topical landscapes. Joe Davies (University of Oxford) examined the ‘grotesquerie’ of Schubert's late instrumental works, focusing specifically on the violent ruptures between musical serenity and monstrosity in the slow movements of the Quintet in C major, d956, and the Piano Sonata in A major d959. Davies's approach, which interpreted these volcanic moments as expressions of a distorted fantasia topic, led to fruitful discussion concerning the efficacy of various figures of language (such as those derived from psychoanalytical terminology) in the service of Schubertian hermeneutics.

The third session of the day, ‘Compositional Models and Influences’, included two papers concerned, in part, with the identification of links between nineteenth-century repertories and their eighteenth-century precedents. The exploration of such connections is itself indebted to the work of Wollenberg, specifically to her designation of Mozartean grammar within Schubert's chamber music as a stylistic ‘fingerprint’. It was apt, then, that the first paper in this session, given by David Maw (University of Oxford), entitled ‘Haydn's Eroica’, established a similar link between two equally iconic figures. He presented a richly illustrated survey of the similarities between Haydn's harmonic designs (based in Neapolitan relationships) found in three E flat major works and the tonal strategies employed by Beethoven in his Third Symphony. This paper was complemented by that of Rohan Stewart-MacDonald (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini), which brought to light the interweaving of Mozartean influence and nineteenth-century tastes in three unpublished piano concertos by Cipriani Potter. Stewart-MacDonald trained his focus on the stylistic attributes of these works, whose engagement with and reinterpretation of late eighteenth-century models is only beginning to be fully understood.

The day ended with a keynote address given by Matthew Head (King's College London) on the critical reception of and aesthetic issues surrounding Mozart's Keyboard Sonata in A minor, k310. Interrogating the foundations of biographical readings that associate this piece with the death of Mozart's mother, Head offered fresh perspectives on the expressive modes of the music (notably its second movement, which he interpreted as a pastoral scene with a stormy outburst) and situated the work within the wider context of eighteenth-century keyboard culture. The implications of Head's approach resonated beyond the immediate boundaries of the conference presentation, pointing in the direction of a significant contribution to Mozart scholarship.

The conference was dependent upon the generosity of the Fellows and Principal, Alan Rusbridger, of Lady Margaret Hall. The venue was a fitting one, given Wollenberg's uninterrupted connection of fifty years with the college since her time there as an undergraduate and, subsequently, as Fellow. This personal link between college and scholar was underlined by the conference recital, given by the soprano and musicologist Aisling Kenny (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), accompanied by Oxford University alumna Cecily Lock, on a beautiful new Steinway (known informally as the ‘Wollenberg Grand’) whose purchase was made possible by donations given through the recently inaugurated Susan Wollenberg Fund for Music. The recital of lieder by Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann and Maude White was a moving end to the conference, and paid tribute to Susan Wollenberg's contribution to the study of women composers, as rich in this area as in all the others of her extensive career.