Bettina Varwig

Bettina Varwig is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Music and a member of Girton College. Originally from Germany, she received her BMus from King's College London and completed her graduate studies at Harvard University. Prior to coming to Cambridge, she held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford. She has also taught at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on music in early modern Europe, in particular German music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She is interested in issues of cultural exchange and transmission, religious practices and processes of secularisation, and historical modes of music analysis. Her recent publications address aspects of music and rhetoric, J. S. Bach's cantatas, and the seventeenth-century historiography of 'new' music. Further research interests include musical listening and the formation of German musicology as a discipline in the decades around 1900. At present she is completing a monograph on Heinrich Schütz, discussing his role in early seventeenth-century musical culture and his twentieth-century reception.

Recent Publications:

'"Mutato semper habitu": Heinrich Schütz and the Culture of Rhetoric', Music and Letters (in press)

'"New Music" in the Seventeenth Century', in Gewinn und Verlust in der Musikgeschichte, ed. Andreas Haug and Andreas Dorschel (Vienna, London, New York: Universal Edition, in press)

'One More Time: Bach and Seventeenth-Century Traditions of Rhetoric', Eighteenth-Century Music 5/2 (2008), 179-208

Review: Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue, and Paul Collins, The Stylus Phantasticus and Free Keyboard Music of the North German Baroque, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31/1 (2008), 186-189

'Weltfreude und Todesverklärung. Zu Bachs Kantate "Ich habe genug" (BWV 82)', in Verwandlungsmusik. Über komponierte Transfigurationen, ed. Andreas Dorschel (Vienna, London, New York: Universal Edition, 2007), 52-75

'Variatio und Amplificatio: Die rhetorischen Grundlagen der musikalischen Formbildung im 17. Jahrhundert', Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 3/3 (2007), www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/0109/0109.html

Review: Bach Perspectives 6, ed. Gregory Butler, Early Music 35/4 (2007), 635-637

'Schütz's Dafne and the German Operatic Imagination', in Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany, 1850-1950, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 117-138

'Mahler's German Language Critics', with Karen Painter, in Mahler and his World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 268-379