Blog topic: Music

Carl Maria von Weber, 6 Lieder und Gesänge, op. 66

Memorial Library of Music, MLM 1141

Guest blogger: David Wilson

Carl Maria von Weber is remembered today primarily for his opera Der Freischütz, almost to the exclusion of all else. Yet Weber was, in fact, a prolific, and widely respected composer—even Chopin, a notoriously cantankerous critic of other composers, admired Weber’s work. His compositional output includes several symphonies, chamber music, piano music, and dozens of art songs. While a few of the examples of this latter category are still performed today, many of Weber’s songs are almost completely unknown to contemporary audiences.

January 23, 2017 - April 22, 2017

Located in the entrance hall of the East Asian Library, "Mario Paci: An Italian Maestro in China" features an exhibition of of selected materials from the Mario Paci Papers, a collection of documents, photographs, and musical scores donated to Stanford University Libraries in 2013 by Floria and Alexander Zaharoff, Paci's daughter and grandson, with the assistance of Stanford professor Jindong Cai.  This important collection of documents is held in Stanford University Libraries Special Collections, and has recently been digitized.     

Weldon Kees was unknown to me when I started processing the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation collection about three months ago.  In photographs, Kees has dark hair combed neatly to one side, a matching moustache, and an intense gaze.  He was most often photographed wearing a tweed suit with a sweater vest and tie and holding a cigarette. He dabbled in a number of things (among them: Communism, novel-writing, Abstract Expressionist painting, psychotherapy) but, over time, it has become clear that Kees best made a name for himself through poetry.