Although we often think that scholars have ploughed through all available archives and libraries for important texts or images from the past, that is not true. A recent case was Professor Albrecht Classen’s rediscovery of the poetry and music by the seventeenth-century German poet and composer Erasmus Widmann (1571-1634). Even the label ‘Baroque’ might not be quite accurate in this case, considering the often quite light-hearted content of his songs. He represents a significant representative of an intermediate stage between the late Middle Ages and the Baroque and deserves to be studied in great detail. For this purpose Prof. Classen has recently published an edition of his worldly, entertaining, and didactic songs in German that is now available in Weidler Verlag.
Albrecht Classen, PhD, Distinguished Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona (as seen on PBS), has published close to 50 scholarly books, and close to 500 scholarly articles. His research focuses on the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the history of German speaking Jesuit missionaries in eighteenth-century Sonora. He has received numerous teaching and research awards, most recently the Henry and Phyllis Koffler Prize for Research (2008) and the Five Star Faculty Award (2009, student nomination only). In 2004 the German government awarded him with its highest civilian Order of Merit, the Verdienstkreuz am Band.