Professor Laura Tunbridge, FBA
Laura Tunbridge joined the Oxford Faculty of Music in 2014, having previously been Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester (2004-2014) and Lecturer at the University of Reading (2002-2004). She was Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine’s College until she was appointed as Heather Professor in Music in October 2025.
Professor Tunbridge studied music as an undergraduate at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and gained a M.A. from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from Princeton University. Her doctoral dissertation was on Robert Schumann’s music for Byron’s Manfred and the Szenen aus Goethes Faust. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York (2010) at the History of Listening Emmy Noether Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2021), and at Harvard University (2024). She has been the recipient of grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association from 2013-2018, in 2017 she was elected to the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. She is a member of the Academia Europaea (2020) and a Fellow of the British Academy (2021). She was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association in 2021.
Laura’s research initially concentrated on German Romanticism, with a particular interest in reception through criticism, performance and composition. More recently she has explored song and chamber music since 1800. Her monographs include Schumann’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2007), The Song Cycle (Cambridge, 2010), Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performance in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago, 2018), and Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Viking, 2020), named by The Times as one of the books of the year, and awarded ‘Best Composer Biography’ by Presto Books. Supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2019-2022), Laura's current book projects are The String Quartet: A Sonic and Social History, an exploration of ensembles since the mid twentieth century, and A Very Short Introduction to Chamber Music.
Laura was a founder member of the Oxford Song Network and of the Women’s Song Forum. She regularly gives pre-concert talks (including for Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Halle, the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, the Oxford Lieder Festival, and the Southbank Centre), writes programme and liner notes (Wigmore Hall, Barbican, Salzburg Festival, Chandos, Delphian, Pentatone, all that dust) and book reviews (Times Literary Supplement) and appears on the radio (Record Review, Music Matters, Composer of the Week, In Our Time, Start the Week, In Business, Front Row) and podcasts.
Undergraduate teaching has included courses on Richard Strauss and Representations of Women, The String Quartet between Classicism and Modernism, The Art of Song, Vienna in the 1820s, Musical Thought and Scholarship, and Music Analysis and Criticism. At Masters level, she has taught elective and core seminars and supervised dissertations. The topics of Laura’s recent and current doctoral students range from nineteenth-century song and chamber music through interwar transnationalism to contemporary opera studies. She has also been a mentor for postdoctoral awards from the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions.
Monographs:
Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Viking, 2020; Yale University Press, 2020; Spektrum (Dutch), 2020).
Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performance in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago University Press, 2018).
The Song Cycle (Cambridge University Press, 2010); El ciclo de canciones (trans. Juan González-Castelao, Ediciones Akal, 2016).
Schumann’s Late Style (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Edited Collections:
Song beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, and Performance, co-edited with Philip Bullock (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2021).
German Song Onstage: Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, co-edited with Natasha Loges (Indiana University Press, 2020).
Rethinking Schumann, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
‘Resisting Middlebrow Mediation: Beethoven's “Grosse Fuge” and interwar audiences’. In The Oxford Handbook to the Middlebrow in Music, ed. Christopher Chowrimootoo and Kate Guthrie (Oxford University Press, 2024), 285-304.
‘Education: Discipline and Desire’. In The Cultural History of Music, vol. ‘The Industrial Age’, ed. Alexander Rehding and Naomi Waltham-Smith (Bloomsbury, 2024), 111-130.
‘Sound Recording’. In Wagner in Context, ed. David Trippett (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 412-420.
‘Robert Schumann’s ‘Ich grolle nicht’’: Unsettling the Song Cycle’. In The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology, ed. Benjamin Binder and Jennifer Ronyak (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 102-125.
‘Schubert as Balladeer’. In Schubert’s Piano, ed. Matthew Gardner and Christine Martin (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 161-179.
‘Once again … speaking of’ Heine in Song’, Song Beyond the Nation, ed. Philip Bullock and Laura Tunbridge (Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2021), 114-132
‘Canonicity and Influence’. In The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s “Winterreise”, ed. Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feuerzeig (Cambridge, 2021), 242-256.
‘Exterminating the Recording Angel’, Opera Quarterly (2019): 1-14.
‘Constructing a Musical Nation: German-Language Criticism in the Nineteenth Century’. In The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 170-189.
‘Schumann’s Struggle with Goethe’s Faust’. In The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, ed. Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight (Oxford University Press, 2019), 87-116.
‘Loving Mozart: Berhard Lang, “Ach, ich fühl’s” (Grace Moor), I Hate Mozart, Act I’, Cambridge Opera Journal 28 (2016): 271-275.
‘Versioning Strauss’, Nineteenth-Century Music 40:3 (2017): 283-300.
‘Saving Schubert: The Evasions of Late Style’. In Late Style and its Discontents, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford University Press, 2016), 120-130.
‘Singing against late style: The Problem of Performance History’. In Schubert’s Late Music in History and Theory, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 426-441.
‘Scarlett Johansson’s Body and the Materialization of Voice’, Twentieth-Century Music 13 (2016): 139- 152.
With Wayne Heisler, Jr., ‘Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht: Strauss before Sixty’, Opera Quarterly 31:4 (2015) 273-288.
‘”The soft hours of Sardanapalus”: Music and Effeminacy in Byron’s Seraglios’. In Ottoman Empire and European Theatre -Part III: Seraglios and Harems in Theatre, Opera, and Poetry from the Earliest Theatrical Sources to Lord Byron’s “Don Juan” (1819-1824), ed. Inge Praxl and Michael Hüttler (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2015), 281-296.
‘Reading Lieder Recordings’, Colloquy: ‘Studying the Lied: Hermeneutic Traditions and the Challenge of Performance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 67:2 (2014), 555-560.
‘Opera and Materiality’, review-article in Cambridge Opera Journal 26: 3 (2014): 289-299.
‘Singing Translations: The Politics of Listening between the Wars’, Representations 123 (2013): 53-86.
‘Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 437-474.
‘Robert Schumann’. In The Wagner Encyclopaedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
‘Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages’. In Autorschaft-Genie-Geschlecht, ed. Suzanne Kogler and Kordula Knaus (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012), 179-194.
‘Deserted Chambers of the Mind (Schumann Memories)’. In Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge (Oxford University Press, 2011), 395-410.
‘Schumann als “the Perfect Wagnerite”: Seine Rezeption in England um 1900’. In Robert Schumann. Persönlichkeit – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Helmut Loos (Laaber: Gudrun Schroeder, 2011), 424-433.
‘Schumann’s Orchestration for Das Paradies und die Peri and the Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust’, American Choral Directors Association Journal 51 (210): 8-17.
‘Schumann: A Lover’s Guide’, Review-article for Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2008).
‘The Piano Music II: Afterimages’. In The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, ed. Beate Perrey (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 203-232.
‘Weber’s Ghost: Euryanthe, Genoveva, Lohengrin’. In Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (Ashgate, 2006), 9-29.
‘From Count to Chimneysweep: Byron’s Manfred in London Theatres’, Music and Letters 87 (2006): 212-236.
‘Schumann as Manfred’, Musical Quarterly 87 (2004): 546-569.
‘Schumann’s Manfred in the Mental Theatre’, Cambridge Opera Journal 15 (2003): 153-183.
Research interests in 19th and 20th-century music, song, chamber music, opera studies, reception history and analysis.
