Austin Glatthorn

Dr Austin Glatthorn is a musicologist and cultural historian investigating musical life in early modern Europe. He is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of music, politics, aesthetics, and mobility in Central Europe around the year 1800.

Austin joined the RNCM in 2023. He completed his PhD at the University of Southampton in 2016, during which time he was a fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (2013–2014) and the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (2015). In 2016, he became the Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project ‘Opera and the Musical Canon, 1750–1815’ funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and hosted by Dalhousie University. An Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Oberlin College & Conservatory of Music between 2018 and 2019, Austin then returned to the UK as a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University.

• Music, diplomacy, and empire
• Early modern cultural history
• Music for Winds
• Melodrama & Opera
• Digital Humanities

Austin’s first monograph, entitled Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge, 2022), draws on a wealth of archival sources and digital tools to explore the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. His book uncovers how material and discursive networks mediated an entangled web of Central European theatres—networked by postal communication and mobility—that served as preconditions for a shared musico-theatrical culture. Austin’s other recent work appears in book chapters and with A-R Editions, Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, and Journal of War & Culture Studies. His article ‘The Imperial Coronation of Leopold and Mozart, Frankfurt am Main, 1790’ won the Mozart Society of America’s Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, and his essay ‘The Legacy of “Ariadne” and the Melodramatic Sublime’ was a winner of the Music & Letters Centenary Prize Competition. Austin often creates editions of music long since heard for performance and has worked with student ensembles to stage the modern premieres of such works in public concerts in the US, UK, and Germany. His edition of the melodrama Philon und Theone (1779), for instance, was used to stage its world premiere in Vienna (2021) as was planned, but never realized in the eighteenth century. Together with Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University, Canada), Austin is currently editing the Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century.