In his interactive lecture, Thomas Hampson uses his transatlantic biography to look at song as an identity-forming force: personally, culturally and socially. Together with the audience and using audio examples, he discusses the role song art can play in collective and personal self-image in light of the USA’s cultural mosaic of immigration history, political ideas and artistic diversity.

The lecture is part of the “Schubert’s American Dream” theme day, which opens an imaginary window into the composer’s world of thought on the first Sunday of the festival. On his deathbed, Franz Schubert dreams himself away to America with the Lederstrumpf novels by James Fenimore Cooper – in search of freedom, individual self-determination and that better world that he repeatedly sketches musically in his songs.