The Bardolator: Professor of English Jonathan Baldo Retires

By Jonathan Heath

 

The language of Shakespeare sings to the ear. Through rhyme, rhythm, and iambic pentameter, the Bard arranges words as deftly as musicians position notes on a staff. His poems and plays have endured for good reason: when we reach for language to express love, loss, jealousy, or joy, Shakespeare often supplies just the right line.

For more than 40 years, Eastman Professor of English Jonathan Baldo has brought England’s most celebrated playwright to life for students on Gibbs Street. As the school’s preeminent Shakespearean scholar, he has transported aspiring musicians to Stratford-upon-Avon and back, a trip he has made a few times in person—a fitting pilgrimage for such a devoted bardolator (passionate admirer of Shakespeare).

Generations of students have credited Baldo with rekindling their passion for literature. A wellspring of insight on 19th- and 20th-century writers (from Franz Kafka to Gabriel García Márquez to Percy Bysshe Shelley), he once earned high praise from a former student who described his class as “the best book club ever.”

Since joining the faculty in 1983, Baldo has been a grounding force in the Humanities Department, serving as chair from 1997 to 2005. A graduate of Yale University (B.A., English) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D.), he has authored several acclaimed books. His scholarly influence has extended well beyond Eastman, with invitations to speak at conferences and universities across the United States and Europe.

Baldo’s gifts as an educator earned him the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011 and Eastman’s Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014. These honors reflect his rare and distinguished presence in the classroom.

In May, Eastman unveiled Baldo’s retirement portrait on the Cominsky Promenade, where he now joins a century of esteemed colleagues. In her remarks, Joan and Martin Messinger Dean Kate Sheeran praised Baldo’s scholarship and generosity, describing him as a mentor and colleague whose legacy will endure—much like the works of Shakespeare he so passionately brought to life.

As Orsino says in Twelfth Night, “If music be the food of love, play on.” For his many students, Baldo’s classroom was exactly that—a place where literature sang.

Ahead of his retirement at the end of this semester, I spoke with Professor Baldo about his four decades at Eastman.

What are your first memories of Eastman in 1983?

“I have a memory from the spring of my first year at Eastman: I was walking through the rear of the Eastman Theatre, as it was known then, on the way to my office. The great pianist Rudolph Serkin was alone onstage, preparing for a solo recital that evening. As I paused to listen, I knew that I had landed in a very special place.”

What professional moments from the past 40 years stand out?

“I suppose that would have to be my first invited professional talk overseas. The invitation came from the English Department at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. A member of that department told me upon my arrival, “We have been reading your work with great interest.” The collective “we,” the idea that my work was being read and discussed by a department and not just an individual or two, took me by surprise. So often in my profession, one is left guessing as to whether one’s work is being read at all.”

What’s your favorite part of working with students?

“I have always admired the enormous creativity of Eastman students. Even after 42 years, I am astonished whenever I attend my students’ recitals. Such technical mastery combined with artistic maturity at an age when most of us are stumbling through a vast menu of choices, hoping to settle on a definite direction in our studies! I also love the challenge of introducing students to authors or whole great swaths of writing with which they had no previous acquaintance.”

How does the Humanities Department at Eastman play a pivotal role in shaping musical careers?

“I’ll answer your question with a story. During the pandemic, I received a phone call from an Eastman alumnus who had landed a position as conducting fellow with the New World Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas assigned him a rarely performed Schumann overture to conduct. When he asked the famous conductor for advice, Thomas responded with something like the following: “Go and read Wuthering Heights first, and then I’d be glad to discuss your conducting assignment.” He dutifully complied, they discussed the novel, and my former student confirmed that it shaped the way he conducted Schumann. The story reinforced my belief that music is connected with every other area of intellectual inquiry and artistic endeavor.

“In the Department of Humanities, we try to offer a broad menu of choices tailored specifically for Eastman students. I consider each one of our department’s electives an opportunity to instill a lifelong interest in an area of inquiry that our students might never again have a chance to connect with, whether it be women’s history, French cinema, political theory, anthropology, art history, modern poetry, or any of the dozens of subjects that we offer our students. My colleagues and I hope that those interests will enrich our students’ thinking and therefore their interactions with others and with the world around them. By helping to shape the overall person, I believe we play an important role in shaping the musician as well.”

Where does your fascination with Shakespeare come from?

“My fascination with Shakespeare dates to the middle of my college years, but it expanded greatly as a direct result of my teaching. Early in my career, one of my colleagues said to me, “One of us ought to teach Shakespeare. If you don’t want to do it, I will.” Over the years I have taught seven or eight different courses on my favorite author, but I was especially delighted when, after a two-semester sequence on the first and second halves of his career, a group of students asked for a third semester. I offered them a choice: would they like a course on “Bad” Shakespeare—that is, the plays that are seldom read and performed—or one on the history plays. They chose the latter, and their choice confirmed what an amazing place Eastman is: a music school where I could teach, by request, a course on 400-year-old plays about 600-year-old British history.

“All of this is to say that my fascination with Shakespeare has a collaborative slant to it. It both fed and was fed by student interest. That shouldn’t be surprising, because Shakespeare himself seems to have been a consummate collaborator. Not only was he chief playwright of the company to which he belonged, but he was also an actor, co-author of several plays, and company shareholder. The agility and nimbleness of Shakespeare’s mind make him a fit companion for musicians, whose profession requires a quickness and alertness of mind.”

What does retirement look like for you?

“I am not retired yet. Ahead of me looms what is perhaps the most daunting challenge of my career: cleaning out an office that is cluttered with more than four decades of papers, notes, and files, many of them dating from the years before we had computers to help us teach and do research. And then there are the acres of books I have accumulated. They reflect the special opportunities I have enjoyed at Eastman to teach an unusually wide range of courses: virtually anything that students and I took a mutual interest in.

“After June 30, I suppose I will wake up to the astonishing realization that every weekday is now part of an endless weekend. And that I am enjoying a sabbatical that has no end date except the one that we all face one day. I have research projects that I intend to pursue in retirement. Research and writing offer pleasures that I don’t want to relinquish. Our two-year-old grandson lives in town, and he is one of my principal reasons for retiring. Infants and toddlers change so fast, and I don’t want to miss any phase of his discovery and exploration of the always fascinating world around him. And then there is my cherished partner of forty-four years and counting: I like to think that we still have something to learn about one another, especially as we seek out new experiences. I haven’t given retirement a lot of thought, but it will surely include lots of childcare, dog walking, deferred house projects, travel, volunteer opportunities, reading and writing about authors I love, as well as time to feed my curiosity. And especially time to read books other than the ones I have assigned.”

What is so special about Eastman?

“Unlike most of my colleagues who have experienced other musical schools, I have experienced only one, though I have gotten to know, through a consortium to which we belonged, faculty at other music schools and arts schools who teach the liberal arts component of a rigorous musical curriculum. My conversations with those faculty confirm what I always suspected: that Eastman is different in ways that really matter. I am especially proud to have been part of an institution that is firmly committed to the ideal of a comprehensive music school: one that promotes exploration of music’s place in the world and its relation to the other arts. The leadership of Eastman seems to have always understood how the humanities help us understand human behavior, learn about and appreciate other cultures, process complex information, deepen our sense of social responsibility, and negotiate conflicting points of view in such a way that issues in productive dialogue.

“Eastman seems to me to possess an unusually warm and nurturing atmosphere, one that is, by some mysterious and miraculous means, passed down from one generation to another. I am especially tickled by the ways in which students turn out for and support one another with boisterous whoops of appreciation at recitals and concerts.”

 

For a full biography of Jonathan Baldo, visit our website.