This document examines Sonata No. 1 for Piano, Op. 74 of Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov (1865-1936) and illustrates the incorporated Russian musical elements. The study has the twofold purpose of firstly defining musical elements idiomatic of Russian folk song, Russian Orthodox Church music and the Mighty Five; and secondly finding their representation in Glazunov's piano sonata. The introductory chapter describes the purpose of this study and the need for identifying the idioms of musical Russianness. The second chapter provides a historical background and explores characteristics of Russian folk music and Russian Church music, which are intrinsic to Russian musical culture. The third chapter discusses the historical background of Russian nationalism in music, the establishment of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, and the contributions of the Mighty Five to the rise of a truly Russian national style as opposed to the Western traditions. Chapter four provides biographical information about Aleksandr Glazunov. The first part of chapter five presents historical background of Sonata No. 1 for Piano, Op. 74. The second part of this chapter discusses the composition within the context of Russian musical elements as identified in chapters two and three. The concluding chapter six summarizes the observations of the author. It was the premise of this study that the compilation of historical and analytical evidence would lead to an identification of the idioms of musical Russianness and of their use by Aleksandr Glazunov. The analysis performed here captures the musical elements of Russianness and offers a deeper understanding of Glazunov's achievement in integrating them with traditional Western compositional techniques.

In this dissertation, I explore the musical prosody of the literary symbolists and the influence of this prosody on fin-de-siècle French music. Contrary to previous categorizations of music as symbolist based on a characteristic "sound," I argue that symbolist aesthetics demonstrably influenced musical construction and reception. My scholarship reveals that symbolist musical works across genres share an approach to composition rooted in the symbolist concept of musicality of language, a concept that shapes this music on sonic, structural, and conceptual levels. I investigate the musical responses of four different composers to a single symbolist text, Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salomé, written in French in 1891, as case studies in order to elucidate how a symbolist musicality of language informed their creation, performance, and critical reception. The musical works evaluated as case studies are Antoine Mariotte's Salomé, Richard Strauss's Salomé, Aleksandr Glazunov's Introduction et La Danse de Salomée, and Florent Schmitt's La Tragédie de Salomé. Recognition of symbolist influence on composition, and, in the case of works for the stage, on production and performance expands the repertory of music we can view critically through the lens of symbolism, developing not only our understanding of music's role in this difficult and often contradictory aesthetic philosophy but also our perception of fin-de-siècle musical culture in general.