Geringfügig geänd. Diss. Univ. Hildesheim.

This study examines the social and cultural circumstances surrounding the publication of the poems "Venus Mater" and "Wiegenlied" by the late nineteenth-century German poet Richard Dehmel, and the composition of the corresponding lieder by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. An accurate history of the publication and reception of Richard Dehmel's poetry has been difficult due to the existence of multiple similar versions of his poems. By referring back to the primary sources of his poetry, it is shown that "Venus Mater" and "Wiegenlied," although very similar, were discrete works published at different times in different anthologies of Dehmel's poems. Further examination of the circumstances behind the publication of these two poems shows that the social and cultural reaction to the differing sources of these poems were substantially different. While "Wiegenlied" never aroused any controversy in fin-de-siècle German society, "Venus Mater" was a component of Die Verwandlungen der Venus, a poetic cycle which was one of Dehmel's most problematic works, the publication of which resulted in charges of blasphemy and obscenity against the writer. In light of the circumstances under which Dehmel's poetry was published and received, the musical settings of these poems by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss are investigated. It is shown that, contrary to many previous accounts, Pfitzner's textual source for his lied "Venus Mater" was Dehmel's notorious Die Verwandlungen der Venus, while Strauss' source for his "Wiegenlied" was Dehmel's uncontroversial Erlösungen. The effects which these different texts and their contexts had on the composition and reception of the composers' lieder is explored through an examination of the composers' own writings, the writings of other scholars and critics, and a brief music analysis of the two lieder. The elucidation of these details reveals some ways in which cultural and social ideologies, such as representations of gender and sexuality, can be transmitted through both text and music.

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Begun in Berlin, completed in exile in Paris, and premiered on both sides of the Atlantic, Kurt Weill's Symphony No. 2 sets up the symphony circa 1933 as both resolutely international and messily interdisciplinary, and spotlights how fundamentally a transnational approach is needed in order more comprehensively to understand both the genre and the localised political and social issues shaping symphonic discourse at this time. Taking the issues raised by Weill's symphony as a starting point, and borrowing fine-grained, historically synchronic approaches from year studies, this thesis examines the symphonic genre in 1933 through four other case-study works composed or premiered in that year. I thus position the symphony as a site of cultural exchange between and within the major contexts traversed by Weill and his work: Berlin, Paris, and a messier U.S. East-Coast nexus that centres on New York and Boston, via Mexico City, looking in detail at Hans Pfitzner's Symphony in C-sharp minor, Roy Harris's Symphony 1933, Aaron Copland's Short Symphony, and Arthur Honegger's Mouvement Symphonique nr. 3. The Germanic genre has long been associated with nationalism, monumentality, and power display, wedded to Germanic Enlightenment philosophical discourses about universalised selfhood and its relationship to society. 1933, the year in which Hitler took power and the Great Depression reached its peak, was politically and economically fraught, concentrating social questions that intersect with symphonic issues about power, selfhood, space, and mass audiences. It is also a neglected year within symphonic surveys. The thesis combines archival work and hermeneutic perspectives to foreground those social and political discourses historically associated with the genre. I argue for the significance of their differing legacies in co-existent contexts, for the complicity of the genre in establishing and perpetuating political and colonial hegemonies, and for the urgency of rethinking the symphony as an international phenomenon.