During World War II the composer Kurt Weill was in America writing for the Broadway stage. On August 27, 1943, he became an American citizen and was eager to volunteer his talent to the American war effort. Among his many wartime musical contributions are fourteen songs, all with war-related texts, which can be divided into three distinct groups: the American propaganda songs (8), the German propaganda songs (2), and the Walt Whitman songs (4). It is the purpose of this paper to present a comparative analysis of a representative group of these war songs (two from each group) in order to illustrate Weill's musical versatility. The American propaganda songs were written in a purely popular song style; sung by Broadway actors; directed toward an American audience; with texts by the Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and the Hollywood movie executive Howard Dietz. The German propaganda songs were written in a cabaret song style; sung in German by Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya; directed toward a German audience behind enemy lines; with texts by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and the German cabaret writer Walter Mehring. The Four Walt Whitman Songs were written in a classical art song style; sung by classically trained singers; directed toward a general audience; with texts by the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman. After an initial discussion of Weill's early musical training and career in Europe, his exile from Germany, his reception in America, and his contributions to the American war effort, each group of war songs is analyzed musically, textually, vocally, in reference to the audience to whom it was directed, and with regards to vocal performance practice. Comparisons and conclusions are then drawn. Kurt Weill's war songs are valuable for musical study, both in terms of examining his ability to write equally well in various musical styles and as an opportunity to learn more about music and society during the turbulent years' of World War II.

Theodor Adorno verkündete, das Model von Kurt Weill lasse sich nicht wiederholen. Seine Bühnenwerke wurden trotzdem zum unvermeidlichen Präzedenzfall für Komponisten auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks. Diese Promotionsarbeit erkundet insbesondere die Rolle seiner formalen Innovationen im Musiktheater von Marc Blitzstein und Leonard Bernstein. Dabei haben die Komponisten seinem ästhetischen Beitrag zur amerikanischen Tradition entweder wiederstanden oder ihn heruntergespielt. Komparative Analysen aufgrund von Harold Blooms „Anxiety of Influence“ und anderen intertextuellen Methoden decken auf, dass die Grundsätze von Weills Opernreform eine einheimische Bewegung von anspruchsvollem, sozial-engagierten Musiktheater katalysierten. Die folgende Studie richtet den Fokus auf Werke, die verschiedene Phasen seiner Mission vertreten, die Gattung der Oper zu erneuern, eine Entwicklung, die sich von der Urform in Die Dreigroschenoper bis zum Musical Play (Lady in the Dark) und zur Broadway Opera (Street Scene) erstreckt. Blitzstein und Bernstein wiederum überwanden die formalen Grenzen zwischen Oper und Musical mit The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide und West Side Story, teil einer kurzlebigen Bewegung in Amerika des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Dieselbe überschnitt sich mit einer Renaissance für Weills deutschsprachige Werke im Anschluss an die Premiere von Blitzsteins Übersetzung The Threepenny Opera unter Bernsteins Leitung. Das unveröffentlichte A Pray by Blecht, für welches Bernstein sich an Stephen Sondheim und Jerome Robbins, seine Kooperationspartner in West Side Story, wieder angeschlossen hat, vertieft den Bezug von Bernsteins Musiktheater-Ästhetik auf Weill. / Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill could not be repeated. His stage works nevertheless set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. My dissertation explores how Weill’s formal innovations in particular laid the groundwork for the music theater of Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein although they either resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. Comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveal that the principles of Weill’s opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre. The following study focuses on works that represent different phases of his mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from the Urform (original or primitive form) in Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play (Lady in the Dark) and Broadway Opera (Street Scene). Blitzstein and Bernstein in turn defied the formal boundaries between opera and musical theater with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide and West Side Story, part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill’s German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein’s translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein’s baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, – for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, – deepens the connection of Bernstein’s music theater aesthetic to Weill.

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.