Zugl.: Hannover, Universiẗat, Diss., 2003.

The popular musico-historical image of Richard Strauss misrepresents both the composer and his music. As this thesis shows, such misrepresentation results from a failure to recognise the significance of Romantic heroic idealism to Strauss's compositional aesthetic. In his aesthetic, heroism operates at a fundamental level where musical self-representation exists as the expression of the Romantic heroic self and its subjectivity. This thesis, presented in two parts, examines firstly the concept of Romantic heroism, itself a misunderstood phenomenon, and, secondly, the ways that a deeper understanding of heroism functions as the underlying impetus for apprehending Strauss's approach to creativity. This creativity is tantamount to the composer's invention of a musical self. Chapter One examines nineteenth-century heroism as an ideological, aesthetic, and philosophical phenomenon, looking at how the early Romantics defined the hero and the centrality of notions of self-identity and self-consciousness to this definition. These notions legitimised subjectivity and realistic artistic self-portrayal. Chapters Two to Four examine literature, painting, and photography, respectively, as artistic spheres in which the idea of self became particularly pronounced. This is seen in the adoption of Romantic irony expressed as extreme realism. As a remedy for self-consciousness, this realism signalled the development towards the acute subjectivity of later nineteenth-century auto-heroism. Part Two, Chapters Five to Eight, considers Strauss's heroic allegiance, understood as an auto-heroic stage of heroism. His aesthetic notion of self is shown to have been specifically derived from social, national, and cultural spheres, all of which reinforced and demonstrated the realistic and auto-heroic expression of the musical self. Having established Strauss's historical reputation (Chapter Five) for the purpose of presenting the image which heroism amends, the idea of self obtaining from the social sphere of education (Chapter Six), and from the broader cultural and national outlooks suggested by Goethe (Chapter Seven) and Wagner (Chapter Eight), are considered. Within these chapters, the ways that these ideas of self are translated into the music itself are explored particularly in relation to the tone poems from Also sprach Zarathustra through to Eine Alpensinfonie. Romantic heroism enables Strauss's music to be understood as the product of a well-defined aesthetic theory within which self-representation is fully justified, thereby challenging the composer's predominating image.

Thesis (M.M.)--Butler University, 1978. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 60).

Inaug.-Diss. Phil. Bern, 1993.

MMus, Dept of Music, Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand

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.

Abstract Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was the one of excellent post-romancticism composers. He composed approximately 200 songs. This study mainly discusses Mädchenblumen, op. 22, accomplished in his middle composition period. For the purpose of this study with Strauss making use of lyric, expressive melodies and techniques of New German School, we can examine the kinship of vocal, poems, and accompaniment. The lecture-recital document contains three main sections: the biographical information about Richard Strauss, the musical characteristics of Richard Strauss¡¦ Lieder, and a performance analysis of Mädchenblumen. In these four songs, making a lot of tone colors by increasing chromatic techniques and paying much attention to the declamatory, lyric, continuous, leaping melodies, are all showed Strauss¡¦s achievement of Mädchenblumen.

After 1885, Richard Strauss began to create program music due to Alexander Ritter¡¦s suggestion. Among these works, the most important were the 7 tone poems. Tone poem ¡mDon Quixote¡n was composted according to the play created by the Spanish writer Cervantes. Richard Strauss not only expressed the story by leading motive and tone painting, but also satirized the society. Furthermore, he unleashed his angry by the meaning of the story. My essay is divided into two major parts. The first is the biography of Richard Strauss as well as the characteristic of this tone poem. The second is the analysis of variation structure, motive development, tone painting skill, orchestration timbre and harmony disposition. I still discuss the rhythm, skill and terminology in advanced.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-140).

Oscar Wilde overshadows the German reception of <I>Salome</I> (1891), yet his text is a problematic one. Wilde's one-act drama is a mosaic text, influenced by the abundance of literary and artistic treatments of the Salome figure during the <I>fin de si??cle</I>. Moreover, Wilde did not write <I>Salome</I> in his native tongue, but rather in French, and allowed it to be edited by a number of French poets. Furthermore, the translation of the text proved problematic, resulting in a flawed English rendering dubiously ascribed to Lord Alfred Douglas. <br /><br /> However, there is a German mediator whose translation of Wilde's play is less problematic than the original. Hedwig Lachmann produced a translation of <I>Salome</I> in 1900 that found success despite having to compete with other German translations. Lachmann's translation alters, expands, and improves on Wilde's French original. In contrast to Wilde's underlexicalised original, Lachmann's translation displays an impressive lexical diversity. <br /><br /> In 1903 Insel Verlag published her translation accompanied by ten illustrations by Marcus Behmer. Behmer's illustrations have been dismissed as being derivative of the works of Aubrey Beardsley, but they speak to Lachmann's version of <I>Salome</I> rather than to Beardsley's or Wilde's. Indeed, the illustrations create their own vision of <I>Salome</I>, recasting the story of a <I>femme fatale</I> into a redemption narrative. <br /><br /> In Germany the play proved quite successful, and Lachmann's translation was staged at Max Reinhardt's Kleines Theater in Berlin. It was here that Richard Strauss saw Lachmann's version of the play performed and adapted it for use as a libretto for his music drama <I>Salome</I>. Despite being adapted from Lachmann's translation, Strauss' music drama is often cited as being based directly on Wilde's play, without mentioning the important role of Lachmann's mediation. Moreover, the libretto is often praised as an exact replica of the play put to music. Neither of these assertions is, indeed, the case. Strauss excised forty percent of the text, altered lines, and changed the gender of one of the characters. <br /><br /> I employ G??rard Genette's theory of transtextuality as it is delineated in <I>Palimpsests</I> (1982) to discuss the interrelatedness of texts and the substantial shift that can occur from subtle changes, or transpositions, of a text. Translation, shift in media, excision, the inclusion of extra-textual features including illustrations, and regendering of characters are all means by which a text can be transformed as Lachmann, Behmer, and Strauss transform <I>Salome</I>. Additionally, I will be using Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's term bitextuality, as described in <I>The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin de Si??cle Illustrated Books</I> (1995) to reinforce Genette's notion that extra-textual elements are also significant to a text as a whole. Finally, I employ Jacques Lacan's theory of gaze as outlined in "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" (1956) and "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the <I>I</I> Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1949) to discuss the function of gaze within the three texts. <br /><br /> In this thesis, I will be addressing these three German intermedial re-envisionings of <I>Salome</I> and arguing for their uniqueness as three distinct representations of <I>Salome</I>. In this thesis, I will argue that Wilde's text is a problematic precursor and that Hedwig Lachmann's text not only alters, but also improves on the original. Additionally, I will argue that Marcus Behmer's images, while influenced by Beardsley, focus more closely on the text they are illustrating and thus provide a less problematic visual rendering of the play. Finally, I will argue that Strauss' libretto for <I>Salome</I> is mediated through Lachmann's translation and that it is further substantially altered. <br /><br /> In order to show the ways in which the texts differ from one another, I have chosen to focus predominantly on the motifs of the moon and gaze. By analysing the way in which each text represents these motifs it is possible to track changes in characterisation, motivation, and various other salient features of the text.