Die aufsteigende Kleinterzrückung des tonalen Zentrums stellt eine im amerikanischen Musical mittlerweile geradezu klischeehafte Wendung zur Erzeugung erhöhter musikalisch-espressiver Intensität dar, die in ungezählten Songs zu beobachten ist. Um ihre spezifische Qualität musiktheoretisch darzustellen, wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz auf das u.a. von Jacques Handschin und Hermann Pfrogner entwickelte Modell der ›relativen Helligkeitswerte‹ der Töne einer diatonischen Skala je nach ihrer Position in der als Quintenkette vorgestellten Diatonik zurückgegriffen. Anhand dreier Beispiele – Leonard Bernsteins Tonight (West Side Story, 1957), Kurt Weills Speak low (One Touch of Venus, 1943) und Alan Menkens Out There (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996) – wird zudem untersucht, wie die Distanz der tonalen Zentren im Rahmen einer primär an diatonischen Verläufen orientierten Melodik im Einzelfall überbrückt wird. / In American musicals the shift of tonal center up by minor-third represents a downright cliché for heightening musical-expressive intensity that can be observed in countless songs. In order to illustrate the specific quality of this shift, the present article employs among other things the model of “relative brightness values” (relative Helligkeitswerte) developed by Jacques Handschin and Hermann Pfrogner, which describes the tones of a diatonic scale according to their position in a diatonic system understood as a chain of fifths. The examination of three examples—Leonard Bernstein’s “Tonight” (West Side Story, 1957), Kurt Weill’s “Speak low” (One Touch of Venus, 1943), and Alan Menken’s “Out There” (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996)—will reveal how, within melodies confined primarily to diatonic processes, the distance between tonal centers can at times be spanned.

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.