Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

Alighting briefly once again on Weill’s Symphony No. 2 from the book’s opening, and then turning to consider Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor as a closing case study, Chapter 6 pivots between the early 1930s and the present day to consider the legacies and twentieth-century historiography of the symphonies in the book – their absences and recoveries – and the remarkable persistence of the symphonic genre in the mechanisms of how cultural and political agency is conferred to the present day. The poor reception of Weill’s New York premiere in 1934 comes under examination in light of the discussion in the intervening chapters, raising the question of why, for that time and place, Weill was the wrong kind of symphonist. Then, the chapter addresses the contemporary revival of Price’s symphony in the early 2020s, and it suggests the capacity of symphonies from the tumultuous years around 1933 to invigorate a differently dynamic symphonic landscape and a differently dynamic landscape of selfhood.

An analysis of brecht's most popular piece along tragic parameters.

The chapter explores affinities with tragedy and the use of tragic themes in this brecht/weill opera.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.

Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music. Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music. There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama. Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner. The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.

In the years from his death to the outbreak of the Second World War, Mahler’s music was in various degrees admired, misunderstood, celebrated, condemned, and ignored. The range of musical figures who engaged with it spans the continent geographically and aesthetically: the Viennese creative, critical, and academic intelligentsia; Europe’s leading conductors (Oskar Fried, Willem Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Wilhelm Furtwängler); younger, forward-thinking Germans (Kurt Weill); adventurous British musicians and writers (Benjamin Britten, Henry Wood, Hamilton Hardy, Donald Francis Tovey, T. E. Clark); curious French pedagogues (Nadia Boulanger); central personalities in US music (Aaron Copland, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzy, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor); and Russians eager to remain connected (Ivan Sollertinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich). The varied interests and opinions embodied in this group are surveyed here with a view to laying out the lively breadth with which this music was discussed in a supposedly quiet time of the composer’s reception history.