DRMUS 911 — Studies in Style Criticism

Topic: Perspectives on Mahler and Strauss. An intensive stylistic, historical, and cultural investigation into the music of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, contemporaries who brought the post-Romantic style to its zenith and catapulted the art of music into the 20th century. Magnificent conductors, orchestrators, and creators of symphonic masterpieces, they also demonstrated enormous sensitivity to words in their music for the voice. The course will investigate Mahler’s songs and symphonies, and Strauss’s songs, tone poems, and operas. Problems to be addressed will include Mahler as Jew and Christian, Strauss’s relationship to the Third Reich, autobiography and heroism in music, exoticism, explicit and hidden programmatic content in symphonic music, Mahler’s and Strauss’s responses to earlier composers, songs for voice and orchestra, and the blending of hedonism, perversion, eroticism, intellectualism, and virtuosity in Strauss’s operas. Required of all second-year D.M.A. students.