In this essay, I explore the text and contexts of Richard Strauss’s “Schlechtes Wetter,” Op. 69 No. 5 (1918), in order to illustrate the nature of song as interpretation. First, from the musicological side (and with brief reference to two classic theoretical accounts of the methodology of Lied analysis by Kofi Agawu and Lawrence Zbikowski), I consider Heinrich Heine’s poem and Strauss’s setting of it as meta-texts that reflect on the artists’ creative processes, observing in particular how Strauss’s song can also be heard to reveal the creative and interpretative essence of the traditional manner of identifying text-music relationships in the Lied. Turning then toward the work and perspectives of performers, I explore Strauss’s song as it was interpreted by soprano Elisabeth Schumann and the composer at the piano on their 1921 tour of the United States, along with some brief concluding reflections on my own performance of the song as pianist with soprano Sari Gruber in recitals given over the past decade. These performances radically alter our understanding of what the song is about and who we are to understand its vocal persona to be, illustrating the vital role of performance in determining what a song is and means.

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

The decade (1899–1909) separating Verklärte Nacht from Schoenberg’s second major contribution to Night Music, the monodrama Erwartung, was typically turbulent and productive. Based mainly in Vienna, he established himself as a competent conductor, and also as the revered teacher of talented young composers such as Berg and Webern. The ambitious scale of Schoenberg’s major compositions from these years confirmed his determination to distance himself technically from admired contemporaries like Strauss, Busoni and Mahler. In pursuit of greater intensity and concentration, romanticism gave way to expressionism, as chordal dissonances were freed from their traditional need to resolve. And although critics were often hostile, Schoenberg retained the admiration and respect of performers as well as of friends such as Zemlinsky and Mahler. The affair between his wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl (ending in uneasy reconciliation after Gerstl’s suicide) fuelled the fierce musical outbursts of important compositions like the Second String Quartet, as well as of Erwartung.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of modern allegory, I argue that the narrative arc of The Exterminating Angel ushers in a spatiotemporal ‘collapse’ of diegetic time and slippage into ‘allegorical’ time. By distorting sonic elements (i.e. motives, cycles and topics), Adès establishes a musico-dramatic opposition in the course of the opera between false optimism and the eventuality of doom. This opposition translates into a battle between the socialites’ wilful interventions and the force that strips them of their will. In what I refer to as ‘allegorical’ time, the distinction between past, present and future dissolves, and the protagonists as well as the sonic elements are stripped of their identities and, by the end of the opera, disappear into an existential void. While the narrative trajectory follows the arc of dramatic irony, the conclusion of the opera defies resolution through the suspension of telos.

Program music, a category that applies explicitly to Mahler’s early symphonies and implicitly to all of them, had a long and complicated history by the time he made his first attempts. Purely instrumental works by Froberger, Frescobaldi, Kuhnau (Biblische Historien), Bach (Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo) and François Couperin (Le Parnasse ou l’Apothéose de Lully); Parisian symphonies ca. 1800 by composers such as François Lesueur, Francesco Antonio Rosetti, and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf; and “characteristic” music of early nineteenth-century Austria and Germany formed the backdrop of better-known efforts by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, all of which played in Mahler’s mind when he began to forge his own path. The survey and typology provided by this chapter serve to frame Mahler’s conflicted attitude, which led him ultimately to a public repudiation of programmaticism, but not a private one.

Notwithstanding their remarkable peculiarities and profoundly individual nature, Mahler’s symphonies were part of a tradition begun by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; extended by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Berlioz; and renewed during his lifetime by composers including Bruckner, Brahms, Bruch, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Elgar, Strauss, Sibelius, Nielsen, and Glazunov. This context is surveyed here in two periods: composers who flourished during Mahler’s youth roughly (1870–89) and those active from 1889 until the outbreak of World War I. The former period reveals that even within this relatively conservative choice of genre (vis-à-vis the symphonic poem) a remarkable of approach obtained, from the motivic integration of Brahms and the fragmented grandeur of Bruckner to the lyricism and user-friendly national influences of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. In the later group, a trend toward amalgamation of programmatic and traditionally symphonic impulses becomes more pronounced, such as one finds in Mahler’s own works.

This chapter explores the nature of European celebrity ca. 1900 as a context for Mahler’s mission to promote himself and his works among the public at large. Figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlotte Wolter, and Hans Makart found ways in their respective fields to walk the line between popular success and artistic achievement, maintaining highbrow prestige while intriguing the public to a significant degree, particularly among the educated middle class. The growth of a consumer class, and the proliferation of opportunities for that class to consume those celebrities and personalize them in the process, provided a rationale for the lower middle class to push up against the cultural capital of the educated bourgeoisie. In this environment, Mahler’s creative project, as creator and as performing artist, emerged as a recognizable, if idiosyncratic, attempt at artistic fame in the modern sense.