Music, memory, emotion: Richard Strauss and the legacies of war
Music, memory, emotion: Richard Strauss and the legacies of war
This essay seeks to use a history of listening to Richard Strauss’s late work for strings Metamorphosen as a way of exploring hitherto under-researched legacies of the Second World War for German society. Situating the popular reception of the piece within histories of memory, the emotions, and the senses, it posits the existence of a ‘period ear’ in the immediate post-war period; that ‘period ear’, it argues, attests to the presence of affective legacies of the war lost to subsequent generations. Specifically, it argues for the presence of a peculiar culture of nostalgia for the Wilhelmine era in the 1950s and 1960s that was displaced by a later generation of listeners focused on the music’s alleged evocation of traumatic wartime memories. Its wider argument rests on a plea to recognize problem spaces that sit less at the interstices of two particular disciplines than in fields framed by scholarly discourses of concern to a multitude of disciplines.
55-76
Gregor, Neil
ee3a0bc7-3779-4dd8-ad67-aad07359ca51
February 2015
Gregor, Neil
ee3a0bc7-3779-4dd8-ad67-aad07359ca51
Gregor, Neil
(2015)
Music, memory, emotion: Richard Strauss and the legacies of war.
Music & Letters, 96 (1), .
(doi:10.1093/ml/gcu110).
Abstract
This essay seeks to use a history of listening to Richard Strauss’s late work for strings Metamorphosen as a way of exploring hitherto under-researched legacies of the Second World War for German society. Situating the popular reception of the piece within histories of memory, the emotions, and the senses, it posits the existence of a ‘period ear’ in the immediate post-war period; that ‘period ear’, it argues, attests to the presence of affective legacies of the war lost to subsequent generations. Specifically, it argues for the presence of a peculiar culture of nostalgia for the Wilhelmine era in the 1950s and 1960s that was displaced by a later generation of listeners focused on the music’s alleged evocation of traumatic wartime memories. Its wider argument rests on a plea to recognize problem spaces that sit less at the interstices of two particular disciplines than in fields framed by scholarly discourses of concern to a multitude of disciplines.
This record has no associated files available for download.
More information
e-pub ahead of print date: 17 February 2015
Published date: February 2015
Organisations:
History
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 394112
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/394112
ISSN: 0027-4224
PURE UUID: d878a8fd-65b4-4717-b71b-f8dcad6e3c5b
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 26 May 2016 15:49
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 00:16
Export record
Altmetrics
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics