Abstract
This study on death themes in music aimed to gain more insight in the various ways in which composers have been dealing with (fear of) death, loss and grief through the ages. The research area of this PhD dissertation is restricted to compositions from the German-speaking area in the period
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from the early seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Six compositions were studied in detail. Based on the idea that music always takes place within a particular context, these compositions were related to cultural and historical developments. Besides a musicological point of view, psychoanalytic perspectives were also used, especially when it comes to handling the fear of death and coping with loss and grief. The first period includes the times of the German Reformation. The case studies from this period relate to the death of children and a partner. Many composers from this period had a Lutheran background. This was expressed musically in different ways. In the Lutheran ars moriendi, part of the early modern attitudes toward death, consolating the bereaved took centre stage. The study of compositions by Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz shows how this Lutheran approach of the theme of death has been expressed in their work. The second period, an age of transition, includes Enlightenment. In this period death is still a central issue. In the case studies, attitudes toward the own death were examined and discussed from the point of view of Lutheran ars moriendi on the one hand, and Freemasonry on the other. Compositions within the framework of the ars moriendi concern some musical settings of a poem by Martin Schalling, in which a representation of Abraham’s bosom is shown. In the period of Enlightenment, in which the rise of freemasonry was clearly noticeable, there was, on the other hand, an increasing secularisation taking place, causing the ars moriendi tradition to decline. A composition studied within the context of Freemasonry is Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik. The third period studied here is the German Early Romanticism, in which death of the other was more in the foreground than one’s own death. The focus was on loss and farewell. There was a true fascination with death. In the selected compositions by Franz Schubert, two distinct images are presented, each expressed in a different way, both textually and musically. In conclusion, it can be stated that the image of death has changed in the course of the centuries, and in line with this, it has been represented in the studied compositions in different ways as well, in accordance with cultural changes, context, and contemporary musical idiom. But universalia can also be detected, such as the notion of resurrection in one way or another, and transition to another form of existence or a new beginning.
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