The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought

This chapter contains Erich Korngold's personal reflections on his former teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. Zemlinksy was an Austrian composer and conductor who enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a private music teacher in late Habsburg Vienna. He is perhaps best remembered in this capacity for the counterpoint instruction he gave to his future brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. For a brief time, beginning in 1900, Zemlinsky taught Alma Schindler, with whom he had a love affair in the period before she began the relationship that would lead, in March 1902, to her marriage to Gustav Mahler. Among the last—and certainly the most precocious—of Zemlinsky's Viennese students was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose lessons were initiated in 1908 and continued for upward of two years until Zemlinsky departed Vienna to become the music director of Prague's New German Theater.

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Hyphenated Hitlerism

Competing Germanies ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501739859.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 171-225

Author(s):

Robert Kelz

Keyword(s):

Cultural Hybridity ◽

National Socialist ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

Local Media ◽

German Theater

This chapter shows how reviews in local media emphasized Nazi tropes, such as anti-urbanism, the leader cult, mania for Aryans and Teutons, the glorification of war, and racial anti-Semitism. Though they were Nazi loyalists who enthusiastically supported Ney's ensemble, local dramatists and theatergoers also emphasized their cultural hybridity and affinity for Argentina. This estranged them from the fatherland and undercut Nazi officials' efforts to construct a transatlantic National Socialist community. Later, when the war and the Argentine regime turned against Germany, comedies formed a larger proportion of the ensemble's repertoire. Spectators at both the Free German Stage and the German Theater embraced the comedic genre to cope with the overlapping psychological and emotional duress that they incurred as emigrant populations whose nations of origin were at war.

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