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.