Information may be Subject to Change

Time & Place

2024 Winter Term 2
Tuesdays & Thursdays
2:00pm to 3:30pm

Language & Prerequisites

This course is taught in English and there are no prerequisites.

Live Streaming

All our sessions will be streamed live.

Degree Requirements

This course counts towards the Literature Requirement for UBC’s Bachelor of Arts degree.

Course Description

This course examines the relationship between words and music in German and Austrian works from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is the period in which German and Austrian composers became an unparalleled driving force in the evolution of the Western musical canon. It is the period of Mozart’s monumental operas, Beethoven’s groundbreaking symphonies, Wagner’s revolutionary Gesamtkunstwerk and finally Brecht’s deconstruction of the entire tradition. This wave of musical innovation precipitated a response from the world of literature and philosophy: Many of the era’s key writers critically and productively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, among them the radical thinker Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. – As we make our way through these works, the focus of this course will lie on three major topics: The relationship between art and politics, art as a means to affect social change, and the category of the sublime. Classes will be dedicated to lectures on and discussion of a diverse selection of operas, songs, and literary texts. This course is taught in English, and there are no prerequisites.

Primary Materials

Beethoven, Ludwig van – Fidelio (1805)
Brecht, Bertolt – Threepenny Opera (1928)
Hoffmann, E.T.A. – Kreisleriana I (1810-14)
Mauersberger, Rudolf – Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst? (1945)
Mann, Thomas – Tristan (1901)
Mörike, Eduard – Mozart’s Journey to Prague (1856)
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus – The Magic Flute (1791)
Nietzsche, Friedrich – The Dionysiac World View (1870)
Schönberg, Arnold – A Survivor From Warsaw (1947)
Schubert, Franz – Winterreise (1827)
Wagner, Richard – Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850/68)
Wagner, Richard – Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1868)

Evaluation of Student Work

Two Midterm Exams (33% each)
Final Exam (34%)

Exam Modalities

All our exams are open-book exams that are based online, and you can complete them from anywhere in the world: your dorm, your apartment, your family home out of province – as long as you log in during the proper time slot. This also means that our final exam should not meaningfully impact your end-of-term travel plans. As long as you are travelling to a location where internet connections are readily available, you need not stay in Vancouver on account of our course’s final.