Exilierte Göttinnen: Frauenstatuen im Bühnenwerk von Kurt Weill, Thea Musgrave und Othmar Schoeck

According to Busoni, the "supernatural or unnatural" is the "natural region" of opera alone. Busoni's pupil Kurt Weill and friend Othmar Schoeck took this observation to heart. In Weill's musical 'One Touch of Venus' (1943) and Schoeck's opera 'Venus' (1921) the supernatural manifests itself in the form of an ancient statue of Venus which comes to life when a young man places a wedding ring on its finger. Schoeck's plot, based on a work by Prosper Merimée, concludes in the spirit of Busoni's "magic mirror" with the death of the young man, but Weill's work, in the spirit of Busoni's "mirror of laughter", has a happy ending. Thea Musgrave also subscribed to Busoni's aesthetic of the "supernatural" and in her opera 'The Voice of Ariadne' (1974), based on a short story by Henry James, uses the theme of a married man who feverishly searches for an ancient buried statue of Ariadne. In this study the three works, composed in very different styles at different points in the 20th century, are for the first time submitted to a detailed interdisciplinary analysis at the intersection of musicology, cultural studies, and literary criticism.