Generic intergration and its expressive potential in the music of Kurt Weill and Richard Rodgers

This study begins the process of unraveling the cross-pollination in music of the mid-twentieth century between Broadway and opera genres, using a semiotic analytical framework. The use of what are known as performative musical acts are view as tying the operatic genre to the direct, sincere emotional communication that is possible within that genre. However, the operatic style, even while it expresses emotion very clearly, is asserted as unbelievable for an audience due to its perceived cultural irrelevancy---competency in the common cultural signposts of the style had waned. On the other hand, the study asserts musical theatre, through its focus on meta-commentary, self-referentiality, irony and other discursive elements (including framing with underscoring and play-outs) creates distance from the actual events and emotions presented on the stage. This is a principal Robert Hatten calls "reflexivity," and it suggests a composer can "get outside" the artificiality of a form in order to suggest either a greater reality of experience or an awareness that goes beyond the expressive discourse of the work itself. Combined with the "relationship of complicity" created by the extensive use of irony (and sometimes farce), this "greater reality of experience" is the audience. That is: the reflexivity of the musical theatre genre draws the audience closer into the work. This relationship is strengthened, and indeed, made possible, through the use of culturally relevant musical codes---the Broadway style.;This use of extreme cross-pollination---Broadway and opera entanglement---reaches beyond "signaling shifts in levels of discourse" and more toward the desire to create something new by troping genres. The Broadway genre is used to reel in the audience, while the operatic genre is used to transmit deep emotion. Using this combination of genres, a piece can become deeply dramatic, emotional (i.e., operatic) and culturally relevant and immediate (i.e., Broadway).;These processes are used in different ways throughout the repertorie of both genres; this study begins by focusing on the use of specific operatic and musical theatre tropes and their interactions in parts of Kurt Weill's Street Scene, and then moves on to a discussion of the use of la solita forma (nineteenth-century operatic conventions of formal organization) in Rodger's Carousel, in the context of examining how operatic tropes were used as expressive devices in a major "Golden Era" musical.