BY

faune (1894) are both musical works inspired by poetry. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) drew from Richard Dehmel’s poem,“Verklärte Nacht, ” and Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) drew from Stephane Mallarme’s poem “L’apres-midi d’un faune. ” While both pieces were written in Europe in the 1890s, they sound drastically different. This research aims to determine whether these aesthetic differences in the musical and literary works can be attributed to social or cultural differences between Germany and France in the 1890s. Previous research on this topic has not provided a comparison of works from different regions at the time, and usually focused on only one component. Often, musical sources were either solely analysis-based or historically-based. My research combines historical and cultural research as well as literary and musical aesthetic analysis. This research reveals a clear relationship between the works and the cultures in which they were written. In the 1890s in Germany, both literary and musical arts movements continued to develop traditional German arts aesthetics. The literary movement was greatly influenced by Freudian developments in psychology, while maintaining conventional narrative. In music, Schoenberg intentionally extended the compositional techniques of historically significant and contemporary composers. In France, both arts movements were affected by France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and aimed to separate French art culture from German art culture. Consequently, the literary movement moved away from conventional narrative and began to explore perception in lieu of emotions. The music movement turned away from German compositional techniques, drawing from historical French composers, and in the works of Debussy, contemporary Russia