First supervisor: Prof. Dr Melanie Unseld (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) | Second supervisor: Prof. Dr Anna Langenbruch

The picture cycle 'Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel' by the painter Charlotte Salomon is available to the Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam in over 1000 pictures and has been widely interpreted and discussed for several years. In an academic context, too, there is an interdisciplinary struggle to classify, categorise and name Salomon's paintings. What is still missing, however, is an overall view of the paintings from a musicological perspective - an aspect that is actually obvious on closer inspection, considering that Charlotte Salomon based her cycle of paintings largely on music-related memory. On the one hand, this can be seen in the intermedial structure of the work, but the subtitle 'A Singing Game' also points to the possibility of a musical reference, as does the treatment of numerous music-cultural themes. Fundamental questions in this context are those that ask how is remembered and what is remembered.

Taking into account sociological, (music) historiographical and cultural studies approaches, the doctoral project will pick out and analyse examples of musical memory processes within the Singespiel. In line with what can be seen in Charlotte Salomon's pictures, the focus will be on musical repertoire as well as music-cultural actors and performances of music, remembered places and remembered spaces of music-cultural action, musical networks and their actors as well as music-related professionalisation processes and biographies of female musicians. Above all of this, the ambivalence of autobiographical readings of "Life? or Theatre?" against the background of the Holocaust and the artistic re-structuring of the self through music-related memory is always dealt with.