Rudi Stephan, who died in the trenches of World War I at the age of twenty-eight, has long been regarded as a great hope cut short, a tantalizing "might-have-been". When his works began to be heard in 1912 many critics agreed that Stephan had the individuality and gifts of a major composer.

The present study is the first to offer a full account of Stephan's life (chapters two and three), with attention also to the reception of his music during his lifetime and after (chapter one); in the biographical chapters I draw on primary sources and contemporary accounts. My principal focus, however, is the discussion of Stephan's compositional language and of individual works of his oeuvre. I have attempted, despite a dearth of primary documents, especially from his early years, to define the formative influences on the composer and the probable nature of his early development (chapter four). The three central preoccupations of Stephan's musical style--harmonic language, form, and musical drama--are discussed in greater detail. His harmonic language, while explicable on the large scale by tonal means, is an eclectic mix of sonorities, relying heavily on exploitation of ambiguities and with frequent recourse to retroactive harmonic re-definition (chapters five and seven). These hallmarks are closely associated with his sense for formal organization and balance (chapter six). None of his works follows a clear-cut or repeated schemata, yet all share a propensity for sectionalization and the arch form in which opening material returns, transformed, at the conclusion (chapters six and seven). Finally, it is clear that throughout his creative life he felt an abiding fascination with the challenges and possibilities of dramatic music. Though much has been made of Stephan's use of "Musik fur ... " as a generic designation for his instrumental works, a study of his scores for Die ersten Menschen and Liebeszauber (chapter eight) does not suggest that Stephan himself made a clear distinction between "absolute" and programmatic music. The desire to express, indeed, to express dramatically and with force, was basic to Stephan's creative urge. But like many composers of that time he hoped to find musical renewal by avoiding the worn gestures that had through time become associated with "expressive" music, and to return instead to the intrinsic building blocks of turn-of-the-century musical language. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)