The 2025 Kurt Weill Book Prize for an outstanding scholarly book on music theater since 1900 has been awarded to The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy by Larry Wolff, Silver Professor of History at New York University. Published by Stanford University Press, the book was the unanimous top choice for this year’s distinction, which carries with it a $5,000 award. Wolff’s work brings new perspectives to the context and creation of the well-known opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, composed by Richard Strauss to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The three-member jury responded enthusiastically to “Wolff’s essential new scholarship” and “extraordinary narrative skill, which will appeal to an academic readership as well as one far beyond.”
The panel awarded special recognition to Masi Asare, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a Tony-nominated songwriter and dramatist, for her Blues Mamas & Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage, published by Duke University Press. Judges cited its “pioneering approach” to a “convincing demonstration of vocal theory through the history of many Broadway singers.”
The three-member panel for the article prize found two entries to be exceptional standouts, so distinctive as to make it impossible to rank one above the other. They awarded two equal prizes, each carrying an award of $2,000. “Ligeti’s Unfinished Alice in Wonderland” by Joseph Cadagin (published in Perspectives of New Music), “imagines what an unfinished opera by György Ligeti might have looked like” and “casts valuable insights into Ligeti’s operatic aesthetic, compositional methods, and stylistic preferences.” Drew Nobile’s “Sondheim’s Dissonant Tonality” (published in Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater, edited by Michael Buchler and Gregory J. Decker) “lays the foundation, as few previous analytical studies have done, for a more comprehensive view of Stephen Sondheim’s treatment of tonality.” Cadagin serves as Audience Education and Communications Manager at Houston Grand Opera and Nobile is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Oregon.
Awarded biennially by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, the Kurt Weill Prizes recognize distinguished scholarship in music theater since 1900, including opera and dance. Books and articles published in 2023 or 2024 were eligible for the 2025 prize; book and article nominations were each reviewed by a separate panel of distinguished music and theater experts. The Kurt Weill Book Prize was inaugurated in 1995, with the Article Prize following shortly thereafter in 1999. For a complete list of Kurt Weill Prize winners, SEE HERE.
