Elliot Antokoletz

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande^R (1902) and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. It also looks at how this language reflects the psychodramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his Hungarian disciple, Bela Balazs. These two operas represent the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. Duke Bluebeard's Castle is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations (including whole-tone, octatonic, and other pitch constructions derived from the system of the interval cycles). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serve as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instruments of fate.The book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts.

---

This book explores the means by which the operas of Debussy and Bartok transform the structures of the traditional harmonic system into a new musical language. Antokoletz formulates new theoretic-analytic principles and describes how these principles link various historical and cultural as well as philosophical and psychological issues of the early twentieth century within the operatic milieu. The new musical language described here is based almost exclusively on interactions between folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press, USA
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Dezember 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 531g
• ISBN-13: 9780195365825
• ISBN-10: 0195365828
• Artikelnr.: 23303656

Autorenporträt

Elliott Antokoletz received the Béla Bártok Memorial Plaque and Diploma from the Hungarian Government in 1981. He is author of several books and co-editor of the International Journal of Musicology. He received his Ph.D in musicology from CUNY in 1975.

Inhaltsangabe

* Preface
* Acknowledgments
* 1: Backgrounds and Development: The New Musical Language and Its
Correspondence with Psycho-Dramatic Principles of Symbolist Opera
* 2: The New Musical Language
* 3: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious in the
Debussy and Bartók Operas
* 4: Pelléas et Mélisande: Polarity of Characterizations: Human Beings
as Real-Life Individuals and Instruments of Fate
* 5: Pelléas et Mélisande: Fate and the Unconscious; Transformational
Function of the Dominant-ninth Chord
* 6: Pelléas et Mélisande: Musico-Dramatic Turning Point: Intervallic
Expansion as Symbol of Dramatic Tension and Change of Mood
* 7: Pelléas et Mélisande: Mélisande as Christ Symbol - Life, Death,
and Resurrection - and Motivic Reinterpretations of the Whole-Tone
Dyad
* 8: Pelléas et Mélisande: Circuity of Fate and Resolution of
Mélisande's Dissonant Pentatonic-Whole-tone Conflict
* 9: Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Psychological Motivation; Symbolic
Interaction of Diatonic, Whole-tone and Chromatic Extemes
* 10: Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Toward Character Reversal; Reassigment
of Pentatonic and Whole-tone Spheres
* 11: Duke Bluebeard's Castle: The Nietzschean Condition and Polarity
of Characterizations; Diatonic-chromatic Extremes
* 12: Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Final Transformation, Ambiguous Tonal
Cycle, Retreat into Eternal Darkness; Synthesis of
Pentatonic/Diatonic and Whole-tone Spheres
* 13: Symbolism and Expressionism in Other Early Twentieth-century
Operas
* 14: Epilogue