Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok
Elliot Antokoletz
Abstract
This book explores the means by which two early 20th-century operas — Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) — transform the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language, and how this language reflects the psycho-dramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Balázs. In reaction to the realism of 19th-century theater, many authors began to develop a new interest in psychological motivation and a level of consciousness manifested in metaphor, ambiguity, ... More
This book explores the means by which two early 20th-century operas — Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) — transform the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language, and how this language reflects the psycho-dramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Balázs. In reaction to the realism of 19th-century theater, many authors began to develop a new interest in psychological motivation and a level of consciousness manifested in metaphor, ambiguity, and symbol. In his plays, Maeterlinck was to transform the internal concept of subconscious motivation into an external one, in which human emotions and actions are entirely controlled by fate. The two operas of this study represent the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. The new musical language is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic-diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations (dominant ninth, whole-tone, octatonic). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serving as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as symbols of fate. This book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social, and aesthetic contexts.
Keywords:
psycho-dramatic symbolism,
fate,
subconscious motivation,
pentatonic,
diatonic folk modalities,
whole-tone,
octatonic,
dominant-ninth chord,
symmetrical transformations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195365825 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2008 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195365825.001.0001 |
