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Musical Symbolism in Bartók's  Bluebeard: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious

Antokoletz, Elliott (2006) Musical Symbolism in Bartók's  Bluebeard: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious. Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 47 (3-4). pp. 279-292. ISSN 0039-3266

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Abstract

The intention in this lecture is to explore the means by which Bartók's DukeBluebeard's Castle (1911) transforms 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 Béla Balázs, Hungarian disciple of the Belgian dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck. In reaction to the realism of nineteenth-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 Symbolist plays, Maeterlinck was to transform the internal concept of subconscious motivation into an external one, one in which human emotions and actions are entirely controlled by fate. The Bartók-Balázs opera represents one of the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. This language is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations, the opposition of these two harmonic extremes serving as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instruments of fate. Also explored are the new musico-dramatic relations within larger historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. Distinguishing features are seen in the formulation of the new theoretical principles and how they serve to conjoin historical and cultural as well as philosophical and psychological issues within the operatic milieu.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: M Music and Books on Music / zene, szövegkönyvek, kották > M1 Music / zene
M Music and Books on Music / zene, szövegkönyvek, kották > M1 Music / zene > M10 Theory and philosophy of music / zeneelmélet, muzikológia
Depositing User: Endre Sarvay
Date Deposited: 09 Oct 2017 14:30
Last Modified: 09 Oct 2017 14:30
URI: http://real.mtak.hu/id/eprint/65355

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