: Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni . Wye Jamison Allanbrook.

Platoff, John

doi:10.1525/jm.1985.4.4.03a00080

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The problem of the deficiency in the musical portrayal of Onegin she solves with a reference to Mozart's Don Giovanni: "Like that of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Evgeny's musical psychology is all impulse, action divorced from reflection, with no guiding principle other than the whim of the moment" (Frey 2013, p. 224). This reading is based on Wye Allanbrook's analysis of Don Giovanni, but downplays somewhat the observation that the Don uses musical codes connected to social class intentionally to mimic the behavior of his intended victims (Allanbrook 1983).…”

Section: A Burst Of Enthusiasm: For What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tchaikovsky, Onegin, and the Art of Characterization

Maes

2024

Arts

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Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing Yevgeni Onegin. He expressed his fulfillment in a famous letter to Sergey Taneyev. What could his enthusiasm convey about the content of the project? Music criticism has taken Tchaikovsky’s words as proof for the thesis that the opera is connected to autobiographical circumstances. In this mode of thinking, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music is the result of the composer’s identification with the subject matter. Despite the objection of several Tchaikovsky scholars, the autobiographical paradigm remains very much alive in the reception of Tchaikovsky’s music. As an alternative, Tchaikovsky scholarship has explored a hermeneutical approach that would link his music to its context in Russian society and culture. In this paper, I present another possible reaction to Tchaikovsky’s statement: an exploration of the composer’s approach to musical characterization. Analysis of some key scenes reveals that the definition of characters and situations by musical means is more precise than standard interpretations of the opera would concede. This discovery may lead to a new assessment of characterization as a critical tool to refine the definition of Tchaikovsky’s position in European music history. The method may be applied to examples outside his operatic output, such as Serenade for Strings and the Fifth Symphony.

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Section: A Burst Of Enthusiasm: For What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tchaikovsky, Onegin, and the Art of Characterization

Maes

2024

Arts

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“…The opening musette (Ex. 4) is a traditionally ‘low’ topic; rooted in the imitation of the musette, a bagpipe‐type instrument common in the eighteenth century, the musette genre is characterised by a drone and skirl (wail), commonly translated to a pedal point, a sharp melodic treble and a raised fourth (Allanbrook 1983, pp. 52–3).…”

Section: Second‐order Topics and Socialist Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The musette evokes the broader pastoral style, or ‘the most directly suggestive expression of the rustic scene’ in eighteenth‐century music, as Wye Allanbrook describes (Allanbrook 1983, p. 52). A first‐order reading is suitable narodnost′ , the musette and pastoral connoting an idealised, unsullied Arcadian simplicity, not far removed from the bucolic idylls depicted in contemporaneous art such as Arkady Plastov's Haymaking (1945) and Andrei Mylnikov's In Peaceful Fields (1950).…”

Section: Second‐order Topics and Socialist Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second‐Order Topics and Prokofiev's String Quartets

DONALDSON

2023

Music Analysis

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In his 1957 Mythologies, Roland Barthes proposes a second‐order semiological system, in which a familiar sign is repurposed to become a new signifier and in the process mythologises the previous sign system. This article adapts this principle to musical topics in twentieth‐century music, using the case study of the eighteenth‐century topical universe as it appears in Sergey Prokofiev's two String Quartets.I approach this from two directions, exploring in turn the mechanics of internal relationships and wider historical‐political implications. First, drawing upon William Caplin's concept of formal functions and their various possible associations with topics (Caplin 2005), I propose that topics with formal associations can express formal functions without the requirement for clarity in the primary parameters of harmony, tonality, grouping and cadence. Accordingly, they signify on a second‐order plane. The recurring Mannheim rocket in the first movement of Prokofiev's String Quartet No. 1 (1931) provides a case study. Second, I demonstrate the parallels between a second‐order system and key tenets of socialist realism. Concepts such as dostupnost′ (making the work understandable to everyone) and opora na klassiku (based on past Classical models) echo Barthes's model, as meaning is drawn from reference to Enlightenment‐associated art as a whole, rather than the individual topics. I demonstrate these principles in practice with reference to Prokofiev's Quartet No. 2 (1941). Together, these second‐order perspectives show the deeply rooted reliance on eighteenth‐century semantics in Prokofiev's music and their wider aesthetic implications.

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: Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni . Wye Jamison Allanbrook.

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Tchaikovsky, Onegin, and the Art of Characterization

Tchaikovsky, Onegin, and the Art of Characterization

Second‐Order Topics and Prokofiev's String Quartets

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