Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok explores the meansby which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelleas et MelisandeR (1902)and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonicstructures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musicallanguage. It also looks at how this language reflects the psychodramaticsymbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his Hungariandisciple, Bela Balazs. These two operas represent the first significant attemptsto establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramaticconception and the new musical language. Duke Bluebeard's Castle is based almostexclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities andtheir more abstract symmetrical transformations (including whole-tone,octatonic, and other pitch constructions derived from the system of the intervalcycles). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serve as the basis fordramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instrumentsof fate. The book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within theirlarger historical, social psychological, philosophical, and aestheticcontexts.

Elliott Antokoletz received the Bela Bartok 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.