Modernist Mysteries: Persephone

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-973016-2
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, Format (B × H): 166 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1110 g

Modernist Mysteries: Persephone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Persephone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s.

As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levitz, Tamara

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Opernmusik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik Geschichte der Musik: Klassische Musik des 20./21. Jahrhunderts
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Tanz
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Materielle Kultur, Wirtschaftsethnologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction: Melancholic Modernism

Part I: Faith

Chapter 1: Gide's Anxiousness: Proserpine/Perséphone
Chapter 2: Stravinsky's Dogma
Chapter 3: Performing Devotion

Part II: Love

Chapter 4: André's Masked Pleasures
Chapter 5: Igor's Duality
Chapter 6: Ida the Sapphic Fetish
Chapter 7: Voices from the Crypt

Part III: Hope

Chapter 8: The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Tamara Levitz is Associate Professor of Musicology, UCLA and author of Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio Busoni's Master Class in Composition (Peter Lang, 1996).