An Aesthetic Deconstruction of R. Wagner’s Mythological Time in “Salome”, by R. Strauss

Carl Nielsen’s first opera, Saul og David, turns on the pairing of two seemingly contradictory foundations: the book of 1 Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, and the musico-dramatic influence of Richard Wagner. It is well-known that Nielsen firmly rejected Wagner and Wagnerism in the opera, and it is generally acknowledged that he succeeded: Saul og David sounds not at all like Wagner, and it overtly lacks the web of leitmotivs that so characterizes the Wagner music dramas from Das Rheingold on. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nielsen, along with his librettist Einar Christiansen, learned much from Wagner. Most importantly, the creation of a modern musical drama out of an ancient text was a task that both Wagner and his Danish successors faced. Like the best of Wagner’s music dramas, Saul og David is a model of clarity and intensity – a drama that focuses an abundance of narrative detail in the original source into a taut, psychologically penetrating story, a story masterful in its condensation of action and in its large-scale dramatic and musical form. That the opera appropriates a number of dramatic and musical techniques of the anti-Semitic Wagner in its portrayal of a foundational story from the Hebrew Bible is an irony well worth contemplating.

In his essay, Main Stream of Music, Donald Francis Tovey wrote that revolution effected by Wagner is not less important-or, as Kant would say, not less Copernian-than any previous event in musical history. It concerns the time-scale of music .... Wagner's achievement consisted in refashioning the whole texture and form of music until it covered the drama on a time-scale measured by hours instead of minutes.1 As evidence of Wagner's concern with musical form on the largest scale, Tovey pointed to the presence of massive recapitulations in Tristan and in the Ring, yet nowhere in his writings did he describe in detail the procedures which made possible this enormous expansion of the time-scale of music, enabling Wagner to equate the development of music with the development of the entire drama. Nor has this important matter received much attention in the vast literature on Wagner. As Anthony Newcomb recently pointed out, the large-scale formal context of the later music dramas is a topic conspicuously avoided in most scholarship since Lorenz.2 The shortcomings of the analyses of Lorenz, or of traditional analysis of Wagner's works according to leitmotives, on the other hand, may be due in part to the inadequacy of Wagner's earlier theoretical concepts when applied to his later music. Wagner's own discussions of the poetic-musical period and of of reminiscence, for instance, appear in his treatise Opera and Drama from 1851. The term poetic-musical period was employed only once by Wagner, but it has sidetracked much analysis since Lorenz used it to justify his division of the music into a succession of closed schematic forms.3 Not surprisingly, the analyses of Lorenz have been shown to be almost always artificial, if not downright inaccurate. Such attempts inevitably run counter to larger formal continuities in the music. Analogous difficulties confront an analytical approach based on leitmotives. As Jack Stein and others have pointed out, true motives of reminiscence largely disappear in Tristan and later works, where the motives undergo a more complex musical development, and rarely can be assigned dramatic

The place of children in societies is a question that we have been grappling with in many forms, maybe nowhere more creatively and visibly than in the products of our imaginary complexes, such as films. Educational theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux (2012) describes a contemporary crisis about youth and considers youth as potential cultural and pedagogical 'border-crossers or outlaws'. Our complex contemporary engagement with the concept of youth coincides with an increasing awareness of, firstly, the genderedness of our world and, secondly, of anthropocene planetary ecological states of crises. In this article I consider two girl-centred films, both with young female protagonists, where the convergence of these discursive forces is depicted in the narrative context of the current renewed appreciation for indigenous cultures, particularly those of the global south. The films are New Zealand director Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002) and Disney's animated film Moana (2016). There are clear similarities between the films, and the Disney creators have openly credited Whale Rider as influential in their creative process. I particularly consider how these two films, when read together, engage with ideas of cyclical mythological time, the leitmotifs of exploration, gender and colonisation, and with the trope of monstrousness or monstrosity as metaphors for paradoxical and complex living in an age of increasing complexity and anxiety.

The subject of research in this paper is the specific manifestation of associative tonality and tonal-harmonic third relations in Strauss's opera Elektra. Originating from the analytical discourse of several authors, dedicated to opera and music drama, associative tonality is a dramatic-tonal concept within which a certain key is consistently associated with a specific dramatic element, such as character, collectivity, event, feeling and more. In addition to the strong presence of associative keys related to the dramatic characters, Elektra is distinctly characterized by a chromatic and doubly-chromatic third relation that occurs both between chords and between keys. It is important for the harmonic language of the opera that these two types of relations that are formed between keys, at certain moments become more important than the manifestation of one particular key. New achievements in the field of hermeneutic musical analysis represent the initial assumption in this paper, and within these achievements it is possible to talk about the interpretive analysis of harmony as an interpretation of an opera or music drama. The paper aims to examine the ways in which associative tonality, on the one hand, and two types of third relationships between keys and between chords, on the other hand, function as instances of interpretation, which would provide a deep or completely new understanding of the elements of dramatic structure.

The article explores the ways of development of Ukrainian nativity drama - a genre of musical art that provides an opportunity to recreate the elusive breath of time, to learn not only about the world around but also the prospects for its preservation in Ukrainian culture. For the formation and development of the national musical culture of Ukraine, the traditions of Ukrainian nativity drama, the precondition of which was the folk music of national-historical orientation, became especially important. Besides, the folklore basis contributed to the formation of some professional genres, including opera and instrumental plays.
 The object of the research is the nativity drama within the opera art of Ukraine.
 The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the nativity scene as a musical and dramatic art form, which is an original monument of Ukrainian culture.
 It should be noted, that the nativity scene, especially the images of the second act, the type of its drama, had an impact on the development of Ukrainian musical and dramatic theater even in the XIX century. The mentioned influence was manifested, in particular, in the musical drama "Chornomorets", "Natalka Poltavka" by Lysenko, where folk song and dance are an integral part of the action and are a means of characterizing individual characters and dramatic situations. Some features of the character of Zaporozhets from the nativity scene were developed in the image of Karas from S. Gulak-Artemovsky's opera "Zaporozhets za Dynayem". Ukrainian music and drama art with its sources are associated with the ancient East Slavic agricultural and family holidays, games, dances, in which the element of dramatization played an important role since ancient times. Christmas games with costumes, Maslenitsa farewells, spring round dances, harvest festivals, autumn-winter round dances, and weddings became a rich source for the development of musical and theatrical art of the Ukrainian people in the XV–XVI centuries. To sum up, we can conclude that for the formation and development of the national musical culture of Ukraine in the XIX century, the Ukrainian opera became especially important, the precondition of the one was the folk music of national-historical orientation. Also, the folklore foundations, in particular the nativity scene, served to form professional genres including opera and instrumental plays.
 The study can be applied to prepare students and graduates in the field of Historical Sciences, Musicology, and Culturology.
 The significance and influence of nativity drama on the opera art of Ukraine have been studied, where the traditions of Ukrainian nativity scene, the precondition of which was the folk music of national-historical orientation, have been singled out.
 The study can be the basis for further study of the Ukrainian nativity drama of the XX–XXI centuries.

Purpose. The article is aimed to reveal the essence of the eternal problem, comprehended by Augustine Aurelius in the culture of the early Middle Ages – the focus of the value orientations of the anthropological search. Theoretical basis. Only in the twentieth century, various aspects of Augustine’s creative legacy became the subject of scientific research by many authors. As the direction of their scientific research, the problem of the relationship of reason, faith, knowledge, which has risen sharply in medieval Christian culture, has been considered. The logical outcome of these studies was the assertion that for Augustine Platonism was the main of the philosophical teachings of antiquity; that Augustine, being in line with Christian philosophy, considered the understanding of the aesthetic perfection of the Divine creation of the world as the sense of human life. The analysis of their works gives reason to argue that the definition of the human essence – the Augustine’s anthropological problems, was practically not addressed by representatives of domestic and foreign philosophical thought, and therefore remained undiscovered. Originality. The authors have proved that the definition of the human essence by Augustine is in the correlation with his answers to questions about the nature of the origin of man, about the secrets of being, etc. The ethical ideal of the thinker has been revealed, which is systematically formed in his works. Conclusions. The thesis has been substantiated that the anthropological views of Augustine Aurelius are in correlation with his epistemological judgments. Only by knowing the order of things in the universe, determined by the will of the Lord, we will know also the order of our value orientations. The basis of the philosophical comprehension of the human essence by Augustine Aurelius is a series of questions that constantly arise before mankind – about the nature of its appearance, about the secrets of human existence, the sense of life, death and immortality, etc. The ethical ideal of the thinker is an eternal city that is not based on human nature, it is too volatile, therefore it is only to a small extent subject to research, but on a Divine basis – the Christian idea.

Acknowledgements Introduction Writing the Score The Process of Creation: Forethought and Spontaneity The Quest for Melodic Diversity Handel as Harmonic Blacksmith: Changes in Tonal Structure Texture as Form The Rough Places Made Plain: Closure vs. Continuity Texts, Musical Form, and Dramatic Impact Musical Imagery as Drama Singers and the Creative Process Conclusions Bibliography Index of Handel's Compositions General Index

Interpretive properties of recitation in the vocalist’s performing arts

The aim of the study is to identify the structural-narrative, semiotic, and archetypal properties of the Ukrainian multimodal narrative as a semiotic space of secondary signification and social mythologization. The data for analysis include slogans and promotional multimodal videos (video narratives) of the Ukrainian brand “Золотий вік” (Golden Age). Based on multimodal research, semiotics and advertising mythology theories, as well as the theories of cultural archetypes, and utilizing multimodal, narrative, narrative-semiotic, and archetypal analysis, in conjunction with conceptual integration tools, the article has achieved the following key results. The Ukrainian brand narrative is a multimodal discursive construct formed by a combination of multiple semiotic codes realized through verbal and non-verbal sign systems via auditory and visual channels. The modules are integrated through multimodal video narratives, constructing a semiotic world integrated with the secondary signified “love” and the associated concepts that replace the denotative meaning of the brand as a jewelry company and its products as ornaments. The secondary signified is verbalized through slogans, visualized through plots, voiced by background songs or voice-over narrators, and encoded by cultural codes in their intertextual and archetypal aspects. Multimodal video-narratives, featuring various characters, narrative plots, and formal-narrative structures, exhibit isomorphism with respect to the possible worlds they construct, archetypal images, motifs, and characters, as well as analogous narrative plots with differing levels of reduction in structural narrative elements. The verbal module, based on a slogan, as well as invariant auditory accompaniment common to all video narratives – the song “Love” and off-screen narrative, supports a hermeneutic code because it contains a key metaphor based on the slogan and peripheral metaphorical components that reveal the conceptual features of its target space. The audio-visual module forms a proaritic code based on the narrative plots of advertising clips in a three-component possible world: extratextual frame narrative, textual pseudoreal narrative, and fairytale narrative. The cultural code is realized through various multimodal resources. The slogan and the brand name include explicit references to the source intertext based on the song. In the video narratives, techniques of interdiscursivity are used, combining elements of melodrama, a romantic story, and a fairy tale, as well as references to archetypal images, motifs, and elements of the archetypal cyclical time. Central to these are the archetypal images of dreams, magic, hearts, and motifs of the magical helper-giver, the journey, crossroads, and magical transformation of those who receive a branded gift. The main archetypes are those of gold and the ring-circle, associated with the symbolism of the sun. Cyclical temporality, associated with mythological time, is actualized by recurring motifs and underpins the unity of love and preciousness from the perspective of the connotations of “eternity” – as eternal spiritual and material values. The semantic code of connotations is related to the secondary signification meanings, which associate the brand’s products with “embodied” love and is based on all the brand’s narrative modules, constructing its social mythology. The symbolic code is based on archetypal symbols and the core value of the brand in its implicit opposition to values foreign to the brand, appealing to the motivational value of “love and the need for belonging” in the hierarchy of human motivations. The perspective for further research is the analysis of the pragmatics of multimodal narratives in Ukrainian brands.

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

Prescribed-time tracking for triangular systems of reaction-diffusion PDEs

Challenge from Within: Harold Prince in Context * The Prince Legacy: Musical Drama on Broadway * Cultural Barricades: British Musicals in the Eighties and Nineties * Beyond the Logos: West End Musical Drama * New Horizons: Musical Drama in the Non-Profit Theatre * Expanding Boundaries: Non-profit Directors in the Nineties * British Directors and the Classic American Musicals * Afterlife: Reinterpreting the Canon

The research object is the sacred music of a well-known Norwegian composer Henning Sommerro (born 1952), one of the bright components of his multifaceted creative work. The present article is the first work within the Russian scientific literature analyzing this aspect through the prism of one of the key works of the composer. The authors are also the first to introduce the complete musical score of the composition into the scientific discourse. Along with the recordings, it helps to understand how the composer manages to successfully combine the liturgical and secular components, the poetical and musical texts, and how they outline the modern musical directions. The research subject is the musical drama and expressive means of the “Partisan Requiem” (2000) by Sommerro performed by the combined Russian-Norwegian choir (Murmansk, 2019). The research shows that the composer keeps the graphic structure of the historically formed model of the genre. Owing to the musical expressive means and “citation”, demonstrating the postmodernist practices of the composer, the genre becomes recognizable, denoting the important “memory spaces”. At the same time, in terms of drama, Latin and Norwegian texts are “arranged” according to the internal connection, the monologue inclusions of the narrator are often accompanied with a reduced orchestra, whose timbre and color, on the one hand, thematically unite the Norwegian texts with the graphic and musical sphere of the composition, and on the other hand, deepen the understanding of the ideas underlying them. The briefness of poetic verses strengthens the importance of each of them; they are rhythmically linked to liturgical texts thus helping to create a single lexical and musical fabric of the composition by means of a complex interaction of the choir, the orchestra, the soloists and the actor-narrator.   

Statement of the problem. Musical Orientalism functions and develops on the basis of integrative connections with the system of humanities, primarily philosophy, aesthetics, history, history of culture, art history, literary studies, since the phenomenon of Orientalism encompasses the main directions and types of artistic activity, starting with the Baroque and flourishing more fully in the art and musical culture of the 18th–20th centuries. As a subject of scientific research, Orientalism is most thoroughly studied in philological sciences, where it is analyzed through the prism of linguistic, literary and cultural texts of Asian regions. However, in the field of musical art it turns out to be no less significant, representing a complex of stylistic means aimed at the artistic reproduction of the image of the East. The paradigm of exotic style in music, according to J.-P. Bartoli, forms a holistic system of artistic techniques that are clearly identifiable and together constitute a universal toolkit for creating the effect of exoticism, which composers have successfully used for centuries (Bartoli, 1997). In A. Mamona’s works, for the first time in Ukrainian musicology, the author’s concept of “new Orientalism” was proposed as a special approach of composers to embodying oriental images in their works (Mamona, 2021; 2024). Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the study is to represent the semantics of the oriental component of the choral scenes of the opera “Samson and Delilah” by C. Saint Saëns. For the first time, the article presents a systematic reproduction of the image of the East in the choral scenes of the opera “Samson and Delilah” through a semantic analysis of oriental features. The research methodology is based on systemic-typological, genre-stylistic, semantic and value-semantic approaches. Research results. In the opera “Samson and Delilah” by C. Saint-Saëns, the oriental flavor is combined with religious themes. Along with this, the view of the East is represented by contrasting two worlds – the Western and the Eastern. Samson and the people of Israel represent the Western world, Delilah and the Philistines – the Eastern. This conceptual contrast also finds its expression in musical drama, where choral scenes are not just a musical background, but a powerful dramatic lever. Although both peoples – both Jews and Philistines – belong to the Eastern civilization in the historical context, the composer deliberately uses different musical means to characterize them. Conclusion. C. Saint-Saëns masterfully reveals the mechanisms of musical Orientalism, where exotic elements serve not only as a coloristic effect, but also as a tool for constructing a certain musical semantics of the East. The composer contrasts Western and Eastern musical traditions. The semantics of Orientalism manifests itself at different levels of musical language – mode-intonation, harmonic, dynamic, timbre-textural.

In domestic science there is a perception that today’s opera, under the pressure of massification, simultaneously tries to preserve the elusive traditions of “high” art and lowers the bar to the level of mass culture, while the availability of technological possibilities of transferring opera to the screen is not able to change the preferences of the mass audience, unable to perceive it adequately. It cannot be denied that in the 21st century an uninitiated mass audience’s perception of classical opera is largely formed on the basis of screen representations of musical drama. In this context, the analysis of the applied staging solutions in cinema and television in the incarnation of opera, which includes the determination of the components that are necessary for the qualitative screen representation of musical drama, becomes a relevant subject for scientific research. In this article, which is dedicated to 170th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, an attempt is made to analyze four screen forms of one musical drama different from each other with the aim to reveal variability of staging solutions used for the realization of classical opera on TV and in cinema. The specific features of cinematographic and television representation of musical drama influencing the actualization and popularization of opera in the modern screen space are revealed within different genre frames (film-opera, TV version of musical drama, live TV film, musical TV contest). The author identifies the central figure in the latter processes the director-director, a professional in the field of television, who understands the fundamental laws and staging techniques of musical theater, the expressive means of cinematography.