Fin-de-siècle Lyrical Drama and the European Modernist Sensibility on the Eve of World War One

Abstract

The paper analyses the relationship of lyrical drama, which emerged as the dominant genre of European Modernism, and opera, representing a paradigm shift in European thought on the eve of World War One. The musical metaphor of love-death, originating in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, was adopted widely and transposed into verbal art by the dramatists and prose-writers of Modernism in Eastern and Western Europe. This metaphor or leit-motif is read in the context of the theory of the Freudian death-drive and the emergence of a modern analytic of finitude, which announces a new European cultural paradigm, grounded in identity and difference. A new ‘modern’ sensibility is formed out of these metaphysical elements, which come to expression in the Modernist genre of lyrical drama, in which a synaesthetic relationship is forged between music and the verbal text. A musical motif (love-death) is generalised into desire in the verbal text which it structures through intonation, gesture and the representation of unconscious drives on stage.