Opera “The Tempest” as a phenomenon of the late style of Frank Martin’s works

Abstract

Statement of the problem. Recent research and publications. The absence of works by European and Ukrainian scholars devoted to the study of style peculiarities of the opera «The Tempest» written by F. Martin, an outstanding Swiss composer of the 20th century, actualizes the need for its comprehensive research. Foreign musicology already has some experience in analyzing F. Martin’s works. In the studies of Ch. W. King (1990), S. Bruhn (2011), A. Corbellari (2021) we can find a biography of the composer and generalizations about his musical thinking. The memoirs of M. Martin (2009), the composer’s widow, explain some specific features of his creative process. R. Glasmann’s research (1987) reveals the essence of the Martins’ principle of “gliding tonality”. The author of this paper was the first in the national musicology to research F. Martin’s vocal and choral pieces in terms of their stylistic features and comparative interpretation (Kozyk, 2022 a, b). Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to define the phenomenon of F. Martin’s late style through a holistic analysis of interpretation of W. Shakespeare’s play in the opera “The Tempest” and the peculiarities of vocal and scenic embodiment of its characters. In the concept of the study, the analysis of the opera is offered as the embodiment of the best qualities of F. Martin’s late style. In Ukrainian musicology, this is the first experience of a holistic analysis of F. Martin’s opera. As research methods the principles of holistic analysis of the artistic content of the work (when studying its score) and comparative analysis (when determining the features of F. Martin’s vocal-scenic interpretation of W. Shakespeare’s characters) were used. Results and conclusion. “The Tempest” is one of F. Martin’s most inventive opuses, which synthesizes all the composer’s previous experience. All groups of characters have a clearly defined musical characteristic that helps to identify them even beyond their scenic embodiment. Thus, a group of noble Italians is characterized by various stylistic references that evoke associations with a certain historical era; comic characters are embodied through reliance on conversational dialogues and awkward songs; for lyrical characters, the composer chooses the sphere of lyric utterances. To characterize Caliban, the composer chooses a dodecaphonic series and the saxophone timbre, while for his opposite Ariel he introduces a dance with choral lines and a separate hidden orchestra, thus creating a sense of elusiveness and weightlessness of the air spirit. The composer uses the widest range of expressive means in the musical characterization of Prospero: there is off-pitch recitation, expressive melodic declaration, and extended ariosos. Such a multifaceted style of the opera is due to the multidimensionality of Shakespeare’s play. F. Martin managed to achieve the unity of stage and musical action, the equivalence of orchestral and vocal parts. Despite the fact that the style of “The Tempest” combines various techniques (dodecaphony, serial structures, polystylistics with quotations from different eras), the music is not perceived eclectically. All groups of the music characteristics are united by the composer’s individual method of writing (“gliding tonality”), which contributes to richness of F. Martin’s lyrical expression. Thus, the genre and stylistic complex of F. Martin’s opera represents the phenomenon of the late style as an expected regularity – the crown of the evolution of the composer’s thinking.