Oedipus at a Parting of the Ways. About R.M. Gliere’s Theatrical Composition (1921), Its Genre Status and Its Place in the Composer’s Heritage
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Abstract
This article is the first to consider the earliest surviving compositions by R.M. Gliere in the genre of music for dramatic theatre plays. The novelty of the research is determined by the reliance on archival materials – the composer’s manuscripts and documents of the production process – as well as rare memoirs. The score and clavier of the composition, a typewritten copy of the play with the musician’s notes are of undoubted historical and scholarly value. In spite of the fact that the play had never been produced and the musical score had never been published, the work is embedded in an extended series of historical interpretations of the Oedipus story, and more generally in the panorama of “Russian Antiquityˮ of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as part of the tendency towards “New Antiquityˮ in the art of the time. The research tasks of this article are linked in many respects to the evaluation of the score’s place in the global musical and cultural process of the early 1920s, as well as in Gliere’s hеritage at the turning-point from the early, pre-revolutionary stage to the late, Soviet period. The main aim of the analysis was to reveal the peculiarities of an independent concerto opus in the composition of the applied genre: original dramaturgy and the methods of recurrence at the levels of pitch, rhythm and timbre. The final conclusion of the work is the special position of Oedipus in the series of Gliere’s works, which lies between his philharmonic and theatrical fields. Starting from his cantata-oratorio prototypes, the composer anticipated the emergence of a model of “choral theatreˮ in the second half of the century. Remarkably, the score remained the only one of its kind. Other theatrical projects, despite commonalities in sound stylistics, had a different structure, directly derived from the stage action.
Keywords: Gliere, Oedipus, Sophocles, theatrical music, choral genres.
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