• Как сделан Подъячий Мусоргского? An Opera Emerging from Gogol's Sleeve—“Musical Synecdoche” in the making

    Author(s):
    Miklos Mezosi (see profile)
    Date:
    2009
    Group(s):
    American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society (IMS), Literary theory
    Subject(s):
    Russian literature, Nineteenth century, Russia (Federation), Music, History, Opera, Metaphor, Poetics
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Opera semiotics, synecdoche, Gogolian mask, 19th-century Russian literature, Russian musical history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/dcz5-pb37
    Abstract:
    One of the characteristic elements of Gogol's poetic arsenal, a technique termed as the “Gogolian mask” by Boris Eikhenbaum, re-appears in Musorgsky—not in the comic “Gogol operas” but in a scene of Khovanshchina, his last and most somber opera. The paper focuses on how a particular literary legacy—the Gogolian mask—is adapted for a musical genre. Musorgsky as a composer boasts a considerable poetic vein (he has definitely and passim “intervened” in Pushkin's text to make it adaptable for opera, and has written the libretto for Khovanshchina himself). Taking this into account, and also that he was expressly a great admirer of Gogol, invite an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to elucidate the question. In his essay on Dante, Osip Mandelstam apprehends intuitively what lies at the bottom of the Gogolian mask (though he makes no reference to Gogol), and assumes physiology-based operation for “poetics in action” in Divina Commedia: ”The art of speech distorts the face, bursts its quietness, tears off its mask...” Placing Gogol's masks on this Dantean base, the paper discusses the adaptation by Musorgsky of Gogol's mask, supporting the argumentation with Mandelstam's findings on Dante's poetics. The result of Musorgsky's adaptation is termed as the “musical synecdoche”, the basic element within the “musical metaphor”, a larger unit in “opera rhetorics”. Musical synecdoche breeds musical mask, the aesthetically perceptible form in which it appears.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://sek.elte.hu/media/cf/22/80a59d7ee1d79358beea19d06e9f36ba3b06936b5958c8f363e07824189d/StudiaSlavicaSavariensia2009.pdf
    Publisher:
    University of West Hungary Press
    Pub. Date:
    2009
    Journal:
    Studia Slavica Savariensia
    Volume:
    14
    Issue:
    1-2
    Page Range:
    215 - 233
    ISSN:
    HU ISSN 1216-0016
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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