University of Sussex
Browse

File(s) not publicly available

Oedipus's Requiem: Verdi's Voice in Stravinsky

chapter
posted on 2023-06-08, 06:18 authored by Nicholas McKay
This paper was originally presented for the Verdi 2001 commemorative international conference held in Parma and New York. It was written under the brief of papers addressing 'ways in which Verdi's music had been used since his death'. Curiously, of all of Stravinsky's many allusive gestures (and explicit quotations) referencing other composers, the voice of Verdi (the ultimate emblem of nineteenth-century, romantic melodrama against which Stravinsky's music had so pointedly reacted) was the most prolific. The very limited literature on Stravinsky's numerous Verdi references had, however, somewhat naively and conservatively accounted for this in traditional terms of 'reverential homage'. These accounts were often underpinned with Stravinsky's vocal use of Verdi as a Wagner-foil and a lifelong love of Verdi that grew from the early influence of his father's many Verdi performances on the St. Petersburg stage. This article, however, goes further in advocating that Verdi's music was used precisely for its 'other-voiced' quality in a reading of these references as musical metaphors that trope heightened meanings onto Stravinsky's music and drama through an interpretative framework borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory of double-voicing. A semiotic theoretical framework is thus constructed on Peirce's tripartite division of the sign that reads these musical references to Verdi as 'Icons' working at the levels of 'images', 'diagrams' and 'metaphors' in Stravinsky's music.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Leo S. Olschki

Volume

94

Page range

411-441

Pages

31.0

Book title

Historiae Musicae Cultores - Biblioteca

ISBN

8822251962

Department affiliated with

  • Music Publications

Notes

Verdi 2001: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, New York, New Haven, 24 gennaio-1 febbraio 2001

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

R Montemorra Marvin, M Marcia, F Della Seta

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC