A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Andrea Fabry discusses in her article, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle," the image of Bluebeard as a metaphor for gender relations. Bela Bartok's opera and its libretto represent a prime example of the metaphor that in turn can be found in a range of text types, from fairy tales through novels to films. In the article, Fabry analyzes Bartok's contribution to the metaphor, namely with his opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle. She relates the opera to the text of the opera's libretto, written by film theoretician Bela Balazs, and places her analysis in the larger historical framework of audience research in modernity. The analysis reveals that in a pronounced misogynistic artistic climate of the time and working from a libretto whose tragic ending denies transcendence to the female character of the opera, Bartok's opera can be understood as the representation of simplistic domesticity where the real story remains un-mediated and unnarrated. Andrea Fabry, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.4 (1999):
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.
Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as "the art or science of interpretation, esp. of Scripture." It was toward the end of the last century that Hermann Kretschmar applied the word to the verbal elucidation of musical meaning, but musical hermeneutics was an art (or science) that, under one rubric or another, had long been practised. Music, it was generally agreed, had meaning. It was an art of expression; therefore it should be possible to determine what it expressed and how. Kretschmar, with his detailed attempts at exact explanation, thus represented what might be called the dogmatic climax of a long tradition. At the very time he was writing, however, a more formalistic view, expounded by critics like Gurney and Hanslick and furthered by theorists like Schenker, was gaining support. Indeed, for a time the purists were successful in discrediting hermeneutical methods and results--although their victories may have been due less to the force of their own logic than to a widespread reaction against the excesses of ultra-realistic program music on the one hand and of literalistic "interpretations" on the other. As a result, even those who still defended the possibility and relevance of musical expression were loath to define its nature in any specific terms. Today, however, when it is once more acceptable to admit an interest in the subjectmatter and iconography of a painting, it has become increasingly feasible to discuss the putative meaning of a musical composition without evoking immediate derision. There have been a number of recent books that try, from various points of view, to come to grips with the problems involved.'