Ðóñ Eng Cn Translate this page:
Please select your language to translate the article


You can just close the window to don't translate
Library
Your profile

Back to contents

Scientific notes of the Gnesins Russian Academy of Music
Reference:

Solomonova O.B. The principles of semantization of the musical text in the Mussorgsky opera «Boris Godunov»

Abstract: The subject of this research is the mechanisms of semantization of the music in "Boris Godunov", principally the "passionate" rhetorical figures (katabasis, passus duriusculus) and the genre models of lament and glory that have a long history of intertextual existence – and for that reason bear the most consistent information in relation to the opera’s semantic program. The article investigates the culminating zones of “Godunov” associated with the formation of the prosodic paradigm fall–crucifixion–death of the tsar. The author finds that many important points voicing the idea of the doomed nature of Boris are based on downward movement in overt or latent content (diatonic and modal-distorted, often with alteration of the descent or a chromatic variant similar to the rhetorical figure passus duriusculus).The nature of this work has occasioned a need to adapt the methodological principles of various fields of scholarship, chief among them semiotic, hermeneutic, comparative and systematic research methods as well as a holistic intonational analysis.The study of the semantic aspects of "Boris Godunov" reveals the specifics of the directorial work by Mussorgsky. It emerges that the main characters of the opera, Tsar Boris and the Simpleton (Yurodivy), are linked by a common intonational program based on the musical symbols of suffering and death. The semantically opposite glorification genres correlate with real characters (Boris, the Imposter and the boyar Khrushchov), a crowning-debunking. These are anti-glorifications, which lead to a "disruption" of the glorification semantics (the glorification of Khrushchov and the chorus "Glory to the beauty of the sky" with its katabasic "Live and prosper, our King and Father"). An important exception is the Praise to the Heavenly King performed by the kaliki chorus, which is the only true glorification. The author demonstrates that the semantic dynamics of the genre-intonational symbolism under examination unfolds in the coordinates of two systems: latent inverse (Prolog) and direct (the Kroma scene). The given semantic accents, reinforced in the second edition of the opera, make up an important directorial move by Mussorgsky and offer evidence of the consistent concept aimed at the formation of deep semantic intentions.


Keywords:

lament, genre, passus duriusculus, catabasis, rhetorical figures, hermeneutics, intonational semantics, glory, directing, dramaturgy


This article can be downloaded freely in PDF format for reading. Download article

This article written in Russian. You can find original text of the article here .
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.