Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious

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Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Backgrounds and Development: The New Musical Language and Its Correspondence with Psycho-Dramatic Principles of Symbolist Opera
2 The New Musical Language
3 Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious in the Debussy and Bartok Operas
4 Pelleas et Melisande: Polarity of Characterizations: Human Beings as Real-Life Individuals and Instruments of Fate
5 Pelleas et Melisande: Fate and the Unconscious
Transformational Function of the Dominant-ninth Chord
6 Pelleas et Melisande: Musico-Dramatic Turning Point: Intervallic Expansion as Symbol of Dramatic Tension and Change of Mood
7 Pelleas et Melisande: Melisande as Christ Symbol - Life, Death, and Resurrection - and Motivic Reinterpretations of the Whole-Tone Dyad
8 Pelleas et Melisande: Circuity of Fate and Resolution of Melisande's Dissonant Pentatonic-Whole-tone Conflict
9 Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Psychological Motivation
Symbolic Interaction of Diatonic, Whole-tone and Chromatic Extemes
10 Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Toward Character Reversal
Reassigment of Pentatonic and Whole-tone Spheres
11 Duke Bluebeard's Castle: The Nietzschean Condition and Polarity of Characterizations
Diatonic-chromatic Extremes
12 Duke Bluebeard's Castle: Final Transformation, Ambiguous Tonal Cycle, Retreat into Eternal Darkness
Synthesis of Pentatonic/Diatonic and Whole-tone Spheres
13 Symbolism and Expressionism in Other Early Twentieth-century Operas
14 Epilogue

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Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. It also looks at how this language reflects the psychodramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Balázs. These two operas represent the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. Duke Bluebeard's Castle is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations (including whole-tone, octatonic, and other pitch constructions derived from the system of the interval cycles). The opposition of these two harmonic extremes serve as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instruments of fate. The book also explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts.

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