A City Called Wagner
Antigona Rădulescu
The orchestral work Wagner Under is Op. 157 in composer Dan Dediu’s oeuvre. It was composed in 2014 and since then it was played in Romania and Denmark with great success. Wagner Under is particularly intriguing in terms of its compositional technique, the complexity of its conceptual layers, and the open character of its interpretation, as my analysis endeavors to demonstrate. Drawing on concepts from the fields of musical semiotics and narratology, I explore Wagner Under in terms of both expression and content (in a Hjelmslevian sense). Analyzed together, the two may truly reveal the composer’s strategy, the exuberant fantasy with which he creates sonorous worlds with a significant impact on communication, and, ultimately, the features that define the musician’s truly unmistakable style.
The Enemy’s Culture
Katy Romanou
This article is concerned with the admiration of the Nazis for ancient Greek culture and with the admiration of the Greeks for German music as manifested during the occupation of Greece by the Nazis. Greek musicians collaborated with officials of the occupying forces in order to found the first Greek state symphony orchestra and Greek state opera ever. The fact shows how slow Greece has been in establishing the nexus of organisations necessary for the promotion and the education of music. The article observes the reactions that three important musicians of the first half of the 20th century had to this situation. Dimitri Mitropoulos chose to pursue a career in the United States, being certain that Athens would be his “total ruin”. Nikos Skalkottas was involuntarily secluded in Athens. By contrast, Manolis Kalomiris chose to work for the development of music organizations in Greece; as one of the musicians contributing to establishment of the legal basis for the foundation of the State Orchestra and the State Opera, he was accused, at the end of the war, of having collaborated with the enemy. After having prepared an apology, he was finally exonerated, through the mediation of friends.
Abstracts
This paper aims at looking, from a performer-conductor’s point of view, at the structure of George Enescu’s Œdipe. Respecting the division in acts, tableaux, and scenes as found in the manuscript facsimile score held by Editura Muzicală, this analysis is also an attempt to read the work’s internal logic based on Edmond Fleg’s libretto. Identifying and following the major dramaturgical and musical threads was the main criteria in selecting and grouping into semantic units the elements considered relevant. For the sake of conciseness, the analysis of each act proposes a table of the respective act’s schematic presentation, while its subsequent discussion hopes to offer the necessary hermeneutical explanations.
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