Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-76l5x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-06T04:12:22.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In the Beginning of Penderecki's Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2013

SCOTT MURPHY
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , September 2013 , pp. 231 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anselm, Saint. Proslogion, trans. Charlesworth, B.J.. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II (i), trans. Bromiley, G.W. and Torrance, T.F.. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956.Google Scholar
Blumenfeld, Harold. Review of Paradise Lost (1979) by Penderecki, Krzysztof. The Musical Times 120/1632 (February 1979): 145–46.Google Scholar
Brower, Candace. ‘Paradoxes of Pitch Space’. Music Analysis 27/1 (2008): 51–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruhn, Siglind. Messiaen's Interpretations of Holiness and Trinity: Echoes of Medieval Theology in the Oratorio, Organ Meditations, and Opera. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Bruhn, Siglind. ‘Paradise Lost: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Biblical Story of Salvation’. In Krzysztof Penderecki's Music in the Context of 20th-Century Theatre, ed. Malecka, Teresa. Krakow: Akademia Muzyczna, 1999. 141–48.Google Scholar
Chlopicka, Regina. Krzysztof Penderecki: Musica Sacra – Musica Profana. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2003.Google Scholar
Cohn, Richard. ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/2 (2004): 285–323.Google Scholar
Craig, William Lane. ‘God, Time, and Eternity’. Religious Studies 14 (1979): 497–503.Google Scholar
Darcy, Warren. ‘Bruckner's Sonata Deformations’, in Bruckner Studies, ed. Jackson, Timothy L. and Hawkshaw, Paul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 256–77.Google Scholar
Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.Google Scholar
Draus, Agnieszka. ‘Krzysztof Penderecki, Paradise Lost. From Milton's Poem to the sacra rappresentazione Libretto’ in Krzysztof Penderecki's Music in the Context of 20th-Century Theatre, ed. Malecka, Teresa. Krakow: Akademia Muzyczna, 1999. 173–89.Google Scholar
Forte, Allen. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Hoeckner, Berthold. ‘Paths Through Dichterliebe’. 19th-Century Music 30/1 (2006): 65–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huron, David. ‘Tone and Voice: A Derivation of the Rules of Voice-leading from Perceptual Principles’. Music Perception 19/1 (2001): 1–64.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H.. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Lange, Art. ‘Penderecki's Paradise Lost’. Tempo 128 (March 1979): 34–35.Google Scholar
Murphy, Scott. ‘A Model of Melodic Expectation for Some Neo-Romantic Music of Penderecki’. Perspectives of New Music 45/1 (Winter 2007): 6–44.Google Scholar
Priest, Dale G. ‘Toward a Poetry of Accommodation: The Invocation to Book III of Paradise Lost’. The South Central Bulletin 41/4 (Winter 1981): 112–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Wójtowicz, Ewa. ‘Some Harmonic Aspects of Krzysztof Penderecki's Paradise Lost’. In Krzysztof Penderecki's Music in the Context of 20th-Century Theatre, ed. Malecka, Teresa. Krakow: Akademia Muzyczna, 1999. 161–74.Google Scholar