A Narrative of Dreams: Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52930/mt.v2i2.47Resumo
This essay discusses Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie from a narrative point of view, arguing that in addition to considering musical narrative as a study of affective logic, it also requires a consideration of cultural ideas at play in the music. The essay argues that in the Polonaise-Fantaisie one of the cultural oppositions involves dreaming vs. doing. This polonaise has difficulty maintaining the proper military (doing) aspect common to the genre, often falling into sections that signify dreaming. For example, a nocturne appears in the middle of the work, and various interruptions of the polonaise theme pull it away from its significations of action. The essay discusses the double apotheosis of the polonaise and nocturne themes, arguing that the work is making a statement about how dreaming and acting must come together for action to be meaningful. The essay concludes by detailing how the Polonaise-Fantaisie can prompt us to reconsider modern subjectivity, since the sections about dreaming point to a growing sense of our inner life, which was a growing concern in the nineteenth-century.
Referências
Agawu, Kofi. 1991. Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Almén, Byron. 2008. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Coelho, Paulo. 1998. The Alchemist, trans. Alan R. Clarke. New York: HarperCollins.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, Halina. 2004. ‘Remembering that Tale of Grief’: The Prophetic Voice in Chopin’s Music. The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Halina Goldberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 54-94.
Hepokoski, James, and Warren Darcy. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kallberg, Jeffrey. 1985. Chopin’s Last Style. Journal of the American Musicological Society 38/2, p. 264-315.
Klein, Michael L. 2005. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
__________. 2013. Musical Story. Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, p. 3-28.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. The Bounded Text (1969). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 36-63.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 6-48.
Liszt, Franz. 2005. The Life of Chopin, trans. Martha Walker Cook. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
Monahan, Seth. 2015. Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Newcomb, Anthony. 1994. The Polonaise-Fantasy and issues of musical narrative. Chopin Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 84-101.
Proust, Marcel. 2003. In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1904. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Volume I, trans. unlisted. Edinburg: Oliver and Boyd.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
