Zwischen »musique pure« und religiösem Bekenntnis

Igor Stravinsky’s aesthetics, which scholars have treated only superficially to this day, are regarded as a cool-headed plea for music for its own sake, free from all programmatic or metaphysical trappings. This book, however, demonstrates—through an extensive documentation and analysis of Stravinsky’s aesthetic development during his two decades in France—that a religious subtext became increasingly apparent in his musical-poetological maxims around 1930. To trace this spiritual component, the entire spectrum of musical and creative-philosophical ideas that Stravinsky adapted for himself is laid bare. The émigré Russian and cosmopolitan engaged with the aesthetic discourse in France only through the filter of various intellectual role models, advisors, and mentors. These provided him—the pragmatist who usually had others write his texts and writings—with adequate interpretive frameworks and coherent rhetoric. The study is supplemented by a case study on Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio *Oedipus Rex* (1926/27), which demonstrates the nature of the (far from congruent) relationship between aesthetic principles and artistic practice. This marks the first comprehensive assessment of Stravinsky’s reflections on the essence of music. His aesthetic credo is characterized by an intertwining of purism and religious subtext, a fluctuation between the will to assert oneself and external attributions, by eclecticism and partial inconsistency. Yet it is precisely these ambivalences, this conflict of a composer with himself, that constitute an essential part of Stravinsky’s genius.

contents

free shipping within Germany