Russian opera and symbolist poetics

This dissertation is a detailed examination of the influence of Russian Symbolist poetics on operatic composition. It centers on four works, each reflecting an important trend in Symbolist aesthetics: Pyotr Chaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (1890), an opera that depicts the cultural malaise that led to the foundation of the World of Art movement; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1905), an opera that illuminates the religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, the aspirations of the Old Believers, and notions of religious syncretism and spiritual communion; Aleksandr Skryabin's incomplete Mysterium (and Preparatory Act), an impossible meta-operatic project founded on Eastern religious notions of transcendence and the emancipation of the collective human will; and Sergei Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (1923/27), a Modernist setting of a Symbolist text that explores mystical ideas about mimesis and life creation. The central task of the dissertation is to show how attempts at Symbolist opera pushed musical and dramatic techniques to their extreme. Unifying the four chapters is a definition of the musical symbol as a device that mediates between discrete dramatic spheres: the "natural" and the "supernatural"; the "internal" and the "external"; the "real" and the "more real." The music analysis portions of the text draw on manuscript materials housed in the State Archive of Literature and Art (Moscow), the Skryabin Memorial Museum (Moscow), and the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library (St Petersburg). Source readings include articles in the Russian Symbolist journals Apollo, The Golden Fleece, Libra, The World of Art, and Works and Days.