Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - French Music (II): Berlioz and Debussy
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : David Curran
‘Chasse Royale et Orage’ (Royal Hunt and Storm) is one of the most celebrated numbers of Berlioz’s penultimate opera, Les Troyens. Signifying the moment during which Didon and Énée consummate their love, this orchestral tableau plays witness to the first confrontation of the opera’s two main themes: love and history. Formal analysis of the piece, however, has been thin on the ground. Ian Kemp has provided valuable if informal commentary on the movement in his edited essay collection on the opera. He suggests a structural premise in a large-scale crescendo and identifies motivic connections between several of the work’s themes. Nevertheless, his programmatic reading fails to satisfy the analyst who seeks corroboration in a closer reading of the music. This paper offers a semiotic-Schenkerian poetics of the number in order to elucidate more rigorously how ‘meaning’ manifests itself in the orchestral prelude as a dialectical ‘play’ between ‘structure’ and ‘expression.’
