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In the Beginning of Penderecki's Paradise Lost
Murphy, Scott
Murphy, Scott
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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.
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This is the publisher's version, also available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8967795&fileId=S1478572213000030
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2013-08-12
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Cambridge University Press
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Murphy_2013.pdf
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Scott Murphy. (2013). “In the Beginning of Penderecki’s Paradise
Lost.” Twentieth-Century Music 10(2):231-248. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1478572213000030