Parody and Pathos Forms of Instrumental Musical Theater
Thomas May
Amid its teeming polyphony of ideas, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) stages a face-off between the Nazi apocalypse and a superhero created by a defiant pair of budding comic-book artists. For all the biases against the comic-book genre, this is anything but “escapist” entertainment. Ditto for the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who transformed his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors into the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus (1991). György Ligeti anticipated these bold innovations with his sole opera Le Grand Macabre. Cartoons and comic strips—as Ligeti knew—posit a kind of contemporary mythology. When he set the “Dies Irae” of his Requiem from the mid-1960s, Ligeti described the way the poem copes with the fear of death as “an extraordinarily colorful, almost comic-strip representation of the Last Judgment.” A similar aesthetic pervades Le Grand Macabre, a work peopled by grotesquely cartoonish characters who confront the imminent end of Planet Earth. In her book Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Esti Sheinberg asserts that the Russian composer’s music “speaks about human nature as horrifying and ludicrous, simultaneously repellent and cruel, cowardly and loving, humorous and courageous”—a contradictory mélange often interpreted as a reaction to the degrading treatment to which the composer was subjected by Soviet cultural authorities. Yet already in the Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra—the first of his remarkable series of concertos, written before his infamous denunciation by
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