Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880-1951) was a Russian composer, pianist and pedagogue. While active during the period of Modernism, he was one of the last descendants of the nineteenth-century tradition. Without a doubt, Medtner was considered one of the most brilliant successors of the Russian piano school, though his compositions did not particularly bring him a great deal of popularity in his time. Nonetheless, his unique style of writing has always attracted a small circle of musicians and admirers, and more recently, there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in Medtner’s music. In the 2000s, several recent prizewinners of the International Tchaikovsky Competition – Daniil Trifonov, Dmitry Masleev, and Lucas Debargue – have shown their special interest in Medtner’s music, and this has drawn public attention to Medtner’s major piano works. However, discussions regarding performance practice and interpretation in playing Medtner have only recently begun. Although dissertations focused on Medtner’s music began to appear in the 1960s, primary sources have been examined by only a limited number of scholars, due to geographic and linguistic barriers. This dissertation aims to formulate and answer performance practice issues to develop a practical approach to learning and performing Medtner’s piano compositions. Since the primary sources related to op. 38 are comparatively abundant, and the work contains several pieces of contrasting character, Forgotten Melodies can serve as a good model for developing an informed approach to interpreting Medtner’s piano music. Analyses of three major types of material are provided to trace the chronological development of ideas in op. 38: sound recordings of Medtner’s own playing; written records by the composer and his student; and the score Medtner had on which he noted down his ideas. In addition to Medtner’s publication The Muse and the Fashion, unpublished diaries and essays found at the Medtner Archive (‘Fond Metnera’) of the Glinka National Museum of Musical Culture (Moscow, Russia) have also been examined.

I detta examensarbete analyseras den ryska kompositören Nikolai Medtners Sonata Reminiscenza Op. 38 no. 1 från ett harmoniskt, motiviskt och strukturellt perspektiv. Denna analys innefattar också reflektioner kring några av författarens interpretationsmässiga val. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur styckets form och harmonik kopplar det samman såväl med den klassiska kompositionskonstens regler som med Medtners artistiska/poetiska mål. Studiens resultat påvisar att verket är såväl kompositionstekniskt fulländat som känslomässigt rikligt. Sonatformen är på ett sofistikerat vis implementerad i verkets struktur och återfinns som en integrerad del i musikens narrativ.

Music scholars have long been trying to determine the major influences on the Ballades of Fryderyk Chopin. Some, like Karol Berger, have pointed to ideological influences of the Polish emigration in Paris, while others, like James Parakilas, have given credit to the generic characteristics of the European literary ballad. In my own view, however, the most salient extra-musical factor in the background to Chopin's Ballades are Ballady, a series of poems by the 19th century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. / After Chopin's death, Mickiewicz's Ballady were frequently associated with Chopin's Ballades, and in the first chapter I demonstrate this by examining the reception history of these works. In the next chapter I analyze the ideology of the Polish emigration in Paris, including prominent themes of alienation, powerlessness, morbid anxiety, pilgrimage, and nostalgia, which were used by that expatriate society to identify itself. Finally, in the third chapter, I trace analogies between these themes and their manifestations in Mickiewicz's Ballady. This analysis of Mickiewicz's poems forms the basis of my interpretation of Chopin's Second Ballade, where I discuss how certain textual and thematic features of the poems taken as a group can be mapped onto the form and musical discourse of the piano piece. / In sum, although the associations between specific poems and Chopin's Ballades have been made by many authors, no one has distilled a single narrative archetype from the group of Mickiewicz's Ballady to apply to Chopin's works.

No description available.