In 1936, André Jolivet (1905-1974), Yves Baudrier (1906-1988), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (1908-2002), and Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) founded the group Jeune France. They initiated this group under the influence of politically nonconformist movements in France which had started in the 1920s. The ideology of Jeune France was to revive in music 'true human qualities', free from 'extreme political domination'. At a time when some composers, associated with a revolutionary Left wing, were exploring avant-garde ideas in music that included atonalism, serialism, and other advanced techniques out of the common practice, other composers fell into a nationalistic Right wing, recalling the French Catholic traditions, and promoting an exclusive and true 'French' music. In contrast to these polarizing trends, Jeune France tried to trace back its art to its origins, and the goal of Jeune France was to re-establish music composition as something less 'abstract' than the Left, and more 'human' than the Right. The most powerful sound that can reflect the tenets of humanism in music is probably the human voice, especially multiple voices in a choral setting. Thus unaccompanied choral works, in particular, came to be a hallmark of many major composers of the 20th Century. The prevailing social and political environment of the pre-World War Two era also played an important role in contributing to the revival of unaccompanied choral music as a major genre. To demonstrate how these general social and political forces operated in the particular in France at this time, I have used Daniel-Lesur's Le Cantique des Cantiques (1952) to show how these affected a composer at this time. The goal of this research has been to look in depth at both Daniel-Lesur and his most famous work, about which little has been written in English; and to add to a growing body of literature which explores the rise of unaccompanied choral compositions as an important genre in the early 20th Century, a shift that is tied to political, cultural, and social conditions as well as musical ones. Taking Le Cantique des Cantiques as a token of a type, I show how this work reflects these issues as well as the aesthetics behind Jeune France. Finally, I have tried to show just how the experience of Jeune France influenced Daniel-Lesur as a composer as it did his more famous contemporary, Messiaen.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The decade of 1970 experienced a period of transition in which the plan of opening politics , proposed by Geisel s Government (1974-1979), shown the signs of a succession of measures that indicated one acting dynamics very full of ambiguous questions and retrocessions. At the cultural field, the censorship presented on a systematic way since the AI-5 (Institutional Act nº 5), in 1968 maintained itself active in the sense to bar that spectacles and theatrical texts should approach the brazilian social reality on their arguments. In the midst of the arbitrary and repressive pratices, the theatrical class constituted a resistance front, on which the utilization of metaphores, analogies, parables and allegories represented strategies of intervention in the social reality, paradoxically contributing for one of the most fecunds moments of the brazilian theatre s production. On this conjuncture, we detached in this research the political and cultural militance of Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, a responsible person for a profitable dramatistic production along of the 1960/1970 decades. And specially, we analysed the dramatic text Ponto de Partida (1976), one politcal parable whose thematic allowed a reflection about the will, the authoritarian Government and the manipulating strategies of power. His writing, motived by one incident with great impact in the nation, the murder of the journalist Vladimir Herzog by the repression s organizations of the 2nd Army (Armed Forces), also made possible a dialogue with a historical context when was processing one series of social demonstrations in this country to demand the human rights defence and for the return of the State of Right. Thus, to evaluate the thematic possibilities of the theatrical text, to recover the historical incidents that were the motivation for the writing of the dramatic play as well as the repercussion of its staging with the aim to verify the identification between the audience and this spectable, at last, all these questions became privileged points of reflection on this work. / A década de 1970 vivenciou um período de transição onde o projeto de abertura política , proposto pelo Governo Geisel (1974-1979), caracterizou-se por uma sucessão de medidas que indicavam uma dinâmica de atuação repleta de ambigüidades e retrocessos. No campo cultural, a censura presente de forma sistemática desde a implantação do AI-5, em 1968 manteve-se atuante no sentido de coibir que espetáculos e textos teatrais abordassem em sua temática a realidade social brasileira. Em meio às práticas arbitrárias e repressivas, a classe teatral constituiu uma frente de resistência, na qual o uso de metáforas, analogias, parábolas e alegorias representaram estratégias de intervenção na realidade social, contribuindo, paradoxalmente, para um dos momentos mais fecundos da produção do teatro brasileiro. Nessa conjuntura, destacamos nesta pesquisa a militância política e cultural de Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, responsável por uma profícua produção dramatúrgica ao longo das décadas de 1960/1970. Em especial, analisamos o texto dramático Ponto de Partida (1976), uma parábola política cuja temática permitiu uma reflexão sobre o arbítrio, o Estado autoritário e as estratégias de manipulação do poder. Sua escrita, motivada por um acontecimento de grande impacto nacional, o assassinato do jornalista Vladimir Herzog pelos órgãos de repressão do II Exército, possibilitou também um diálogo com um contexto histórico quando se processavam no país uma série de manifestações sociais, reivindicando a defesa dos direitos humanos e pela volta ao Estado de Direito. Desse modo, avaliar as possibilidades temáticas do texto teatral, recuperar os acontecimentos históricos que motivaram a escrita do texto dramático bem como a repercussão de sua encenação, com o intuito de verificar as identificações que o público estabeleceu com este espetáculo, tornaram-se pontos privilegiados de reflexão nesta pesquisa. / Mestre em História