The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which closely reflected their culture, personalities and ideologies. There are several approaches to studying performance practice. One is to study the interpretations of other pianists. While this does have many advantages, it has not been adopted in this paper as it has one flaw: it still fails to capture the distinctive language of these composers. Rather, the paper will study the social and musical influences on the composers, and, more importantly, their philosophies about pianism and the purpose of music. This will be related to interpretative issues in the works. The repertoire has been divided into four areas. The paper commences with a study of the miniature, which is valuable in finding the ‘essence’ of a composer’s musical language expressed on a small scale. Here, the ‘elementary’ considerations in performance practice will be studied. The second chapter discusses etudes. This is useful in gaining an insight into composers’ conception of technique, and how this relates to performance practice. The third chapter deals with music that has extra-musical themes. This provides opportunity for a more detailed cultural and biographical study of the composers. To represent the large-scale repertoire of Russian composers, the sonata will be studied. Here, a detailed analysis of the composers’ musical language and its relationship to expression will be discussed. / Masters Thesis

Este trabalho apresenta uma reflexão sobre a música do compositor soviético Dmítri Chostakóvitch baseada na análise da Sinfonia nº 10 op. 93. Concluída logo após a morte de Jôsef Stálin, a obra carrega notáveis marcas de seu tempo e sua leitura demanda um cuidadoso estudo das questões relativas à significação musical, em especial uma discussão do conceito de ironia aplicado à música em suas mais diversas manifestações, desde a construção de estruturas musicais expressivas até a disposição de elementos singulares, que requerem uma leitura semiótica. Esta abordagem alinha-se com a perspectiva discursiva que relaciona ironia, intertextualidade e interdiscursividade: o cruzamento de vozes e a confluência de discursos, que constituem elementos fundamentais do conceito de polifonia proposto por Mikhaíl Bakhtín, são identificados aqui como uma chave de leitura capaz de evidenciar, também na música, a ironia como elemento estruturante. A análise da Sinfonia nº 10 a partir dessa perspectiva dá fundamento a novas hipóteses interpretativas e estéticas sobre a obra de Chostakóvitch, evidenciando no texto musical as contradições que surgem no desdobramento analítico do discurso sinfônico e confrontando a crítica histórica da música de Chostakóvitch com uma interpretação semiótica baseada na teoria dos tópicos musicais, desenvolvida a partir das propostas de Leonard Ratner. / The purpose of this work is to present a reflection about the music of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich based on an analysis of the Symphony no. 10 op. 93. Written immediately after Joseph Stalin\'s death, the symphony carries remarkable traces of its time, and the unfolding of its singularities demands a careful study of musical signification\'s issues, specially a discussion about the concept of irony applied to music in its various manifestations, from the expressive construction of musical structures to the disposition of singular elements. This kind of analysis requires a wide theoretical perspective, which includes a semiotic approach. This analysis is thus aligned with the discursive perspective that relates irony, intertextuality and interdiscursivity: the voice-crossing and discourse confluence, which constitute fundamental elements of Mikhail Bakhtin\'s concept of polyphony, are taken as keys to identify irony as a structural element in music as well. The analysis of the Symphony no. 10 from this perspective grounds new interpretative and aesthetic hypotheses about Shostakovich\'s music, by revealing on the musical text the contradictions which emerge at the level of symphonic discourse, and by confronting the historical criticism of Shostakovich\'s music with a semiotic interpretation based on topic theory proposed after Leonard Ratner.

The dissertation focuses on the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880–1951). It approaches them in the context of genre history, confronts them with other composers' works, and discusses them from various analytic perspectives. A special goal is to consider the pieces in the aesthetic environment of their time, and to regard them as peculiar instances of the ›sonata principle‹, an ageless conception of musical form. The study is subdivided in three large parts, the first of which presents a summary of sonata composition before Medtner, exploring lines of tradition in Western Europe and Russia. The second part concentrates on Medtner’s musical language and its stylistic features. The third and most comprehensive part provides detailed examinations of eight of Medtner’s piano sonatas, including aspects of their genesis and reception, and making use of recent methods of musical analysis. / Die Dissertation widmet sich den frühen Klaviersonaten des russischen Komponisten Nikolaj Karlovič Metner (1880–1951), die im Kontext ihrer Gattungsgeschichte und im Vergleich mit Musik anderer Urheber betrachtet werden. Ein Hauptanliegen der multiperspektivischen Analysen ist es, den Werkkorpus in ästhetische Kontexte der Entstehungszeit einzubetten und die Einzelwerke als Spezialfälle des ›Sonatenprinzips‹, eines zeitlosen Formkonzepts, darzustellen. Die Studie gliedert sich in drei Sektionen, deren erste die Entwicklungen des Sonatenkomponierens vor Metner zusammenfasst und Traditionslinien in Westeuropa und Russland nachzeichnet. Der zweite Teil ist eine Darstellung der Tonsprache Metners und ihrer stilistischen Merkmale. Der dritte und umfangreichste Teil präsentiert Detailanalysen von acht Klaviersonaten Metners und untersucht die Notentexte mit Hilfe aktueller Analysemethoden.

The censorship of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a familiar story to musicologists, but reception of the opera is not frequently mentioned. Examining the reception of a work can bring a work's relative importance into focus. In this thesis, German literary and reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss's model of the horizon of expectations is applied to reviews of American productions of Lady Macbeth. Curiosity about communism following the Great Depression in 1930s, America and American music critics' knowledge that Soviet composers worked for the Soviet regime led to the belief that Lady Macbeth was officially approved export from the Soviet Union. When the article condemning the opera as a Western formalism appeared in the Soviet magazine, Pravda, Americans needed to adjust their understanding of Lady Macbeth as a socialist expression. Following the work's revival in San Francisco in 1981, the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony is prevalent in many reviews. Many reviewers use Volkov's narrative of Shostakovich as covert dissident of the Soviet Union to assert that the censorship of the opera was about the content of the plot and not the music. Following the Soviet rejection of the work, American critics tried to claim Shostakovich for the West based on the values of individual freedom and feminism set forth in Lady Macbeth.

The dissertation focuses on the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880–1951). It approaches them in the context of genre history, confronts them with other composers' works, and discusses them from various analytic perspectives. A special goal is to consider the pieces in the aesthetic environment of their time, and to regard them as peculiar instances of the ›sonata principle‹, an ageless conception of musical form. The study is subdivided in three large parts, the first of which presents a summary of sonata composition before Medtner, exploring lines of tradition in Western Europe and Russia. The second part concentrates on Medtner’s musical language and its stylistic features. The third and most comprehensive part provides detailed examinations of eight of Medtner’s piano sonatas, including aspects of their genesis and reception, and making use of recent methods of musical analysis. / Die Dissertation widmet sich den frühen Klaviersonaten des russischen Komponisten Nikolaj Karlovič Metner (1880–1951), die im Kontext ihrer Gattungsgeschichte und im Vergleich mit Musik anderer Urheber betrachtet werden. Ein Hauptanliegen der multiperspektivischen Analysen ist es, den Werkkorpus in ästhetische Kontexte der Entstehungszeit einzubetten und die Einzelwerke als Spezialfälle des ›Sonatenprinzips‹, eines zeitlosen Formkonzepts, darzustellen. Die Studie gliedert sich in drei Sektionen, deren erste die Entwicklungen des Sonatenkomponierens vor Metner zusammenfasst und Traditionslinien in Westeuropa und Russland nachzeichnet. Der zweite Teil ist eine Darstellung der Tonsprache Metners und ihrer stilistischen Merkmale. Der dritte und umfangreichste Teil präsentiert Detailanalysen von acht Klaviersonaten Metners und untersucht die Notentexte mit Hilfe aktueller Analysemethoden.

The Sixth, Seventh, and E Piano Sonatas of Prokofiev illustrate the composer's more mature style. In these works there is a definite return to the classic forms and contrapuntal devices which have been called Neo-classicism. Prokofiev, himself, has said that form is one of the basic elements of his style. It is the purpose of this thesis to discover the' formal organization and make a comparison of these sonatas with the works of Beethoven and his contemporaries.