• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Decadent Truncation: Liberated Eros in Arthur Vincent Lourié's "The Blackamoor of Peter the Great"
  • Beteiligte: Móricz, Klára
  • Erschienen: Cambridge University Press, 2008
  • Erschienen in: Cambridge Opera Journal, 20 (2008) 2, Seite 181-213
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • ISSN: 0954-5867; 1474-0621
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  • Beschreibung: <p>Russian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié (1881/2–1966) dedicated his "The Blackamoor of Peter the Great" (1948–1961), an opera based on Pushkin's story about the poet's African great-grandfather, to 'Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history.' Neoclassical in its subject matter, reliance on conventional musical forms, and adherence to tonality, Lourié's "Blackamoor" is nevertheless also an exemplary symbolist opera. This article explains three symbolist aspects of the work: the sources of its libretto (Lourié's librettist Irina Graham interspersed the libretto with symbolist texts), its multi-layered cultural associations, and Lourié's decision to liberate and embody the erotic drive of the main character Ibrahim by representing it as the figure of Eros. Eradicated during the years of Stalinist terror, the culture of Silver Age Russia thus continued to find a voice in the emigrant Lourié's last opera.</p>