Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious (review)

As the title suggests, Elliott Antokoletz weaves his musical analyses of two major twentieth-century operas within the broader cultural landscape of western Europe at the turn of the century. The new sound world he describes arose in part to express the style and objectives of the Symbolist literary movement represented by Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande and Béla Balázs's Bluebeard's Castle, both depicting vague, shifting mood states, unconscious motivations, and pathological gender relationships of traumatized characters inhabiting a world out of place and out of time.

Among the many converging psychological and social changes contributing to the psychological distress of the time, dislocation brought about by waves of industrialization and loss of faith and failure of reason to explain the world created a pervasive sense of loneliness and isolation. At the same time, women's lobbying for education and the vote struck fear in men's hearts. Many men saw in the New Woman the end of civilization—at least as they had enjoyed it—and responded by redoubling their efforts to assert their superiority and subdue the malcontents. Sadomasochistic marital relationships were so common that satirist Karl Kraus said, "the marital bedroom is where brutality and martyrdom cohabitate."¹ Freud saw the outbreak of hysteria as a protest against rigid constraints placed on women. Perhaps no problem was more crucial to the social and psychological climate of the early twentieth century than female sexuality and man's attempt to keep woman in her subservient place. To put things in perspective, I suggest that perhaps no problem is more crucial to the climate in the United States at the dawn of the new millennium than sexuality. One need only consider that the last two elections seem to have been decided on the basis of abortion. Sexuality galvanizes sections of the electorate like nothing else. Overriding crucial concerns about war, the deficit, human rights, and vital social programs is a passionate minority invested in denying women the right to make decisions about reproduction. From Helen to Hillary, the course of world history seems driven by a frenzy surrounding the problem of how to control the womb and keep women down and under the yoke of patriarchal control.

With Freud's groundbreaking studies and the growing awareness that human life is driven less by reason than by unconscious forces, artists, writers, and musicians sought ways to symbolize unknown, disavowed thoughts and feelings that cannot easily be represented. Antokoletz explains why he believes that the dissolution of traditional harmonic functions in early twentieth-century opera created a sound world that was more conducive to portraying the traumatized psychological states of its characters than traditional harmonic patterns: "The transformation of the more linear, defined quality of the traditional major-minor scales into the more diffuse, static effects created by the use of modality, polymodality, and symmetrical pitch-set interactions resonated with the modernist conception of the human being, who is perennially divided and threatened by the split between the conscious and unconscious mind" (p. 292). At least half the book speaks to musicologists and those with a fund of knowledge about scale construction and pitch sets. For others, reading pages of detailed musical symbolism might be tough going. Still, there is so much substance to the literary and psychological insights that this book will likely be enjoyed by a broader readership of those interested in opera, gender relationships, and the application of psychological theory to the greater understanding of both.

Central to Antokoletz's endeavor is to show how the rigid gender roles that reinforce and justify the grandiose narcissistic character structure of both Bluebeard and Golaud cause them to control their wives and seal themselves off from the possibility of intimate connection and mutually satisfying relationships. Antokoletz is not a psychoanalyst, but...