Hudebně-rétorické figury: od teoretické Figurenlehre k hudební praxi

Musical-Rhetorical Figures: from Theoretical Figurenlehre to Musical Practice

Martin Čurda

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):7-74 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.010  

The present study builds on the author's experience with teaching musical-rhetorical figures to the students of a performance academy. It begins with listing a number of difficulties which the students of Figurenlehre must face, pointing out the insufficient reflection of this subject in Czech academic literature and the general lack of illustrative musical examples in the existing sources. The text is divided into three parts: the first offers a review of current academic literature on the subject (thus preparing the basis for further research); the second classifies musical-rhetorical figures and briefly comments on each category (thus supplying...

"Expectance" by Ivana Govorčin: A Micro-Story, its Semantic and Sound Potential

Nataša Crnjanski

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):75-94 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.014  

The poem "Expectance" was written by Serbian author Mirjana Stefanović (1939-2021) and was published in 1967 in the collection Spring in Terazije. Almost sixty years later, young composer Ivana Govorčin brought these verses to life musically by using, among other things, marked sound signifiers which direct the listener's attention to the key points of the narrative flow. The starting point of analysis is the poem itself, in which elements such as a humorous-ironic attitude towards life, stylistic figures of gradation and contrast, issues of borders, motifs of time and transience, and the finality of life are highlighted. This paper will point...

The Sixteen Songs (16 Τραγούδια, 1941) by Nikos Skalkottas

Joan Grimalt

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):95-161 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.012  

This article presents a hermeneutic and analytical study of Nikos Skalkottas's Sixteen Songs (1941), focusing particularly on the first song of the cycle. After an outline of Skalkottas's biography and cultural context, the work explores the complex interplay between poetic text, musical rhetoric, and dramaturgical structure within the song cycle, emphasizing their roots in both Greek tradition and European modernism. Employing tools of topical, textual, and serial analysis, the study demonstrates how Skalkottas fuses dodecaphonic techniques with references to folk music, popular contemporary dances, and rhetorical devices, creating a unique...

Correspondences: Music Inspired by Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night

Małgorzata Pawłowska

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):162-205 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.017  

This article presents the conclusions of a comparative analysis and interpretation of musical works inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s painting Starry Night, created over the last half-century, along with reflections on the similarities resulting from a common source of inspiration. These works include Henri Dutilleux’s Timbres, Espace, Mouvement ou La Nuit étoilée and Correspondances, mov. V: De Vincent à Theo; Einojuhani Rautavaara’s opera Vincent and Symphony No. 6 Vincentiana, mov. I: Starry Night; George Crumb’s Starry Night from Metamorphoses (Book II) and the song Shenandoah from The Winds of Destiny; as well as pieces...

Solitude Transformed. George Crumb's Makrokosmos III (Music for a Summer Evening) from the Perspective of the Topos per aspera ad astra

Marcin Trzęsiok

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):206-222 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.016  

According to the programme note authored by George Crumb, Makrokosmos III (Music for a Summer Evening) "projects a clearly articulated large expressive curve;" its three main parts (I, III, V) "might be interpreted as a kind of cosmic drama," whereas the intermezzi-like inner section (II, IV) are more subjective in nature. In this 1974 cycle, Crumb took up Beethoven's topos per aspera ad astra, i.e., the path from darkness to light or from suffering to joy. The ideological context of this narrative is the modern conflict between religion and science, to which Crumb refers through philosophical and literary mottos, performance notes,...

Form and Meaning in Wranitzky's and Dussek's Cyclic Finales

Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):223-238 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.015  

Classical sonata cycles often end with effervescent dance-like movements. From the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, composers developed a taste for more substantial finales of serious character and reconceived the arrangement of multi-movement works altogether. This article examines a small collection of finales written at the turn of the century by Paul Wranitzky and Jan Dussek that occupy a unique position in these transformations and integrate slow movement and fast finale into an inseparable unit. The last movements of Wranitzky's String Quartets Op. 30 Nos. 2 and 5 and Dussek's Piano Sonata Op. 39 No. 1 constitute an...

The Symphony in Greek Art Music: Cultural Memory between Western and Eastern Europe

Magdalini Kalopana

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):239-252 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.013  

Greek art music has made a significant and enduring contribution to the symphonic genre within European art music, serving not only as a site of stylistic development but also as a repository of cultural memory. Since the 18th century, beginning with Michele Stratico's (1728-1783) thirty-five (35) sinfonias, Greek composers have engaged in a continuous dialogue with the symphonic form, each work echoing both contemporary influences and inherited legacies. This evolving tradition - passed from generation to generation - embodies not merely musical innovation but also the collective memory of a nation navigating modernity, exile, identity, and continuity....

The Semantic Space of Ukrainian National Universals in Olena Lys' Choral Diptych "By the Stairs to Heaven…"

Olena Yakymchuk

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):253-266 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.002  

Since 2014, the work of Ukrainian composers has held a mirror up to the events of the Russo-Ukrainian war. A piece from early 2014 by contemporary composer Olena Lys is considered in this article. The piece begins with the composer's reflection on the events of Maidan in winter 2014 in the form of a choral diptych based on Vasyl Dovzhyk's poem "By the Stairs to Heaven…". In its two parts, it illustrates the death of the Maidan defenders (in the first part) and the mother's prayers for her dead son (in the second part). The present article focuses on a semantic analysis of Ukrainian symbols in both the libretto and the musical text, ultimately...

Witold Lutosławski's Radio Bohemica: A Commentary on the Musical Reception of the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové and the Manuscript of Zelená Hora in Poland

Małgorzata Sułek

Musicologica Olomucensia vol. 37(1), (2025):267-282 | DOI: 10.5507/mo.2025.001  

The discovery of the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové and the Manuscript of Zelená Hora in the Czech lands at the beginning of the nineteenth century aroused great interest among the Polish intellectual and artistic elite, provoking discussions on the prehistory of Slavonic culture and generating numerous more or less faithful Polish translations of the texts included in manuscripts. This article addresses the problem of the musical reception of both forgeries in Poland, which is far more modest than the Polish literary works inspired by the two Czech forgeries or the historical studies addressing the issues outlined in them. To the modest...