Waltz as one of the spaces of grotesque in Alfred Schnittke's works

Abstract

Humour, as one of the most vital phenomena of human nature and culture, has maintained the status of a special category, which evades being defined accurately. Esti Sheinberg thinks that a prerequisite for experiencing a musical piece as comic is the existence of certain incongruity among its meaningful units. She considers musical irony, satire, parody and the grotesque as correlatives of semantic ambiguities, which use two or more layers of meaning. She emphasises irony as a structural prototype for all other modes of ambiguity. Regarding irony as a phenomenon based on mutually excluding components of semantic opposites, Sheinberg makes a distinction in relation to the grotesque, which originates as a result of juxtaposition of aesthetic units, when contradictory semantic pairs are formed. The irresolvable ambiguity of the grotesque is the result of acceptance, not negation of all aspects of the representing subject. The hyperbolical nature of the grotesque in music is manifested through heightening the extreme within the framework of given parameters, while the exaggerations are noted as such in relation to the standard perceived as a human body and voice. The Dance of Death brings to the fore one of the most significant features of the grotesque - the acknowledgement and accumulation of contradiction, with no tendency to their conciliation. The selected compositions for this study are the examples of macabre waltzes in Alfred Schnittke's opus. After their analysis, a certain level of incompatibility among the meaningful elements of the piece has been located and determined, as well as the relationship between the form and content, and the level of deviation from the set norm. Taking into account the importance of the relationship between the body and movement in general and the grotesque, the significant part of the paper is devoted to Hatten's theory of musical gesture.