Heft 04 / Oktober 2017

Zusammenfassung:

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Summary:

Taneyev, Skryabin, and the Orchestra. Concepts of Thematic Unity in Russian Symphonies at the Turn of the 20th Century – It is one of music history’s morbid coincidences that Sergey Taneyev, the temporary teacher of Aleksandr Skryabin, died as early as just two months after his former pupil in 1915. In the year of the centennial of both composers’ deaths, this paper reconsiders their artistic relationship, focusing on a pair of works that were written within a span of only a few years, namely: Taneyev’s C-minor Symphony, op. 12 (1896-98), and Skryabin’s 2nd Symphony in the same key, op. 29 (1901). Both symphonies employ multiple thematic transformation and motivic cross-references throughout their movements. This aspect links these two symphonies to a nineteenth-century paradigm of multi-movement orchestral composition, the so-called cyclic principle. The paper also examines the teacher-student relation between Taneyev and Skryabin, as well as possible mutual influences between both composers.

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