Style
As an opera, The Stone Guest is notable for having its text taken almost exactly from the literary stage work which inspired it, rather than relying on a libretto adapted from the source in order to accommodate expectations of opera audiences for arias, duets, choruses, etc. Consequently, the resulting musical drama consists almost entirely of solo speeches by characters sung in turn, as in a spoken play. This procedure amounted to a radical statement about the demands of spoken and musical drama and was seen by some as a devaluation of the musical genre of opera distinct from the literary genre of spoken drama. Tchaikovsky in particular was critical of the idea; in response to Dargomyzhky's statement that "I want sound directly to express the word; I want truth" (Taruskin 1981, 258), Tchaikovsky wrote in his private correspondence that nothing could be so "hateful and false" as the attempt to present as musical drama something that was not.
Consequently, certain musical novelties of The Stone Guest stem from the above basic premise of composition. For instance, there is little recurrence of whole sections of music in the course of the work; like the verse itself, the resulting music is primarily through-composed. (Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral introduction to the opera, however, draws on themes from the music that Dargomyzhsky composed.) As if to emphasize this feature, the composer wrote the entire opera without key signatures, even though it would be possible (and practical) to re-notate the work with key signatures to reflect the various tonalities through which it passes.
In addition, the opera was novel for its time in its use of dissonance and whole-tone scales. Dargomyzhky's attempts at realism and faithfulness to the text resulted in what has been referred to as a "studied ugliness" in the music, apparently intended to reflect the actual ugliness in the story. Cui termed the stylistic practice of the work as "melodic recitative" for its balance between the lyric and the naturalistic.
Read more about this topic: The Stone Guest (Dargomyzhsky)
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