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Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié

Online ISBN:
9780199377244
Print ISBN:
9780199829446
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié

Klára Móricz (ed.),
Klára Móricz
(ed.)

Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Amherst College
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Simon Morrison (ed.)
Simon Morrison
(ed.)

Professor of Music

Princeton University
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Published online:
21 August 2014
Published in print:
9 June 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199377244
Print ISBN:
9780199829446
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

An exploration of the unhappy career of Arthur Lourié, a cutting-edge modernist composer who briefly served the Soviet regime before emigrating to Germany, France, and ultimately the United States, where his life and works both came to a bathetic end. The book surveys his involvement in the Russian Futurist movement and his subsequent cultivation of a form of Neoclassicism indebted to the spiritual philosophy of Jacques Maritain. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion focuses on Lourié’s grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, which he considered his masterpiece, but which remains unperformed. Lourié’s close relationship to Stravinsky is highlighted, as is the tremendous assistance that he provided to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. The book is a martyr’s tale; it is also an attempt to recover music of strange, elusive beauty—the music of a Russia that Lourié saw disappear.

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