METAMORPHOSES OF TURANDOT'S IMAGE IN PAUL HINDEMITH'S SYMPHONIC SCHERZO

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to determine the peculiarities of reading Turandot's image by Paul Hindemith in
«Metamorphoses» for symphony orchestra.
The methodology of the research is based on the application of the structural-semantic analysis of Scherzo's «Turandot» by P. Hindemit, which is considered using the principles of imagological research in the contextual field of reading the image of a Chinese princess in musical art.
Results. In P. Scerzo's P. Hindemith, Turandot's brazen takes on a new meaning: in response to contemporary to the composer political and social conditions through the prism of parody, and extends the
boundaries of traditional «Chinese», which is characterized by a vibrant jazz component and a neoclassical
dimension, transporting the idea of a Chinese princess through reading an early romantic overture by K. M. von Weber from music to F. Schiller's drama «Turandot». Such specific «polystylistics» in the embodiment of this theme by expanding the intercontinental sound space reveals globalist tendencies and perpetuates humanistic ideals in a kind of grotesque form. The imagosemantics of Turandot's image in P. Hindnmith also contains stable musical markers (toy-puppet theme as a fairy-tale imaginary princess, chromatic-tortuous theme as an imago femme fatale, state imago – fanfare motif as a symbol of imperial-empathetic, motif drums in the spirit of «Chinozerii»). However, a parody-ironic approach to the solution of the image, the genre of eccentric, overflowing with total shock exaltation and warlike scherzo, in which the composer etymologically rethinks the serious challenges of the plot and the image of the heroine itself (the metamorphosis of the delicate «air China» theme into a distorted chromatized dissonance-false fanfare) – appears for the first time. Turandot in the music of the second half of the twentieth century will act more as a representative of totalitarian political structures,  nominally representing Chinese Orientalism of the postmodernist type. Novelty. For the first time in national musicology, Turandot's embodiment in the music of the twentieth century was demonstrated, in particular, in the Scherzo of P. Hindemith's Metamorphosis for symphony orchestra, and the features of reading this image in the dimension of oriental imagosemantics were determined.
The practical significance. In this article, Ukrainian and foreign musicologists may find information useful for exploring Turandot's image in twentieth-century music, particularly in Paul Hindemith's work in symphonic and ballet incarnations.