Music Theatre by Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg and its influence on the Ukrainian theatre in 1910–1920th

Abstract

In general, despite the grandiose epochal historical upheavals in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, nevertheless, music theatre found itself in quite favorable conditions with a flexible cultural policy, with an in­herent openness to new national phenomena. The circumstances were other in Ukrainian music and theatre art. This is especially noticeable where the policy of ideological centrism and the totalitarian control dominated too much in music with the imposing on composers such the creative method as socialist realism. So every experienced researcher is well aware of the standpoint of the aesthetics of socialist realism in the mid-20th century with ideological accusations of the ideas of bourgeois music culture of Western Europe. Thus, until recently, it was not possible to consider in details the issue of international contiguities between Ukrainian music Avant-garde of the 1900s and European musical theatre in Expressionism trends due to ideological restrictions in sci­entific research. The relevance of the study. In contemporary musicologists thinking there remains the problem of an insufficient of overcoming the inertia of post-socialist ideological dogmas in as consequences from the previous period of Ukrainian music historiography. The problem of the lack of deep study and reassessment of the music-art processes taking place in the Ukrainian music Avant-garde theatre at the turn of the XIX—XX centuries continues to exist. The purpose of the paper is desire to grow the researching interest to international contiguities between traditions of Ukrainian music-and-drama theatre, in particular, thanks to Borys Lyatoshinskiy’s art creativity, and European music expressionism by A. Schoenberg and A. Berg. It examines the influence of the musical-theoretical views of representatives of the New (Second) Vi­ennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg) on Ukrainian drama theatre (“Berezil” by Les’ Kurbas) through the music activities of Borys Lyatoshinskiy as the representative of Ukrainian Avant-garde of the first quarter of the 1900s. The research methodology included: methods of biographical analysis (in the case of studying the creativity of personalities such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bo­rys Lyatoshinskiy, Les’ Kurbas), comparative studies (in analysis between the intercultural national Ukrainian music theatre and traditions expressionism by New-Viennese), and critical thinking methods (in the reassessment of the meanings of the aesthetics standpoints of previous era).