Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Barti'Ak: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious

Two early twentieth-century operas — Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (1902) and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) — transformed the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. This new language was based almost exclusively on interactions between folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations. Elliott Antokoletz reveals not only the new musical language of these operas, but also the way in which they share a profound correspondence with the grow…