The various musical meanings of the polysemous term “apotheosis” have received scattered and uneven attention in musicological discourse. Although some historical instances of musical “apotheosis” have generated a fair amount of research, at least one application of the term has generated only little scholarship: the climactic “apotheosis” in the nineteenth-century ballet, and the surviving legacy of this concept in the music of twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). This thesis investigates the concept of “apotheosis” in the finales of five of Stravinsky’s neoclassical compositions: Apollo (1928), Le baiser de la fée (1928), Symphony of Psalms (1930), Scènes de ballet (1944), and Orpheus (1948). Although only three of these finales are explicitly entitled “Apothéose” in the score, the musical restraint generally exhibited in these finales will be shown to form the basis for a modern theoretical conception of the “timeless musical apotheosis” in Stravinsky's music.
Chapter 1 investigates conceptions of “apotheosis” in the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt and the ballets of Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky as potential historical models for Stravinsky’s own conception of “apotheosis.” Chapter 2 explores the antithetical model of a “temporality of timelessness,” a paradoxical frame of reference in which the passage of varying rates of time is juxtaposed with the cessation of time to create a dense temporal web; it is then suggested how such a curious “temporality” might be signified in a passage of music. Chapter 3 applies the historical and theoretical concepts of the previous chapters to Stravinsky’s music; it is argued that the reception history of these works has led to a conception of the “timeless musical apotheosis” that ultimately has little immediately in common with Stravinsky’s own understanding of “apotheosis.”