The dissertation examines text and music in Scenes from a Novel, op. 19 (1979-1982) by the distinguished Hungarian composer György Kurtág (b. 1926). Scenes from a Novel (for soprano, cimbalom, violin, and double bass) is set to poems by Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet living in Hungary. The first objective of the study is to show that Kurtág achieves a musico-poetic symbiosis by creating a multiplicity of structural/semantic connections between each of Dalos's fourteen poems and their fifteen musical counterparts, as well as between the poetic cycle as a whole and its musical realization. My analysis, in this respect, is a demonstration or a sample of Kurtág's unique, scrupulous work with his texts, resulting in a musico-poetic organism, where the two constituents not just complement each other, but are inexplicably interwoven. The second objective is to test what I believe is the optimal analytical approach to Kurtág's vocal music, and possibly, on a larger scale, to vocal music in general — an approach where poetry and music are treated as two equal structural constituents of one musico-poetic whole.
My analytical ideas are inspired by the writings of the preeminent Russian semiotician Iurii Lotman (1922-1994). In Chapter 1, following Lotman's principles of structuralist poetic analysis, I examine the lexical (word content), phonological (sound content), prosodic (metric organization), graphic (visual presentation), and grammatical levels of poetic structure in each of the fourteen Dalos poems. I discuss the means of Kurtág's poetic cyclic organization in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 I examine the musical structure of Scenes, consciously minimizing references to the poetic text and using a variety of contemporary analytical techniques. Chapter 4 reveals the structural/semantic implications of the relationship between text and music in this composition.
The structural/semantic (as opposed to structural and semantic) indivisibility of text and music becomes apparent only when both text and music are examined together and compared with each other. The main feature of Scenes is the interconnectedness of all the elements within and between its fifteen fragments, which I arrange in conceptual, concentric circles. I propose that the connectedness of the constituent elements is Kurtág's compositional goal, whereas structural circularity is Kurtág's aesthetic accomplishment.