| Abstract [eng] |
When looking for connections between literature and music, poetry is usually examined, prose works less often, and drama works even less often. As a result, the most popular play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by the American playwright Edward Albee was chosen as the object of comparative study of musical and dramatic structures in this work. Albee openly acknowledged the influence of music on the structures of his dramatic texts, but researchers analyzing his works for seven decades have never delved into the musicality of his plays. Based on Calvin Brown, Steven P. Scher and Werner Wolf's comparative principles of the two branches of art, the work analyzes and relates the play's content, dramatic form, dynamic, thematic structure to the music, applying musical models of part-writing, leitmotifs, cadences, rhythmicality. During the research, it became clear that the dramaturgy and narrative content of this play are based on forms analogous to music (such as a sonata or a composite three-part form). The voices of the characters in the play are formed in structures analogous to the polyphony of music, and the language of the play is characterized by musicality and the corresponding means of musical expression. The play functions as a kind of meta-performance. Its axis consists of a play within a play, which becomes a double hermeneutic process, characteristic of listening to music as well. |
