Muzyka wojenna Vytautasa Bacevičiusa: Sinfonia de la Guerra (1940)
War Music by Vytautas Bacevičius: Sinfonia de la Guerra (1940)

Summary/Abstract: Vytautas Bacevičius wrote Sinfonia de la Guerra – the first part of the diptych of his war symphonies (No. 2 and No. 3) – in early 1940. Dedicated to his sister Grażyna Bacewicz, this piece reflects on the early developments of World War II, at the same time separating the early modernist and the middle traditionalist creative periods of the composer’s career. The article focuses on the intertextual relations of Symphony No. 2 with the tradition, investigated through the use of the topics theory. Such an interpretational strategy was inspired by the assumption that Sinfonia de la Guerra is a good example of 20 th -century military music and as such is examined within a wider context of semantic codes and stylistic references. The topics’ analysis was adopted for the interpretation of contemporary music based on the research of Raymond Monelle (2000, 2006), as well as the works of Robert Hatten (2004), Vladimír Karbusický (1986) and Nicholas McKay (2012). In the course of the research, it is emphasised that an important role in Symphony No. 2 is played by the network of intertextual relations, which is formed by the long-lived musical gestures, topics and rhetoric figures: the topics of military and hunting music, pastoral, the rhetoric figure of cross and crucifixion, pianto figures, as well as the characteristic intervals and musical gestures – the tritone (diabolus in musica), figurations of the Tristan chord (post-Wagnerian motifs of “desire”, ”awakening” and others), etc. Additionally, the aspect of the topics’ interaction with the stylistic idioms of 20 th century music is discussed, namely the idioms of machinist music, new barbarism (ritualism) and the pastoral idyll. Penetrating deeper into the analysis of trends of topic recontextualisation, two strategies of the composer are distinguished, matching the euphoric and disphoric states of modern adaptation of long-lived topics distinguished by Raymond Monelle. The transformations of semantic codes in Bacevičius’s Symphony No. 2 are associated with the expression of the sublime and irony – the fundamental categories of modern 20 th -century music.

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