From Index to Symbol: Echoes of Liszt in Tchaikovsky’s Works
From Index to Symbol: Echoes of Liszt in Tchaikovsky’s Works

Summary/Abstract: The understanding of signifying acts is conditioned by the journey between the reading of the signs and their interpretation: i. knowing the topic components used by the composer, with its musical correspondent, stylistics; ii. connecting the information on the birth, the program and the source inspiring the analyzed work (historical thinking); iii. rhetoric-aesthetic analysis of the musical quotation (which becomes here a symbol in Peirce’s understanding of return to the original meaning); iv. hermeneutic interpretation of the metamorphosis of the allusive quotation. Adopting the perspective of this methodology in four steps, the present study aims to uncover the multiplicity of symbolic meanings which motivated Tchaikovsky to quote, in Lenski’s aria in Yevgeny Onegin, the main theme from Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann.

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