Motive and meaning in Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd".

Title: Motive and meaning in Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd".
Identifier: AAI9830713
identifier: 9830713
Creator: Griffiths, Wendy Elizabeth.
Contributor: Advisers: Philip Rupprecht | Allan W. Atlas
Date: 1998
Language: English
Publisher: City University of New York.
Subject: Music
Abstract: Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd represents a successful adaptation of not only a literary work but of several literary techniques to an operatic medium. Musical motive plays a crucial role in these musical-narrative techniques. In the analogue for point of view, for example, several characters present their versions of a motive, thereby revealing important information about themselves, information which in a literary work a narrator might supply. Motives are also used in the orchestral narrative which underscores the drama acting as the thread from which this non-verbal narrative is woven. Billy Budd is a work in which techniques of motivic association which would characterize his later works begin to emerge.
Type: dissertation
Source: PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
degree: D.M.A.