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Characteristics of Romantic Harmony in Dora Pejačević’s Solo Songs
Andrea Berki
Sažetak
This paper presents a musical analysis focused on the harmony of four early songs for solo voice by Dora Pejačević, with special attention to the tonal plan, tonal ambiguity, and the expressive shaping of poetic texts. Late-Romantic harmonic features are particularly noticeable in their musical language, indicating the influence of the music of R. Wagner as the most significant model in the formation of Pejačević’s compositional poetics. In certain passages, features of musical modernism may also be discerned, particularly where harmony arises as a consequence of melodic–contrapuntal thinking.
The selected solo art songs analyzed here rely heavily on a late-Romantic harmonic idiom, characterized by a rich chordal palette, highly expressive and intense chromatic connections, abrupt modulations, the use of keys with many accidentals as well as their sudden cancellation, and a marked tendency toward chromaticized sonorities. Tonally unstable sections are achieved through the use of chromatic chords and their elliptical resolutions, non-functional harmonic successions, and frequent shifts to closely related keys. Dora Pejačević does not abandon tonal frameworks, a fact that remains evident even in her employment of the most complex chromatic progressions with altered chords. Through these, she enriches common harmonic progressions or interpolates them between two chords of the same harmony, as if prolonging that harmony by means of chromatic passing motion. In this context, the use of the Tristan chord and other enharmonic variants of the half-diminished seventh chord is particularly noteworthy, pointing to more complex harmonic elaborations within the composer’s musical language. These characteristics will continue to serve as the point of departure for her more mature compositions, in which impressionistic and expressionistic features will become more pronounced.
Ključne riječi
Dora Pejačević, solo songs (Lied), harmonic features, altered chords, Tristan chord
Hrčak ID:
347106
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.12.2025.
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