Music as Theme and as Structural Model in Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Abstract

Music plays a significant role in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It functions at least in three distinct ways: 1. AS SOUND: The play’s text includes a lot of instructions to produce sounds (musical and non-musical); these are often semanticised, acquiring and evoking extra-musical functions and meanings by interactions with words, events and actions on stage. Non- musical sounds (e.g., fire-bells) also enrich the play's sheer acoustic texture. 2. AS THEME: Often, this typically has little to do with actual sounds on stage. Thus, the refusal of Masha (the middle sister, a gifted pianist) to play after her father’s death is, of course, inaudible. Likewise, no sounds are produced by contrasts between personages’ attitudes to music. Such contrasts also characterise music itself as a means of human communication. They are essential to the theme of music. Themes are not heard. 3. AS STRUCTURAL MODEL: This means the organisation of non-musical materials in drama/theatre in ways analogous to organisations of musical ones in works of music (e.g., contrapuntal interrelations). In Three Sisters, music is communicated to the play’s audience through a large variety of auditory, cognitive, associative, analogous (etc.) means, many of which are associated neither with sounds nor with music as theme. In addition, the article offers a typology of complexities in literature-drama, on the one hand, and in music, on the other hand.