IULIA MOGOȘAN
Cartoon-Variations on a Theme by Mozart Op. 51 by Dan Dediu or On the Various Forms of Fantasy
Abstract
This study analyses the work Cartoon Variations on a Theme by Mozart by Dan Dediu, a Romanian composer recognised by the way in which his music reflects an abundance of imagination. It looks to draw a comparison between the way in which imagination and fantasy are reflected in the music of Mozart’s time – on the one hand through the writings of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and his contemporaries, and on the other hand through the reception of the German composer’s music by Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg – and the way in which creative fantasy gradually extended its limits to reach a “music of possible existences” in postmodern music. If Bach conceived that imagination was reflected in the richness of (harmonic) musical structures at an abstract level, refusing any explicit association with poetic images, Dan Dediu’s postmodern music, marked by the aesthetics of the genre, proposes a “fictional method” of composition, in which for any creative stage an extramusical association is possible, as the entire work constitutes a musical metafiction.
Key-words
Cartoon-Variations on a Theme by Mozart Op. 51, Dan Dediu, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, fantasy