"LITTLE TRAGEDIES": THE POLYPHONY OF MUSIC, WORDS AND VISUAL IMAGERY

The music for three-part television movie Little Tragedies (1979) on Pushkin’s literature works (directed by M.Schweitzer, music composed by A.Schnittke) has been investigated. The trinity of music, poetic words and visual imagery, and their amazing consistency and reciprocal functioning has been considered in aspect of polyphony as the universal logical principle of building an art form. All the music of the TV movie grows out of two leitmotifs. And theirs varied implementation in the film is exemplified on examples of polyphonic analysis (music/words/images) of fragments from the four main film sections, such as "Scene from Faust", "Mozart and Salieri", "The Covetous Knight", and "A Feast in Time of Plague".