Modernist mysteries : Perséphone

In Modernist Mysteries: Persephone, author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how a group of collaboratoring artists Igor Stravinsky, Ida Rubenstein, Andr Barsacq, Andr Gide, and others used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s.