問題詳情

Imagine if Hamlet began with the Prince alone on stage, delivering the lines, "To be or not to be ..." — no explanation, no setting of the scene, just one character thinking out loud, leaving us to make of what he says. Edward Elgar (1857-1934), an English composer, does the musical equivalent at the opening of his Cello Concerto, placing the listener in the middle of the work without its opening bars. This is not the way concertos are supposed to begin. Generally there is an extended orchestral introduction, after which the solo instrument makes a carefully stage-managed first appearance. In Antonin Dvorak's Cello Concerto, for example, the opening orchestral section lasts a full three and a half minutes.Elgar begins instead with four insistent chords on the cello that immediately create a melancholy mood. They receive a gentle answer from strings, clarinets and horns, and then the cello becomes more agitated, in a series of rising notes that seem to promise some emphatic statement. What we hear is something else: the violas launch into a subdued lament in 9/8 time that was Elgar's original motivation for the work. He started the concerto just months after the end of the First World War, and this great sorrowful melody is Elgar's lament for all that the war had cost—millions of lives, and, with them, a way of life. Gently swaying between a half note and a quarter note as it winds its way through shifting keys, the theme manages to express both the grief and the ache within. This main theme is passed from orchestra to cello and back again, becoming more anguished with each restatement, until it finally returns on the cello in the same subdued manner in which we heard it first. This leads to a more animated second theme in 12/8, which begins as a dialogue between strings and woodwinds. The first theme is heard again, and the movement ends with three plucked notes on the cello. With its two simple themes that forego any substantial development, the movement uses one of music's simplest form - the three-part structure of a song.
71. Hamlet is mentioned in the first paragraph to .
(A) show how much Elgar was inspired by this Shakespearean character
(B) indicate how Elgar’s cello concerto starts in the 1st movement
(C) prove how important his image is in Elgar’s Cello Concerto
(D) introduce how the latest production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins

參考答案

答案：B
難度：非常困難0
統計：A(1),B(2),C(2),D(0),E(0)

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