Moderato Cantabile Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Roland A. Champagne

Critical Essay by Roland A. Champagne

Diabelli's sonata provides the mood for many encounters in Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile. The enchantment of this sonata performs much like the Sirens who provided Ulysses with a magnetic attraction and a need for self-discipline. In Moderato Cantabile, the sonata creates a "controlled" (moderato) and "lyrical" (cantabile) atmosphere for Mlle Giraud and the young Desbaresdes, Anne and her son, as well as Chauvin and Anne. Each of these couples participates in the alternation between the binary themes of reason-madness, possession-dispossession, the explainable-inexplicable, and construction-destruction. The setting of Moderato Cantabile is organized according to a perpetual alternation between those poles. At first, the mood of Diabelli's sonata attracts the characters toward a milieu of "hateful contraries." The tune itself becomes an enchantment of the "controlled and lyrical" community of these "hateful contraries." On the one hand, the "controlled" elements are lined to reason, possession, the explainable, and construction. These elements dramatize...
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