Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 6 "Pathétique", IV. Finale. Adagio Lamentoso-Andante

Notes

Nadia Chilkovsky Nahumck

Reference: Nahumck, Nadia Chilkovsky. Isadora Duncan: The Dances. Washington DC: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994.

[Isadora] Duncan created the dance four years after the Russian Revolution. It portrays a solitary, grief-stricken supplicant descending to the floor, crushed and desolate.

Lillian Loewenthal

Reference: Loewenthal, Lillian. The Search for Isadora: The legend & legacy of Isadora Duncan. Dance Horizons, 1993.

It is in the fourth movement, the Adagio Lamentoso, that Nozière gave testimony to Isadora's intense imagination and emotive depths. With forceful symbolism she is earth-mother in a dolorous plaint for the slain in battle. A striking metaphor for maternal grief, she kneels and weeps for the dead children of man, and with an immense, surging movement of torso and arms, she wrests them from the void, pressing them against her body, to shelter within her womb. The critic wrote: "Such feelings demand symphonic scope. Beyond words is the sublimity of these movements; the most moving, most profound and human homage that could have been rendered the dead."

Related items in the Archives

The Collection of Mignon Garland > Programs > Isadora Duncan Dancers in New York — 1929

The Collection of Barbara Kane > Programs > Riverside Dance Festival — Isadora Duncan Commemorative Dance Company — Jan 24, 1979

The Collection of Janaea Rose Lyn (McAlee) > Programs > Isadora Duncan — Nov 21, 1916

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