Modernist Mysteries: Persephone

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.