Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner

Abstract

Music is a powerful presence in Eduardo Rovner’s dramatic production that resists being considered merely part of the background. In “Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner” I aim to show that music assumes a key role in this Argentine play, by allowing the audience to connect diverse political and historical spaces and times, from the world of Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, to the present-day performance of four inept and cruel string musicians that unsuccessfully play Beethoven’s work. In Cuarteto, the violent acts of the members of the quartet connect the historical past — including Nazism — with a present moment when social and political violence is being linked to artistic creation, ironically joining Beethoven’s admirable music with the moral indignities and murderous acts of the contemporary musicians, and in turn, indirectly with the atrocities of the Argentine Dirty War of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In Cuarteto, Rovner creates an ambiguous artistic world — both sublime and horrendous — as a way to explore the processes of artistic communication, and to claim not only the artist’s own creative freedom, but also the political and ethical freedom that has been suppressed in Argentina’s recent history. (PM, Article in Spanish)