ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to investigate whether Miltonic music theory can be realized in actual music by exploring the representation of fallenness in the twentieth-century Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera of Paradise Lost (1978). Whereas Milton as epic poet seeks to forget his fallenness and forge a prelapsarian poetic style answerable to the divine origins of human experience, Penderecki instead leans into the experience of modernity to forge a fallen musical style fractured by rhythmic, stylistic, and tonal dissonance. The opera unfolds as an effort to recover a unified, unfallen musical consonance, failing repeatedly until the Son of God, whom Penderecki calls Messias, volunteers to sacrifice himself to save humankind. In dramatizing the search for a unified musical style, Penderecki achieves a distinctive musical idiom that fuses sensuous acoustics with charged metaphorical meaning, thus realizing Milton’s poetic theory of music as at once sound and metaphor.
