Some Thoughts On The History and Historiography of Russian Music

Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music Author(s): Richard Taruskin Source: The Journal of Musicology,
Vol. 3, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 321-339 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/763585 . Accessed: 24/05/2013 18:33
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SOME THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF RUSSIAN MUSIC RICHARDTARUSKIN preliminaryversion of this article was originally read as a paper in a symposium organized by Malcolm H. Brown on "Fifty Years of AmericanResearchin Slavic Music," given at the fiftieth nationalmeeting of the American Musicological Society, on 27 October 1984. The other participantsin the symposium and their topics were as follows: Barbara Krader(Slavic Ethnic Musics), Milos Velimirovic (Slavic ChurchMusic), Malcolm H. Brown (Russian Music-What Has Been Done), Laurel Fay (The Special Case of Soviet Music-Problems of Methodology), Michael Mazo was the respondent. Beckerman(Czech Music Research). Margarita for this was "What Is To Be Done," symposium My assigned topic but being no Chernyshevsky,still less a Lenin, I took it on with reluctance. I know only too well the fate of researchprospectuses. All the ones I've seen, whateverthe field, have within only a few years taken on an aspect that can be most charitablydescribed as quaint, and the ones that have attemptedto dictateor legislate the activity of futuregenerationsof scholars cannotbe so charitablydescribed.It is not as thoughwe were tryingto find a complex medicalcure or a solutionto the armsrace. We are not crusading on behalf of any program;nor have we any overridinggoal that demands the subordinationof our individualpredilectionsto a team effort. We are the music we love as well as we simply curious to know and understand and to stimulate interest in it. I, for one, am content to can, eager possibly sit back and await the discoveries and interpretations of my colleagues, the directionof whose researchI am in no position to predict. I love surprises. It seems fair to say, however, that the main contribution of American scholarsto the study of Russianmusic will be interpretive and criticalrather than philological or factual. This for two reasons:one simple and obvious, the other very complex. The simple factor is practical. We will never have the freedom of access needed to do fundamentalsource researchon a grand scale. Those of us who are passionatelydrawnto problemsof textual criticism or "creative process" will do better to concentrateon Ives or Beethoven than on Chaikovskyor Musorgsky-and I say this in full recognitionof the accomplishmentsof scholars like John Wiley and RobertOldani, Americanswho have done excellent work on just these two Russians.' I have even done a little textological work on Musorgskymyself.2 But I thinkit significantthat
'See R. John Wiley, Tchaikovsky'sBallets (London: Oxford University Press, 1984). Oldani's dissertation,New Perspectiveson Mussorgsky's'Boris Goduno"''(Michigan, 1978), containsa chapter on "Stemmata," which has been published as "Editions of Boris Godunov" in Malcolm H. Brown, ed., Musorgsky:In Memoriam1881-1981 (Ann Arbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1982), pp. 179-214. 2'"Little Star': An Etude in the Folk Style," in Musorgskvin Memoriam,pp. 57-84. 321
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THE JOURNALOF MUSICOLOGY
the Musorgskysources I investigatedare located in Paris and the Chaikovsky sources Wiley took as his startingpoint are in Cambridge,Massachusetts. We Americanswill never gain freedomof access to the motherlode, the archives of Moscow and Leningrad. We had best leave them to the Soviets, who, as we all know from our personalexperience, are determined that if major discoveries are to be made there, then they will make them. And I think, in all fairness, we should let them, for it is in the area of empirical source research that Russian scholars are under the fewest constraints,and I think we can all agree that by and large their publicationsin this field-I am thinking, of course, of Findeizen, Lamm, Dianin, Orlova, and Gozenpud among many others3-have been impressiveand (given the realities of Soviet life) reliable enough. Needless to say, we will never be able to document Balakirev's anti-Semitismor Glinka's monarchismfrom Soviet published sources, but it would be unrealisticto expect that any of us will be shown to the relevantdocumentsin the archives, either. This brings me to my complex factor, on which I will spend the rest of this piece. There is no area of music historiography that is in greater need of fundamentalrevision than that of Russian music, and here the corrective can only come from the West. I am not just talking about sensationalbut trivialmatterslike the circumstances surrounding Chaikovsky's death.4 Nor am I talking about such mattersof recentcontroversyas Shostokovich's purportedmemoirs,5 which, however tempting as a source of scurrilous informationand opinion, are at present a source which no one among us would touch, in any professionalcapacity, with a ten-foot pole,
Russianmusical literature. 3NikolaiFindeizen's monumentalsurveyof pre-nineteenth-century Ocherki po istorii muzykiv Rossii (2 vols., Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928-29) has never been surtranslation by S.W. Pring, passed. A revision and updatingby Milog Velimirovic of a half-century-old commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies but never published, is currently in progress. Pavel Lamm's epoch-makingcritical editions of works by Musorgsky, Borodin and others are well known. Sergei Dianin. son of one of Borodin's closest friends, publisheda complete edition of the composer's letters (Pis'ma A.P. Borodina [4 vols., Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928-1950]) and a biographywhich has been translatedinto English (Borodin,.trans. RobertLord [London:Oxford Unichroniclesa la Deutschfor a number versity Press, 1963]). AlexandraOrlovahas compileddocumentary Russians. Her best known work of this kind is Trudyi doi M.P. Musorgskogo of nineteenth-century into English by Roy Guenther(Musorgskv's Works (Moscow: Muzgiz. 1963), which has been translated and Days [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983]). Abram Gozenpud is the foremost present-day historianof the Russian operaticstage. In seven volumes issued between 1959 and 1975. he chronicled the musical theaterin Russia from its beginnings to the Soviet period. His ballet-historian counterpart, Vera Krasovskaia,has some half-dozensimilarvolumes of fundamental empiricalresearchto her credit. 4The story of Chaikovsky's forced suicide on account of a homosexual liaison with a boy from the highest aristocracywas publishedby AlexandraOrlova almost immediatelyupon her emigrationto the West ("Tchaikovsky:The Last Chapter,"Music and Letters LXII (1981), 125-45) and was given, even before its publicationin full, a huge play in the popularpress. Its evidentiarysupportis extremely flimsy, however, and its uncriticalacceptanceby David Brown in his article on the composer for The New Grove, where the matteris set forth as if establishedbeyond doubt, is one of that distinguished publication's most serious lapses. 5Testimonv:The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovichas Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov,. trans. AntoninaW. Bouis (New York: Harper& Row, 1979).
SOME THOUGHTSON THE HISTORYAND HISTORIOGRAPHY
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thanksto the work of one of my colleagues on the aforementioned panel.6 What I am talking about is our general understanding and interpretation of the whole phenomenonof Russia's emergence as a producerof art music, and our culturalevaluation of the music she has produced. Here we must confrontnot only the extremelymendaciousand tendentioushistoriography that emanates from the USSR, which many Western scholars continue to rely upon far too uncritically, in my opinion, but also a great many unexamined assumptionsthat can cloud our own consciousness and have prevented our view of Russian music and musical life from fully outgrowing its childhood. In 1939 Stravinsky asked, at the beginning of his lecture on "The Avatarsof Russian Music," "Why do we always hear Russian music spoken of in terms of its Russiannessratherthan simply in terms of music?"7 The questionremainsrelevantfour-and-a-half decadeslater,thoughof course Stravinsky's use of the word "simply" is objectionable. It is precisely because it's easy that we talk about Russianmusic in terms of its Russianness; and as we all know, nothing is harderthan to talk about music in terms of music. I'm not at all sure we even want to do that, if the result is going to be the kind of blinkered, ahistoricaland jargon-riddendiscourse that often passes for "theory" or "analysis"-but that, of course, is another story.8 Still, the habit of speaking of Russian music above all in terms of its Russianness has ingrainedmany prejudicesand lazy habits of thought. It is often taken for grantedthat everythingthat happenedin Russian music has a direct relationship, positive or negative, to the national question, which question is often very reductivelyconstruedin terms of "sources in folk song and churchchant," as Alfred Swan put it.9 This in turncan and often does become a normative criterion:an overtly quotationalnational characteris taken as a mark of value or authenticity, and its absence,
6LaurelE. Fay, "Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony'?" The Russian Review XXXIX (1980), 484-93. This extremely importantcritique has never, alas, been reprintedin a musicological publication, with the result that innocent musicologists continue to rely on Volkov's book. Fay has shown that all of the pages of typescript signed as read and approved by Shostakovich contained transcriptsof material previously published in the USSR, and thereforethat none of the sensational new material in the volume bears even this much "testimony" as to its authenticity.As she further points out, moreover,even should the authenticity questionbe settled, the equally troublesomequestion of veracityremains. A greatdeal of evidence suggests that in his last years Shostakovich,with a history of collaborationwith the Soviet regime that he was desperateto live down, became extremely imageconscious, in ways that are reflected not only in his memoirs, both authenticated and not, but in such mattersas the choice of texts to set to music, etc. 7IgorStravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. ArthurKnodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p.95. 8It is well told by Kermanin his vociferous squib "How We Got Into Analysis and How To Get Out,"Critical Inquiry VII (1980), 311-22; also in Kingsley Price ed. On CriticizingMusic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 38-54, under the title "The State of Academic Music Criticism." 9I.e., in the subtitle to his posthumoushistory, Russian Music (New York: Norton, 1973). This ratherchaotic melange, in which rare insights rub shoulders with bald misstatementsof fact, surely representsthe state of its author'snotes at the time of his death, not the book he meant to give us. Its publicationwas a dubious service to the memory of a great scholar.
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conversely, as a markof valuelessness.'? The result is our tendencyto use the word Russian in comparativeor superlativeforms: this is a "very Russian" tune, so-and-so is the "most Russian" composer, and so forth. Not only musiciansdo this, of course. One non-musicianwho did it delightfully froma StateDepartment tourof the Soviet was John Updike, who, returning Union, exclaimed enthusiasticallyto an interviewer, "Russia is so Russian!"" But what Updike said with tongue in cheek is maintainedwith deadly solemnity by so many musicians about, let us say, Glinka. It is on his use of folklore that his status as "founding father" of Russian music is usually said to depend. And when that status gets challenged in a simplistically revisionist spirit, as it does from time to time, it is usually by noting the frequency with which earlier Russian composers, all the way from Verstovsky back to Matinsky and Pashkevich, quoted folk songs in their operas. A dissertationby a well-known student of Russian music, entitled "The Influenceof Folk-Songon RussianOperaUp to and Including the Time of Glinka," is devoted to providing Glinka with an indigenous patrimony,turningthe father, as it were, into a son. 12 But this view distorts the pictureboth of the earliermusic and of Glinka. The differencebetween their respective employmentsof folklore was real, and not simply a matter of degree but of kind-this is something to which I shall return.But what makes Glinka a founding father has most of all to do not with his being the "formulatorof the Russian musical language,"13 whatever that may mean, but ratherwith the fact that he was the first Russian composer to achieve world stature. In short, with Glinka Russian music did not depart from Europe, but precisely the opposite-it joined Europe. In the context of the usual historiographical platitudes,this statementmay have a ring of
"'Gerald Abraham,for example, dismisses the work of the foreignmusicianswho furnishedmusical entertainmentsto the eighteenth-centuryRussian court by noting that "they neither influenced nor, except in a few doubtfulcases, were they influencedby, church music or folk-music," with the result that "it can hardly be said that they contributedmuch or directly to the music of the Russian people" (The Traditionof WesternMusic [Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1974],.pp. 49-50). But this is more or less like Dante's consigning the Greek philosophersto the higher reaches of Hell. Besides, Then Musorgsky never who are "the Russian people'"? Does this category include only peasants'? contributedto their music either. Abraham'scareless criterionof value is precisely thatof Leo Tolstoy, (though, obviously, throughno fault of Tolstoy's or Abraham's)which in turnconditionedthe repressive arts policy of the Soviet state. For a philosophyof art that draws its normativevalues from outside art is always susceptible to totalitarian perversion.For a discussion of the Tolstoyan roots of Soviet music esthetics see my review of Molchanov's The Dawns Are Quiet Here ("CurrentChronicle," Musical QuarterlyLXII [1976]., 105-15). ''Jane Howard, "Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?" Life, LXI, no. 19 (4 November 1966), 81. '2The authorof this 1961 Oxford dissertationhas also publishedhis findings, and propagatedhis viewpoint on Glinka's patrimony,in a numberof articles. See GeraldSeaman, "Russian Folk-song in the EighteenthCentury," Music & Letters XL (1959), 253-60; idem, "The NationalElement in Early Russian Opera, 1779-1800," Music & Letters XLII (1961), 252-62; idem, "Folk-song in Russian Opera of the 18th Century," Slavonic and East EuropeanReview XII, no. 96 (December 1962), 14457. A good correctiveto this viewpoint (which is that of most Soviet writersas well) is given in Simon Karlinsky, "Russian Comic Operain the Age of Catherinethe Great," 19th CenturyMusic VII (1984), 318-25. The sources of the genre and its treatmentof various social types (which accounts for its citations of various indigenous musical styles) is there persuasivelytracedto the Frenchtheater. 13Gerald Seaman, History of Russian Music, vol. I (New York: FrederickA. Praeger, 1967), p. 155.
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paradox, but it is exactly what Yury Keldysh, for example, had in mind when he wrote that Glinka, not Verstovsky and not Pashkevich, formed "the boundarybetween the past and the futureof Russian music."14 With the advent of a Russian composer whom his compatriotscould regard as being "on a level (Yes! On a level!) with Mozart, with Beethoven, or with anyoneone chooses,"15 Russianmusicianswere, so to speak, enfranchised. They no longer had to feel that theirs was an altogetherinsignificant, marginal or callow culture, althoughat the same time no Russian "classical" musicianhas ever been wholly withoutan inferioritycomplex vis-a-vis the venerable musical traditionsof Western Europe-and this was as true of Russian composers of world-wide prestige like Chaikovskyor even Stravinsky, as it was of more strictly regional talents-a neurosis that often found its outlet either in belligerence toward Europe on the one hand, or revulsion at Russia on the other. Now this difference in perspectiveon Glinka-the Westernview that regardshim as the first authenticallynationalRussiancomposer versus the native view that sees him as the first universal genius of music to have come from Russia-is truly a critical one. For if Glinka is valued only for his native traits-certainly not the traitshe valued most highly in himself!then a Chaikovskywill always seem an ambiguousand somewhat suspect figure, to say nothing of a Scriabin. Just look at the way these two are treatedin any generalmusic historytextbookin the West. Chaikovsky,one of the most conspicuous of all composers of any country in the actual concertlife of the last hundredyears, is given a total of twenty-twoscattered lines in the text by which most Americanmusic history studentsin college today are still educated, and he is introducedeverywherewith an apology. In the chapteron nineteenth-century instrumental music, Chaikovsky, towith is in at the thus: Dvorak, end, gether brought very "They have a place in this chapter because, although their music is in some respects an outgrowth of nationalistideas, their symphonies are essentially in the line of the GermanRomantictradition." And in the chapteron "Nationalism, Old and New," Chaikovskyis sneakedin once more as a thoroughlyperipheral
figure: "Tchaikovsky's two most popular operas . . . seem to have been
modelled after Meyerbeer,Verdi and Bizet, though nationalsubjects and a few traces of national musical idioms occur in both of these and, much
'4storiia russkoi muzyki,I (Moscow/Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1948), 369. '5TheDiaries of Tchaikovsky,trans. WladimirLaKond(New York: Norton, 1945), p.250 (entry of 27 June 1888).
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more conspicuously, in some of his less familiarworks for the theater."16 Poor Chaikovsky! He is implicitly denigratedfor not being as "national" as his "kuchkist" rivals, but all the same is ghettoized along with them in the inevitable chapter on nationalism. Confined as he is to the ghetto, as Brahmsor Bizet, Chaikovsky is rarely comparedwith such counterparts except to note his ostensible derivationsfrom them; he is comparedonly with fellow denizens of the ghetto, next to whom he is seen as "assimilated" and thereforeinauthentic.The comparisonis thus doubly invidious. And ironic, too, for during his lifetime Chaikovsky was accepted as a Europeanmaster, honoredwith degrees from Britishuniversities, and with the invitationto open New York's CarnegieHall. My object here is not to vindicate Chaikovsky against naive and irrelevantcharges-though it is certainly interestingto note that in Nina Bachinskaia'ssurvey of Russian folk song in the work of Russiancomposers,17 Chaikovskycomes in second (after the longer-lived Rimsky-Korsakov)in the sheer numberof such appropriations. And the Russians, obviously, have never had any trouble accepting Chaikovsky as a national treasure. My object is only to show attitudesand categories have made this how conventionalhistoriographical most eminentof Russiancomposersa curiouslydifficultmorsel for Western
16Donald Jay Grout, A History of WesternMusic, revised edition (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 593, 635. It may be thoughta dubious or unseemly tactic to criticize in the presentconnection a book that makes no pretense to a specialized viewpoint on Russian music. But it is precisely in textbooks Withrespectto nationalism thatcare must be takennot to foster invidiousprejudicesor double standards. in music, Grout posits a double standardin the baldest terms (pp. 633-34):'The results of the early German folk song revival were so thoroughlyabsorbedinto the fabric of German nineteenth-century music as to become an integral part of its style, which in that period was the nearest thing to an internationalEuropean musical style. Thus, although Brahms, for instance, made arrangementsof Germanfolk songs and wrote melodies that resemblefolk songs, and althoughDebussy called him the most Germanicof composers, we still do not think of him as any more a 'nationalist'composer than Haydn, Schubert, Straussor Mahler, all of whom likewise more or less consciously made use of folk idioms." He goes on to "exonerate" the nationalqualities of Frenchand Italianmusic, and even the Polish elements in Chopin ("for the most part only exotic accessories to a style fundamentallycosmopolitan"). It would be tedious to sort out the logical fallacies here; suffice it to say that in my truth,rather opinion to indoctrinatestudentsto regard"what we think" as any sort of historiographical than train them even in the early phases of study to regard "what we think" as an object inviting examinationand challenge ("falsification," as Popperwould say), is dogmatic, to say the least.
17Narodnye pesni v tvorchestve russkikh kompozitorov (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962).
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music historiansto swallow, obsessed as they (we) are with the idea of the
"mainstream."18
This is a problem of long standing. Carl Dahlhaus, whose taste for illuminatingparadoxis well known, has justly observed, in the challenging discussion of nationalismand music in his recently translated"studies in the music of the later nineteenthcentury," that "the nationalsubstanceof
Russian . . . music was a condition of its international worth, not an in-
validation."19He was speaking from an idealist point of view, and went to say 'coloring' instead on to say that "it would surely be inappropriate of 'substance,' and 'commercial success' instead of 'worth'." But these distinctionsseem a bit pat (Dahlhaus, in any case, never defines them) and do not really stand up in the face of the actual Rezeptionsgeschichteof Russian music. On the contrary, we often find that it was precisely the surface color that attractedinternationalaudiences, sometimes to Russian chagrin. Diaghilev, for example, recognizingthat the music of his beloved Chaikovskywas box-office poison in Parisdespite what he perceived to be its profoundnational substance, suppressedhis desire to present The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty in his first ballet season (1909)20in favor of ephemeral, highly-colored "salades russes" (as Walter Nouvel sneeringly called them)21 drawn from scores by Glinka, Arensky, Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov,Musorgsky, Glazunov and Cherepnin,plus a couple of
"It seems fair to say that nowhere is the distinctionbetween mainstream and peripherydrawnwith greater rigor than in the United States, a situation that may reflect our own national insecurities, as well as the continuinginfluence of the generationof CentralEuropeanimmigrantson the development of the discipline of musicology here. (Grout, for example, seems to have inheritedhis double standard re nationalism from Einstein, who in his Music in the Romantic Era [New York: Norton, 1947] distinguishesin his chapterorganizationbetween "UniversalismWithinthe National"--i.e., Germany, citizen-of-the-world-and the ghettochapter,whereChaikovsky Italy, France,and Chopin, the honorary comes in for the usual double-barrelled rejection.)These prejudicesobtainboth in the domainof music studies: witness the history and that of music analysis. Nor are they confined to nineteenth-century division of Reese's Music in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1954) into two halves, the first devoted to "The Development of the Central Musical Language," and the second to the peripheries. While it is a historical fact that what became the musical lingua francaof the Renaissancedeveloped first in France and the Low Countries, to organize the book as Reese has done means to discuss the contemporariesFevin and Senfl, to pick one example, some four hundredpages apart. It is inevitable that Senfl will seem less importantthan Fevin in such a context, though in reality his importance,and the quality of his work, was arguablythe greater. Discussing the Reese book one day, a specialist in early English music who was educated in England but now teaches in the United States remarkedto me that only when she got here did she realize that her field was a peripheralarea! In reply to the labels probableobjection that "central" and "peripheral"are by now only value-freehistoriographical of convenience, I would suggest thatit is becauseof themthatmanyif not most Westernmusic historians are unable, personal preferencesaside, to recognize in Chaikovskya composer comparablein stature to Brahms. If the reader reacts to this suggestion with incredulityor indignation(Einstein certainly would have!), perhapshe has isolated withinhimself a reasonthatour disciplinecontinuesso tenaciously to cling to the invidious distinction. 19Between Romanticismand Modernism,trans. MaryWhittall(Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1980), p. 84. 20For evidence of Diaghilev's early intentions to stage these ballets, see the press interviews collected by I. S. Zilbershteinand V. A. Samkov in Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo, I (Moscow: Izobratitel'noeiskusstvo, 1982), 209-10. 21Sergei Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet 1909-1929, trans. Vera Bowen (London: Constable: 1953). p. 8. A salade russe, of course, is a Frenchdish.
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little snippets from Chaikovsky's great Maryinsky ballets. The featured Chaikovsky work, the finale of the divertissemententitled Le Festin, was the last movement of Chaikovsky's Second Symphony, a set of variations a la Kamarinskaiaon a "Little Russian" dance tune, perhapsChaikovsky's Like so most "kuchkist"-soundingscore, and thereforeunrepresentative. in with apologies, many others after him, Diaghilev sneaked Chaikovsky the "commercial fearful thathis lack of national"coloring" would threaten success" of the Paris venture. But just what shall we call the "national substance," then? Can it be terms?Dahlhausmost likely meant defined in any but mystical,preternatural school." But need these be define a "national the presence of traits that And all? do they necessarilyderive from lowerquotationalor coloristic at musicalstyles would of class traditions? Any connoisseur nineteenth-century of certainlyrecognize, say, the musical idiom Stravinsky'searly Symphony in E-flat (1905-07) as emphatically "Russian," despite its near-totallack of any resonance from chant or folk song, for it is saturatedwith reminiscences of the styles of Rimsky-Korsakov,Glazunov and Chaikovsky. The sophisticated personal styles of these men-for example, Chaikovsky's devices of chrotechniqueof orchestration,or Rimsky's very characteristic in their own works both manifested matic harmony and modulation-as determine what our and are and in those of their disciples largely epigones, And our in nineteenth late sense "school" the sense of a Russian century. of this school style can in fact be pushed back retrospectivelyas far as Glinka.22To recognize as Russian only an oral or vernaculartraditionand its conscious (and usually superficial) assimilations in "high art" is narrowmindedand often absurd.We can see this easily enough in the case of the fatuous Moscow critic who complained of Alexander Serov's opera Judith, which is set in ancient Judea and is peopled by Hebrews and Assyrians, that its music was not Russian enough.23 But before we scoff at him we should check to see what our own house is made of. Are we not still liable to mistake national subject matterfor nationalstyle; to call, for example, thatmock-kuchkistfinale to Chaikovsky'sSecond his "most fully Russian" work?24Or to think we have made a criticalpoint about Scriabin merely by noting the lack of folkloricinfluenceon his style?25By Scriabin's time, Russian music had been quite thoroughly"denationalized," though its "school" spirit had, if anything, increased.26And in any event, listing
22Fora very neat delineationof some of these school traits, see GeraldAbraham,"The Elements of Russian Music," Music & Letters IX (1928), 51-58. letopis', 23"A Russian opera by a Russian composercontainednot a Russiannote"(Sovremennaia i muzykalnaia Serov: Ego zhizn 1865, no. 35), quoted in Nikolai Findeizen, AleksandrNikolaevlich deiatel'nost' (2nd ed., Moscow:Jurgenson,1904), p. 104. 24DavidBrown, s.v. "Tchaikovsky," The New Grove, XVIII, p.611. 25Grout,p.640. A few recent publicationson Scriabin have finally begun to show that he has a definite place within Russian traditions, which means that finally other Russian traditionsthan the folkloric are gaining recognition by Western musicologists. See MartinCooper, 'AleksandrSkryabin I (972), 327-56; Malcolm H. Brown, "Skriabin and and the Russian Renaissance," Studi musicali Russian 'Mystic' Symbolism," 19th CenturyMusic III (1979), 42-51. 26The term "denationalization" was coined in 1910 by the critic Viacheslar Karatygin in his obituaryfor Balakirev(Apollon, 1910, no.10 [September],p. 54).
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the things a given phenomenonis not will never tell us, after all, what it
is.
Now just as it is assumed that Russian music is, or ought to be, ipso facto "colored Russian," it is furtherassumedthat nationalism,or national character,or the striving for a native idiom, or call it what you will, was something unique, or at least especially endemic, to Russia, or if not to Russia, then to EasternEurope, or if not to EasternEurope, then to "peripheralcenters" generally. It is one of the assumptions,in fact, that keeps these centers peripheralin our minds. But is it true?There was no greater music than Wagner-"that German Slanationalistin nineteenth-century vophile," as Stasov called him27-unless it was Verdi. And, as already implied above, we could easily add the names of any numberof leading "mainstream" composers to the list of nationalists-Weber, Schumann, Brahms, Berlioz, practicallyanyone you like, from Beethoven to Debussy. It was precisely because nationalismwas universallyheld to be a positive value in nineteenth-century Europe-because nationalism, to put it ironically, was international-that Dahlhauscould maintainthat the "national substance" of Russian (or Czech, or Spanish, or Norwegian) music was "a condition of its internationalworth." Nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, in fact, and not just the musical variety, was itself a foreign import.And the precise way in which Glinka'suse of folklore differedfrom that of earlierRussian composers-to wit, that it came from the mouths of main characters,not just decorativepeasantchoristersand coryphees, and that it provideda mediumfor tragicaction, notjust comedy-was precisely the way in which the typical Romantic opera differed from those of the eighteenth century, and reflected above all a change in viewpoint on the natureof folklore-one that emanatednot from Russia but from Western Europe (i.e., from Rousseau and Herder)-that folklore represented"the nation" and not just "the peasantry." That the latter idea died hard even in Russia is reflected in the oft-quoted but little-understood comment overheardand repeatedat the premiereof A Life for the Tsar-that it was "de la musique des cochers."27aAnd it is furtherreflected if we compare A Life for the Tsar with an opera that was written more than forty years later-Evgenii Onegin, where the folkloristic element is presentedexactly as it might have been in a court opera of the eighteenthcentury. Especially telling is the thirdscene, where a groupof berry-picking peasantchoristers provide a decorativeframe for one of the turningpoints in the dramathat concerns the "real people" of the opera, Evgenii's rejectionof Tatiana.
27V.V. Stasov, Sobrannyesochineniia, III (St. Petersburg,1894), 275. 27"Coachmen were not chosen for this sally at random. Their singing (to encourage their horses and frighten wolves) was proverbial,and had been often representedon the Russian musical stage in the past, beginning with Evstignei Fomin's singspiel The Post Drivers (Yamshchiki na podstave, 1788). In fact, though an expression of social snobbery, not a musical critique, the remarkunwittinglyhit the mark: the tune Susanin sings at his first entrancein Act I had been taken down by Glinka from the singing of a coach driverin the town of Luga (see Mikhail IvanovichGlinka, Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge [Norman:Universityof OklahomaPress, 1963], p. 100). The singing of the Russiancoachmen was often noted by 18th- and 19th-centuryEuropeantravellersto Russia, including Berlioz and Mme. de Stael.
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But of course the music Evgenii and Tatianasing is just as "Russian" as the music sung by the peasants. It is modelled on the domestic music of the early nineteenth-century landowningclass, the pomeshchiki,as Stravinsky understood so well when he fashioned his own Mavra on the same Russianmodel28-and experiencedthat very fiasco with the Parisianpublic Diaghilev had expertly avoided a dozen years earlier. What the Parisian public never understood-what the Western public will never understand unless we tell them-is that Russia is large. It contains multitudes:multitudes of social classes and occupations, and multitudesof indigenous musical styles. It is no wonder that Russians like Glinka, Dargomyzhskyand Chaikovsky,plus Stravinskyand Diaghilev, who came fromthepomeshchik class and loved its petty-aristocratic values, should have loved and honored its musical artifactsas well, and consideredthem representative of the best there was in Russia. To appreciatethe Russiannessof a Chaikovskyor a Stravinsky,then, means being able to make finerdiscriminations Russian amongauthentically musical idioms. One of Dahlhaus'most interestingspeculationsinvolves a differentkind of discrimination."Serious considerationshould be given," he writes, "to the possibility that the different manifestationsof musical nationalism were affected by the types of political nationalism and the different stages in political evolution reached in each country:by the difference between those states where the transitionfrom monarchy to democracy was successful (GreatBritain, France)and unsuccessful(Russia), or between states formedby the unificationof separateprovinces(Germany, Italy) and those formed by the secession of new nation-statesfrom an old empire (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Finland)." He goes on to admit that "it is uncertainwhetherthere are any correlations,and, if so, whether they are at all significant;as yet hardlyany attentionhas been paid to the possibility of theirexistence, since musicalnationalismhas been approachedalmost exclusively from the point of view of writing national histories of music."29 His particularbreakdownof nationalism may be questioned, but the thought is indeed a stimulatingone. And here, in the domainof "comparativenationalism,"is where Westernscholarsmay have of Russian music, since in something unique to add to the historiography of Russian music is irrevocablyinsularand itself Russia the historiography nationalistic,devoted exclusively to the writingof "nationalhistory," emphasizingonly "what is nationallyuniqueor distinctive," as Dahlhausputs it, out of all proportionto reality, or, in many instances, to truth. Russian zyka-"foreign music." I know of no Russian scholar of music history with a dual specialty, still less one who specializes in setting Russianmusic within a world context-as GeraldAbrahamhas recently done so compre28Cf. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositionsand Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 82-83. Still, even Stravinsky muddles things a bit when he says that pomeshchiks' music is the "contraryof folk music,"something a little hardto imagine. Romanticismand Modernism,pp. 89-90. 29Between
musicologists specialize either in russkaia muzyka or in zarubezhnaia mu-
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hensively and gracefully30-in any, thatis, but a patentlychauvinisticway. I don't think a study like Abraham'scould be publishedin Russia. But that is not the only way Russian musicographydistorts Russian music history. When one thinks of the musical nationalism of Poland, Czechoslovakia,Finland,Norway, and so on, one is thinkingof progressive politics, of nationalliberation,of nationalheroes standingup to imperialism and tyranny. For better or worse, such is the popular view of Chopin, Smetana, Sibelius, Grieg. These men had no Russian counterpart,for the political situation in Russia was just the opposite of those in the other nations of EasternEurope. Russia was herself a powerful and independent nation, and after the Napoleonic Wars an increasinglyxenophobic andespecially after the Balkan Wars-an increasinglyimperialisticone. Chopin's homeland and Sibelius', after all, were vassal states to Russia, and the rebellionmemorializedin Chopin's "nationalistic"Revolutionary Etude was an uprising against Russia. So the natureof Russian nationalismdifferedfrom Polish or Czech or Finnish, and that naturewas often a far from prettyone. In Russia, nationalism was largely co-opted, just as it is today in the Soviet Union, by the state. I am thinking particularlyof the loathsome doctrineof Official Nationality promulgatedin the reign of the first Nikolai by his Minister of Education, Count Sergei Uvarov. The articles of faith this state ideology proclaimed sacrosanctcomprised a sort of trinity: Orthodoxy, autocracy,
nationality (pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost'). Just compare that with Liberte, egalite, fraternite! Its main proponents included the historian MikNikolai Gogol (who needs no introduction) and . . . Mikhail Glinka, whose
hail Pogodin, the poets Vasili Zhukovskyand Nestor Kukolnik, as well as
opera A Life for the Tsar was a complete and perfect embodimentof it. The opera's moral lessons were precisely those embodied in the poetry of the composer's cousin Fyodor Glinka, a hack who was capable of such effusions as the following, which he put in the mouth of a young widow who has to explain to her childrenthe death of their soldier father: He went hither, to the brightabode of the Heavenly Tsar Because here he had been faithful to the earthlyTsar.31 To put it in terms of the textbook of Russian history used in schools throughoutRussia in the reign of Nikolai I, the characterof the Russian people consists of "profound and quiet piety, boundless devotion to the throne, obedience to the authorities,remarkable patience, a lucid and solid intelligence, a kind and hospitablesoul, a gay temper, courage amidst the greatestdangers, finally, nationalpride which had producedthe conviction that there was no countryin the world betterthan Russia, no rulermightier than the OrthodoxTsar."32 As much could be said of Ivan Susanin (and
3)In The Concise Ox.ford History (London:Oxford UniversityPress, 1979). 31Quotedin Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1959), p. 122. 32Quotedin Riasanovsky, p. 125.
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indeed is said of him in the choralapotheosisat the end of Glinka'sopera)." No wonderA Lifefor the Tsar became a nationalinstitution,the obligatory opener to every season at the ImperialTheatersof Moscow and St. Petersand administered burg, which were the legal propertyof the Tsar, supported by the Ministry of the ImperialHousehold. Nor is it any wonder that the original libretto, by Baron G.V. Rozen, the secretaryto the heir apparent For (the futureAlexander II) had to be changed for Soviet consumption.33 to Soviet Communists.It was it is a concoction that was not just abhorrent abhorrentto nineteenth-century bourgeois liberals, too, like Vladimir Stato you and me. This, then, was the sov.34 I dare say it would be abhorrent beginningof the Russiannationalschool in music. It was bornin the context
of a state ideology in which nationality was understood in patriotic and
dynastic terms linked with the defense of serfdom. It was in connection with Official Nationalitythat Nikolai orderedthat Russian replace French as the official language at court functions, and a great program of Russification-the spreading of Russian language and customs in the non-Russianareasof the Empire-got underway. The mystical identificationof the Russian languagewith the "spirit and characterof the people," an idea borrowedfrom the English and GermanRomantics, for whom it served quite differentends, became a dominanttheme among the Official Nationalists. "Language is the invisible image of the entire people, its physiognomy," wrote StepanShevyriov, Glinka'scontemporary and Russia's leading literaryscholar of the period.35Much the same could be said of musical vernaculars.Glinka's epoch-makingaccomplishment, the raising of Russian popularmusic "to the level of tragedy," as Prince was carriedout in VladimirOdoevsky put it at the time of the premiere,36 the name of political reaction. Official Nationality should not be confused, however, with Slavophilism. Both Slavophiles and Westernizerswere opponents of the state ideology, and the tendency to view the various political camps of Russian music in termsof this classic dualismof Russianintellectualhistory, tempting though it may be in its simplicity, is one of the most reductive and distortingerrorscommonly committedby modernscholarswho write about
was the ideaof nationalityembodiedin Glinka'sopera, 33Toappreciatehow completely monarchist consider the quatrainon which the choral finale reaches its culmination: Glory, glory to you, our RussianTsar! Slav'sia, slav'sia nash Russkii Tsar'! Our Sovereign, given us by God! Gospodom danny nam Tsar' Gosudar'! Da budet bessmertentvoi Tsarskii rod! May your royal line be immortal! Da im blagodenstvuetRusskii narod! May the Russianpeople prosperthroughit! 34Hewrote to Balakirev (21 March 1861): "Perhaps no one has ever done a greaterdishonor to our people than Glinka, who by means of his great music displayed as a Russianhero for all time that base groveller Susanin, with his canine loyalty, his hen-like stupidity ["owl-like" in the original Russian] . . . the apotheosis of the Russian bruteof the Muscovite strainand of the Muscovite era.. . .But there will come a time when . . . Russia will cling ardentlyto Glinka but will recoil from this work, at the time of whose creation his friends and advisers, good-for-nothingsof Nicholas l's time, insinuated their base poison into his talent" (A.S. Liapunova, ed., M.A. Balakirev i V. V. Stasov: Perepiska I [Moscow: Muzyka, 1970], 130). 35Riasanovsky,p. 133. oasledie (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956), p. 119. 36V.F. Odoevsky, Muzvkal'no-literaturnoe
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Russian music in the nineteenth century.37For one thing, the terms are most properly applied to Glinka's period, not to that of Chaikovsky and the Five. More important,however, the terms are quite beside the point when comparingcomposers or critics of art music, for merely engaging in such activities made one a "Westernizer," however great or small one's versus Westernizeris in essence a questionof attitudestowardinstitutions, and once one is writing, say, for the symphony orchestra, the basic acof Russia has ceptance of and commitmentto the musical Europeanization Russia been made. To find real musical Slavophiles in nineteenth-century one would have to look to the ranks of musical folklorists and ethnographers, who had only a very limited impact on the forms and practices of Russian art music before the twentiethcentury. (I am thinkinghere not of such composer-collectors as Balakirevor Villebois, but of scholarcollectors such as Melgunov, Palchikov and Linyova.38)Even here, of course, we find ironies, as everywhere. A figure much honored in the Soviet Union today is the balalaikavirtuoso Vasily Andreyev (1861-1918), after whom variousfolk instrumental ensembles have been named. Andreyevdid much for the spreadof the balalaikain his time, and did much to raise the level of playing on it to a "professional" level. But is this not already an amof these terms to any discussion of music is alreadyapparentin the self37Theinappropriateness created paradox to which writers who use them love to call attention. Thus, for example, Richard musicalfactions] AnthonyLeonard:'All this [i.e., the rivalryof the variousMoscow and St. Petersburg was another phase of the familiar issue which has so often split Russian intellectuals-Slavophiles versus admirers difference. Slavophileswere usually of Westernculture.But here therewas an important looked upon as the conservatives, . . . while the Westernerswere considered cosmopolitan liberals. But in the music life of the eighteen-sixtiesthe opposite was true. The nationalistswere the progressives, and the cosmopolitan Westernerswere the conservatives" (A History of Russian Music [New York: Macmillan, 1956], p. 73). Confrontedwith Chaikovsky's residence in Moscow and the kuchka's location in St. Petersburg,Leonardis forced to compoundthe paradoxto the point of uttermeaninglessness: "Even the cities became switched around,addingto the complication.Petersburg,itself a newlymanufactured imitationof the West, became the centre of nationalismin music; while the old conservative ultra-RussianMoscow became the seat of a cosmopolitaneclecticism." There have lately been some welcome correctives. RobertRidenourhas publisheda full-lengthstudy of St. Petersburg musical politics in the nineteenthcentury which concludes with the salutaryreflection that that ferment is best viewed as a whole, and that its signal accomplishmentwas that it "expanded the scope and resources of musical life in the Russian capital, forced the public and the governmentto take Russian music seriously, and made music a respectable,legally recognizedprofession." The authorpointedlyremarks that "this, . . .ratherthanany supposedreflectionof the conflict between Slavophilesand Westemizers, is the most significantpartof the story of the musical rivalriesof the 1860s for a general understanding of nineteenth-century Russianhistory" (Nationalism,Modernismand Personal Rivalryin 19th-CenturY Russian Music [Ann Arbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1981], pp. 234-35). Even more forthrightly,Richard Hoops has asserted that "the designation 'Slavophile' has no direct application to Russian music" ("Musorgsky and the Populist Age," in MusorgskvIn Memoriam,p. 272), perhapsan overstatement of the case, but an exaggerationin a good cause. Both Hoops and Ridenour,it is perhapsworthpointing out, are culturalhistoriansratherthan musicologists. 38Thesewere the collectors who, beginningin the late 1870s, tried to make accuratetranscriptions of Russian polyphonic folk-singing. Their work was received with hostility by all conservatorymusicians, whose ranksby then included Rimsky-Korsakov.ElsewhereI have tried to show that Linyova's work, the most accuratebecause she was the first Russian folklorist to use the phonographas field equipment, had a direct influence on Stravinsky. See "From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters," in JannPasler, ed., Stravinsky: CentennialStudies(Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, forthcoming).
commitment to cultivating a "style russe." For the question of Slavophile
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biguous aim? And all the more ambiguousdo his activities look when we the constructionof the modern balanote the way Andreyev standardized laika, creating a so-called "concert" instrumentin six sizes out of which he formed an orchestra,for which he composed waltzes and even arranged folklorismpioneeredby Andreyevis pursuedwith a vengeance in the USSR today, with its "orchestras of folk instruments," for which Soviet composers (notably Sergei Vasilenko), have writtensymphoniesand concertos. Nonetheless there was one issue that did occasion a genuine Slavophile/Westernizersplit among Russian musicians in the nineteenthcentury because it was preeminently an issue of institutions. And that was the founding by Anton Rubinsteinof Russia's first conservatoryof music in 1862. But even here the split was not so much over the questionof nationof Russian musical life alism as it was over that of the professionalization under the aegis of a baptized Jew, who was using the Conservatoryas a way of advancing his own social standing and that of his fellow professionals through the instrumentalityof an officially recognized course of title ("Free Artist," trainingat the end of which one received a bureaucratic the same degree as was granted by the ImperialAcademy of Fine Arts) equivalent to a mid-range civil-service rank. This entitled the bearer to various privileges both pecuniaryand social, the latter including the right form of to live in big cities, the right to a respectfulsecond-person-plural addressfrom social superiors,and the like.40 The conservatorymovement had originatedin the French Revolution and had been carriedthence to Germany.The St. Petersburg Conservatory was incidentallyby no means the last to be founded in Europe. It was only twenty years younger than the Leipzig Conservatory,and was ten years older than the conservatoryin Weimar, Liszt's city. Opposition to conservatories,by no means confined to Russia, came largely from those who objected to their levelling institutionalcharacter.In Russia, the most hysterical opponent of this spreadingplague was Stasov, whom I describeda little earlier as a bourgeois liberal. He, too, was large and contained multitudes. He published an article in the St. PetersburgnewspaperNorthern Bee-one of Russia's most reactionary sheets, which had been a stronghold of Official Nationality-in which he sounded off like a particularlyshrill and bilious Slavophile. "The time has come," he proclaimed, "to stop foreign institutionsto our country and to give some thought transplanting to what would really be beneficial and suitableto our soil and our national character. The experience of Europe shows that while the lower schools which confine themselves to teaching the rudimentsof music are useful, the higher schools, academies and conservatoriesare harmful. Is this experience to be lost on us? Must we stubbornlyape what is done in other
39MariaTenisheva, Vpechatleniia moei zhizni, (Paris: Russkoe Istorikogenealoegichesko-Obshchestvo vo Frantsii, 1933), p. 294. 4?Forsome details on the social standingof musicians before and after the establishmentof the conservatory, see Ridenour, ChapterII.
the Peer Gynt suite, along with selections from Carmen.39 The spurious
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places only in order that later we may have the pleasureof boasting about the vast number of teachers and classes we have, the meaningless distribution of awardsand prizes, mountingpiles of worthlesscompositionsand crowds of mediocre musicians?"41This was a fairly obscurantistposition, needless to say. It came, however, from the side that in conventionalhistoriographyis labelled "progressive," and from the writer whose views have been turnedto dogma in the Soviet Union, and who, throughdisciples like Michel Calvocoressi and Rosa Newmarch, set the tone for Western historiansof Russian music, too. You see, then, what I mean when I say that revision is overdue. For a start, we need to insist on the fundamental point that the line dividing the in Russian music had virtuallynothingto do with camps nineteenth-century nationalism. What divided Stasov from Rubinstein and Musorgsky from Chaikovskyhad to do, rather,with professionaleducationand professional routine. Rejection of the West per se was part of no one's program.This is made especially clear by Cesar Cui in a memoirhe wrote in 1909 on the very early days of the "mighty kuchka": We formed a close-knit circle of young composers. And since there was nowhere to study (the Conservatorydidn't exist) our self-education began. It consisted of playing througheverything thathad been writtenby all the greatestcomposers, and all works were subjectedto criticism and analysis in all their technical and creative aspects. We were young and our judgmentswere harsh. We were very disrespectful in our attitude toward Mozart and Mendelssohn;to the latterwe opposed Schumann,who was then ignored by everyone. We were very enthusiasticabout Liszt and Berlioz. We worshipped Chopinand Glinka.We carriedon heated debates (in the course of which we would down as many as four or five glasses of tea with jam), we discussed musical form, programmusic, vocal music and especially operaticform.42 What is being describedhere is not a group of musical nationalistsor patriots, but a "Davidsbund," to use Schumann'sword-a cabal of idealistic progressivesopposing authority,on the one hand, and philistinism, on the other. Except for Glinka all the objects of their venerationwere located to the west of Russia-and why not? Glinka was at this point the only Russian to venerate, precisely because he alone was on a level with the Europeans. Nor was Cui describing an early attitude that grew into the kuchka'sreputedchauvinisticnationalismas the groupmatured.When Rosa Newmarch first met Balakirev in 1901 (Stasov introducedthem), he sat down at the piano to play her a kind of profession de foi in tones. What did he choose to play? Beethoven's Appassionata, Chopin's B-minor sonata, and Schumann's G-minor.43When one knows his music well, it is
41VladimirStasov, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 83. 42"Pervyekompozitorskieshagi Ts. A. Kiui," in Cui, Izbrannvestat'i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1952), p. 544. 43RosaNewmarch, The Russian Opera (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., n. d. [1914]), p. 200.
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clear that the role of these models in the formationof Balakirev's musical technique and style was at least as fundamentalas anything national or native.44 Among the kuchkists only Musorgskyoccasionally sounds a bit xenophobicin his letters, with theirrailleryagainst "Germanizing," "Teutonic cud-chewing," "Germantransitions," and the like.45 He does come on at times like a national liberatorout to free his countryfrom an imperialistic yoke. But it was really academic Formenlehreat which he railed, and this was associated in his mind with Germanmusic mainly because of the Germanicstaff at Rubinstein'sconservatory. It was the Conservatory,from which they felt alienatedand excluded, that the kuchkistshated, not "the West." The feeling, on the partof these autodidactsand mavericks, that the professionalestablishment(which also included the Italian Opera that had been set up in St. Petersburgin 1843) was inimical to their interests, and thereforeto be opposed, is something they had in common, after all, with the original Davidsbiindlerand with their somewhat later Americancounterparts.And the frustrations they felt in confrontingwhat they perceived as anti-national prejudiceon the partof the professionalestablishmentand its wealthy and aristocratic backerswere similar to those experiencedby many Americancomposersand conductors in the early twentiethcentury. Like them, the Russiansof the late nineteenth century tended to fight a discriminatorystatus quo by appealingto patriotism-and to baser sentiments as well. For while both sides of the Concould claim to be motivatedby patriotism and national servatorycontroversy pride,46 only one side was racist-and this, too, is unfortunatelya large part of what motivated musical nationalism in Russia, and not only in Russia, and continues to motivate it to the presentday. Serov used to call
Rubinstein's conservatory the "fortep' iannaia sinagoga"-the piano
synagogue47-and the Russian Musical Society that supportedit the "Yid Musikverein." He referredto its directoras one who "jabbersand scribbles in three or four languagesequally illiterately, since all these languages are foreign to him,"48 as to all Jews. And surely the Black Hundredsboasted no greateranti-Semitethan Balakirev, the one memberof the Mighty Five who might with a certain justice be termed a Slavophile, at least in the later, less active phases of his career. Balakirev, in fact, actually founded
4See my "How the Acorn Took Root: A Tale of Russia." 19th CenturyMusic VI (1983), 189212. 45See, for example, his letter to Rimsky-Korsakovof 15 August 1868. in Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson, The MusorgskyReader (New York: Norton, 1947), pp. 119-21. 46Rubinstein spelled out his patrioticmotives and his Peter-the-Great-like programfor the musical salvation of his homelandin an article on Russiancomposerswhich he publishedin the Vienna Blatter fiir Theater, Musik und Kunst in 1855. See "How the Acorn Took Root," p. 194. 47See Ridenour, p.92. The phrase takes on an added resonance from the fact that in Russian, p'iannaia by itself means "drunk." Despite the fact that he had a Jewish grandmother(or perhaps because of it), Serov was always on the lookout for Jewish targets. Thus despite this admirationand referred to the latteras a "Yid charlatan"(zhid-sharlatan). emulationof Meyerbeer,he characteristically See his letter to Stasov of 28 October 1846, as cited in V.S. Baskin, A.N. Serov (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1890), p. 28. For evidence of Glinka's Anti-Semitismsee Ridenour.p 83. 48Letterto Feofil Tolstoy, cited in Russkaia starina XVII (1874), p. 364.
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a folk-school of sorts, such as Stasov had described in opposition to the conservatory-the so-called Free Music School, where only "rudiments" were taught, where the whole faculty was ethnically Russian, and where no Jew could apply for instruction.49 So Russian musical nationalism,"Official" or otherwise, had its dark side. Later in the nineteenthcenturythe patronageof Russian national art passed from the court to jingoistic merchantpatronslike Pavel Tretiakov in painting, Savva Mamontovin theater,and, in music, MitrofanBeliaev, underwhose aegis the nationaland the professionalwere finally wedded in Liadov a rigidly sectarianguild of composersheadedby Rimsky-Korsakov, and Glazunov.50One of the more curious texts in the history of Russian music is Glazunov's memoir of his first meeting with Chaikovsky.51The of Russianmusic scion of the supposedlyprogressiveand nationaltraditions to the most celebratedmemberof the first class to recalled his introduction graduatefrom Rubinstein'sconservatoryas one of the great liberatingexperiences of his life. These, then, are a few of the ironies and paradoxesthat need to be sorted out in revising the history of Russian music. And that revision, for obvious reasons, will have to take place in the West (one hopes, for nationalistic reasons of one's own, that it will take place in America), and not in Russia. One also looks forwardto ever-increasingsophisticationin the analysis of Russian music, both as a way of accounting for its Russianness-no simple matterof folkishness after all, as we have seen-and as a way of viewing it, as Stravinskywould say, "simply as music," in a larger Europeancontext. In particular,one looks forwardto the development of analyticaltechniquesthat do not condemn non-Germanmusic by their very premises.52Thanksto the pioneeringwork of GordonMcQuere and the other contributors to his survey of Russian TheoreticalThoughtin
49Anti-Semitism remainsa featureof Soviet musical nationalism,as exemplified by what is known as the novaia fol'kloristicheskaia volna ("new folkloristic wave"), a government-sanctioned avantgardismof sorts that drawsconspicuouslyon folk themes in a mannerreminiscent,say, of Stravinsky's Les Noces. This is offered as a Russian"answer" to the assimilationof Westernavant-garde techniques, notably serial ones, which are taintedby the Jewishnessof Schoenberg.I am gratefulto Prof. Vladimir Frumkin of OberlinCollege for bringingthis manifestation to my attention.For a reminderthatAmerican musical nationalism also had a politically conservative and anti-Semitic phase, see Daniel Gregory Mason, Tune In, America:A Study of Our ComingMusical Independence(New York: Knopf, 1931), which contains a fairly heatedjeremiad (pp. 158-62) on "the insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity." 5'See MontaguMontagu-Nathan, "Belaiev-Maecenas of RussianMusic," Musical QuarterlyIV (1918), 450-65. 51Thearticle, entitled Moe znakomstio s Chaikovskim ("My AcquaintanceWith Chaikovsky"), was written in 1923 for inclusion in a book of Chaikovskymemorabiliaedited by Asafiev. It may be found in V.V. Protopopov,ed., Vospoininaniia o P.I. Chaikovskom (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), pp. 4651. 52ObviouslyI have Schenkerforemost in mind, but Allen Forte's "set-theoretic" method, which, as I have noted elsewhere, "is so thoroughlykeyed to the methods Schoenbergemployed in 'working with the tones of a motive' that a Forte analysis of any composer is in effect a comparisonof that composer's work with Schoenberg's," can also become invidious. See my review of Forte's The Harmonic Organizationof the Rite of Spring in CurrentMusicology 28 (1979), 114-29.
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music outside of Russiathat has been influential on twentieth-century Scriabin and Stravinsky, above all-have begun to be elucidatedfor musicians outside of Russia. But just as we would not want to limit our of the culturalhistoryof Russianmusic to what we may find understanding in Keldysh or Asafiev, illuminatingas their work might occasionally be, of it to apwe need not limit our theoreticaland analyticalunderstanding plications of or derivationsfrom the work of Yavorsky or Dernova.54We need to set Asafiev and Yavorsky in their own culturalcontext, just as we need to set the Soviet period into a similarhistoricalperspective. We need a musical counterpartto Vera Dunham's enlightening book on Stalinist fiction,55 which documentsand explains the weird resurgenceof bourgeois values at their most philistine-what in Russian is called meshchanstvothat took place in Soviet arts policy in the 1930s, and which formed the of what is knownas Socialist Realism. And we need a musical underpinning to Camilla Gray's classic survey of the Russian artistic avantcounterpart gardein the decades immediatelyprecedingand following the Revolution.56 Neither of these books, again obviously, is going to be writtenin Russia. As Americanscholars, trainedin a skepticaland "problems-oriented" traditionof humanistic research, and ever more proficient in the once so arcaneRussian language, begin to tackle these and the thousandotherquestions and projects I have not begun to foresee, I look forwardto a much lessened, or at the very least, a much more critical, reliance on the Soviet secondaryliterature.I feel confidentthatwe are past the days when a Soviet musicologist had merely to say so for Americanstudentsof Musorgskyto accept the latter uncriticallyas a musical narodnik(radicalpopulist),57or when historiansof Soviet music would transcribetheir data directly from the pages of Sovetskaia muzykaor the informationbulletins of the Union of Soviet Composers.58The presence of a numberof distinguishedemigre
53AnnArbor:UMI ResearchPress, 1983. The contents include "Russian Music Theory: A Conspectus" (Ellon D. Carpenter);"Sources of Russian Chant Theory" (Nicholas Schidlovsky), "The Theories of Boleslav Yavorsky" (Gordon D. McQuere), "VarvaraDemova's System of Analysis of the Music of Skryabin"(Roy J. Guenther),"Boris Asafiev andMusical Formas a Process" (McQuere) and a final chapterby Carpenteron several theoristsassociated with the Moscow Conservatory.Also of considerableinterestis Jay Reise's "Late Skriabin:Some PrinciplesBehindthe Style," 19thCentury Music VI (1983), 220-31. 54An outstandingcontributionof an inferentialnature, which, however, can be elaboratelysupported by historicalevidence, is Pieter C. van den Toom, The Music of Igor Stravinsky(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). For the historical support, see my "Chernomorto kashchei:Harmonic Sorcery;or, Stravinsky's 'Angle'," Journal of the AmericanMusicological Society XXXVIII (1985).
551n Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Music,53 the theoretical premises underlying a great deal of Russian music
1976).
56The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970). A good start has been made by Detlef Gojowy in Neue sowjetische Musik der 20-er Jahre (Laaber, 1980). 57I have in mind particularlyRichardHoops, "Musorgsky and the Populist Age" (MusorgskyIn
and factitious Memoriam,pp. 271-306), which derives a crucial argumentwholly from an unsupported article to M.P. Musorgsky:Literaturnoenasledie. II case made by Mikhail Pekelis in the introductory (Moscow: Muzyka, 1972), 5-24, esp. 26-30.
58See Laurel E. Fay, review of Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (enlarged edition), Slavic Review XLIII (1984), 359.
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scholars in our midst should certainlystimulateactivity in our field, which in any case is a growing one. It is thankfullyno longer front-pagenews when a graduatestudentin an Americanmusic department knows Russian and contemplatesa specialty in Russian music. I am optimistic enough to think that perhapsthe best answer to the question, "What is to be done," may simply be "Let things continue;they're going well."
Columbia University

Some Thoughts On The History and Historiography of Russian Music

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Some Thoughts On The History and Historiography of Russian Music

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Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music Author(s): Richard Taruskin Source: The Journal of Musicology,

THE JOURNALOF MUSICOLOGY