Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T23:08:14.957Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Tsarist Russia and the Musical World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2022

Tamsin Alexander*
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths, University of London
Rutger Helmers*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam

Extract

The articles in this issue address and illustrate elements that are essential for furthering the current understanding of Russia's embeddedness in the international musical culture of the long nineteenth century: the exchange of musicians and repertoires; the social and political conditions in which these exchanges took place; the range of mediators, from aristocratic patrons to musical professionals; the methods of movement; and the ways in which Russia was imagined and experienced by foreigners.

Type
Introduction
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The articles in this issue follow the transliteration principles outlined by Gerald Abraham for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), including the spelling of proper names, which may deviate from strict transliteration for the sake of simplification (particularly in the suffix -sky) or established Anglophone practice. Spelling has been updated to reflect modern Russian practice. Until 1917, Russia used the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which in the nineteenth century was 12 days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar used in Western Europe (and 11 in the eighteenth). The dates are given in either old or new style depending on the local context; where there is room for doubt, the calendar used has been indicated with either ‘O.S.’ or ‘N.S.’.

References

1 Ridenour, Robert C., Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981): 5Google Scholar.

2 Richard Taruskin coined the term ‘Diaghilevshchina’ to describe the phenomenon of marketing Russia to the West as exotic or barbaric in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of Works through Mavra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 1016, and he has discussed the issue extensively since, including in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): xi–xviii, and ‘Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists’, 19th-Century Music 35/2 (2011): 143–4.

3 This tendency to focus on works by native composers can be traced back to the very beginnings of Russian music historiography in the late nineteenth century (e.g. Cui, César, La musique en Russie (Paris: Fischbacher, 1881): 11–14, 19Google Scholar), and is of course still common in conventional music histories (e.g. Maes, Francis, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. Pomerans, Arnold J. and Pomerans, Erica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar). A notable early exception can be found in Polikarp Perepelitsïn, Istoriya muzïki v Rossii (St Petersburg: M.O. Vol'f, 1888), the title of which (History of Music in Russia) is significant enough: Perepelitsïn does not focus exclusively on the Russian national canon and discusses a great number of performers active in Russia (both native and foreign). In recent Russian scholarship, the recognition of the need to document and understand the local musical world in its broadest sense is exemplified most clearly in the encyclopaedic project Muzïkal'nïy Peterburg. Volumes 10 and 11, edited by I.F. Petrovskaya (St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2009–2010), which are dedicated to the nineteenth century, have entries for a variety of actors, including performers, institutions and patrons, both native and non-native.

4 For the notion of methodological nationalism, see for example Wimmer, Andreas and Schiller, Nina Glick, ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, The International Migration Review 37/3 (2003): 576610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See in particular: Taruskin, Richard, ‘Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music’, Journal of Musicology 3/4 (1984): 321–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, where the term ‘fetishized difference’ is introduced on page 48; and Frolova-Walker, Marina, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

6 Taruskin, ‘Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists’, 133.

7 See for example Valery Vasil'yevich Smirnov, ed., Russko-frantsuzskiye muzïkal'nïye svyazi: sbornik nauchnikh statey (St Petersburg: Sanktpeterburgskaya Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya im. N. A. Rimskogo-Korsakova, 2003); Alla Konstantinovna Kyonigsberg, ed., Russko-ital'yanskiye muzïkal'nïye svyazi: sbornik statey (St Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Politekhnicheskogo Universiteta, 2004); and Kyonigsberg, ed., Russko-nemetskiye muzïkal'nïye svyazi: sbornik statey (St Petersburg: Sanktpeterburgskaya Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya im. N. A. Rimskogo-Korsakova, 2006); Petrushanskaya, Yelena Mikhaylovna, Mikhail Glinka i Italiya: zagadki zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2009)Google Scholar.

8 On Russian influences on French music, see André Schaeffner, ‘Debussy et ses rapports avec la musique russe’, in Musique russe: études réunies, ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky (Paris: Bibliothèque internationale de musicologie, 1953): 95–138; Gasparov, Boris, Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005): 185–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howat, Roy, ‘Russian Imprints in Debussy's Music’, in Rethinking Debussy, ed. Antokoletz, Elliott and Wheeldon, Marianne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 31–51Google Scholar; and Bauer, Steven, ‘Ravel's “Russian” Period: Octatonicism in His Early Works, 1893–1908’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/3 (1999): 531–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gareth Thomas has made similar claims for English composers in his ‘The Impact of Russian Music in England 1893–1929’ (PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2005): 131–261.

9 Petrushanskaya, Mikhail Glinka i Italiya; Daniil Zavlunov, ‘M. I. Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836): An Historical and Analytic-Theoretical Study’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2010); Helmers, Rutger, Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014): 20–49Google Scholar; Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘Against Germanic Reasoning: The Search for a Russian Style of Musical Argumentation’, in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800–1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001): 104–22.

10 Wagner's Russian reception, for example, is explored in Muir, Stephen and Belina-Johnson, Anastasia, eds., Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar, Bartlett, Rosamund, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Salmi, Hannu, Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See, for example, Helmers, Not Russian Enough?, 10–11.

12 Elaine Brody, ‘Russians in Paris (1889–1914)’, in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984): 157–83. Another source that focuses on retrieving reviews of Russian composers in the foreign press is Thomas Kohlhase's compilation, ‘An Tschaikowsky scheiden sich die Geister’: Textzeugnisse der Čajkovskij-Rezeption, 1866–2004, Čajkovskij-Studien 10 (Mainz: Schott, 2006).

13 See, for instance, Vincenzina Ottomano, ‘Dialogo tra il Belgio e la Russia: Il prigioniero del Caucaso di César Cui a Liegi’, Revue belge de musicologie/Belgisch tijdschrift voor muziekwetenschap 66 (2012): 49–60; ‘Die erste Rezeption russischer Opern in Italien: Ein Leben für den Zaren in Mailand’, Studia Musicologica 52 (2011): 143–56; Braun, Lucinde, ‘La terre promise’: Frankreich im Leben und Schaffen Čajkovskijs, Čajkovskij-Studien 15 (Mainz: Schott, 2014): 47–168Google Scholar; and Alexander, Tamsin, ‘Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin in Britain, 1892–1906: Slipping between High and Low, Future and Past, East and West’, Musiktheorie 3 (2015): 223–34Google Scholar.

14 Rebecca Beasley and Philip Bullock, ‘Introduction: Against Influence: On Writing about Russian Culture in Britain’, in Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, ed. Beasley and Bullock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 7.

15 As recorded by Tchaikovsky in a letter to Nadezhda von Meck from Vienna on 27 November (9 December) 1877. Tchaikovsky, P.I. and Meck, N.F. von, Perepiska (Moscow: Zakharov, 2004): vol. 1: 123Google Scholar; translated in Rosa Newmarch, ed., The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (London: John Lane, 1906): 241. Discussions of assumptions of barbarism in Russian music are exemplified by Stephen Muir's work on the reception of Rimsky-Korsakov in Britain. See his ‘“About as Wild and Barbaric as Well Could be Imagined…”: The Critical Reception of Rimsky-Korsakov in Nineteenth-Century England’, Music & Letters 93/4 (2012): 513–42.

16 Bartlett, Wagner and Russia; Galina Petrova and Lucinde Braun, ‘Berlioz und Russland – neue Ansätze, neue Quellen’, Die Musikforschung 69/3 (2016): 209–30.

17 See Ferraguto, Mark, ‘Beethoven à la moujik: Russianness and Learned Style in the “Razumovsky” String Quartets’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 67/1 (2014): 77124CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Representing Russia: Luxury and Diplomacy at the Razumovsky Palace in Vienna, 1803–1815’, Music & Letters 97/3 (2016): 383–408; Jean Gribenski, ‘Pauline Viardot et l'apparition des musiques russe et finlandaise à Paris, à la fin du XIXe siècle’, ‘L'esprit français’ und die Musik Europas: Entstehung, Einfluss und Grenzen einer ästhetischen Doktrin (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007): 654–61; Tamsin Alexander, ‘Decentralising via Russia: Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in Nice, 1890’, Cambridge Opera Journal 27/1 (2015): 35–62; Bullock, Philip, Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)Google Scholar.

18 Philip Bullock, ‘Tsar's Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895–1926’, in Russia in Britain, 113–28.

19 Taruskin has identified the same irony in his own Defining Russia Musically, observing that ‘that book, of course, did not succeed in shaking the baleful question [“How Russian is it?”] because it, too, was almost wholly devoted to music by Russian composers and therefore, at best, merely added a new wing to the ghetto’. Taruskin, ‘Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists’, 132.

20 Clifford, James, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (New York: Routledge, 1992): 101Google Scholar.

21 Greenblatt, Stephen et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 250Google Scholar.