The Complete Sacred Choral Works (review)

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The Complete Sacred Choral Works. Vladimir Morosan, editor-in-chief; introduction by Marina Rakhmanova. (Monuments of Russian Sacred Music, ser. 3.) Madison, Conn.: Musica Russica, c1999. [2 plates; contents, p. xi-xiv; from the editor in Rus., Eng., p. xvii; introd, p. xix-xli; score, 302 p.; crit. notes, p. 307-26; unison chants used by Rimsky-Korsakov, p. 329-52; transliteration system, 2 p. Cloth. ISBN 0-9629460-9-5. $68.]

Though the seminal Russian composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries composed sacred music, much remains unknown about the historical sources and contexts of their work. Research has been hampered by a paucity of data on performance practices, the indecipherability of the notation of the oldest sources, limited funding, and, until a decade ago, restricted access to archival collections (the Soviet government curtailed research into the Orthodox Church). Regrettably, much of the research that has been conducted is unduly narrow, focusing largely on problems of notation. Political and social change in Russia has provided music historians and theorists with unprecedented research possibilities. These in turn have revealed a pressing need for critical editions of the music of composers associated with the Imperial Chapel in Saint Petersburg, the Synodal Choir in Moscow, and the liturgical institutions that preceded their founding.

One positive development in this direction has been Monuments of Russian Sacred Music, a decade-old series of bilingual Russian-English editions published by Musica Russica under the partial sponsorship of the Russian Choral Society of New York. The volume under review follows the publication in 1991 (ser. 1, vol. 1) of a collection of sacred pieces (One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music, 988-1988) dating from between 988 (the year that the Christian faith and its cultural attachments were imported to Kievan Rus' from Byzantium) and 1917 (the year of the Russian Revolution); a gathering of choral works by the baroque composer Vasily Polikarpovich Titov (1995, ser. 13, vol. 1); and editions of the sacred music of Sergey Rachmaninoff (1995, ser. 9, vol. 1-2) and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1996. ser 2, vol. 1-3). This series, along with the series Russkaia dukhovnaia muzyka v dokumentakh i materialakh (Russian Sacred Music in Documents and Materials, founded in 1998 by the State Institute for Art Research in Moscow) and the serialized publication of writings by the nineteenth-century chant scholar Dmitry Vasil'yevich Razumovsky in the journal Muzykal'naia akademiia (Musical Academy, 1992-), represents a revival of the discipline of (what the Russian chant authority Johann von Gardner dubbed) "liturgical musicology," which flourished in the conservatories and seminaries of fin de siècle Russia (see Gardner's seminal Bogosluzhebnoe penie russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi [Liturgical Singing of the Russian Orthodox Church], 2 vols. [Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery, 1978-82]; and Vladimir Morosan's translation published as Russian Church Singing, 2 vols. [Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980-2000]). Morosan, founder of Musica Russica, and Marina Rakhmanova, deputy director of the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, are leading figures in this revival.

This new volume of the complete sacred choral works of Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov includes full-score critical editions of the three collections of sacred music that the composer created during his rather unhappy tenure in the 1880s at the Imperial Chapel. (The unhappiness stemmed from disputes with Mily Balakirev over issues of musical style and religious faith.) The first collection, dating from 1883, includes eight four-voice compositions from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, while the second (1886) features six four-voice arrangements of chants intended for the following events on the Russian Orthodox calendar: the Divine Liturgy of Great and Holy Saturday, Sunday Communion, the first three days of Holy Week at the service of Bridegroom Matins, and Resurrectional Matins of the three Sundays preceding Great Lent. The third collection includes twenty-three items, several appearing to be preparatory studies for pieces in the first and second collections. Thus, it comprises...