The Life and Artistry of Maria Olenina-d'Alheim by Alexander Tumanov (review)

312 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Alexander Tumanov. The Life and Artistry of Maria Olenina-d=Alheim. Translated by Christopher Barnes University of Alberta Press. xxii, 360. $34.95 Most biographies describe history, but a rare few collapse it B and Alexander Tumanov=s is one. The subject of this fascinating study is best approached from the end. Maria Alekseevna Olenina, b 1869, studied voice in St Petersburg with Alexandra Purgold-Molas, Musorgsky=s close friend and the most gifted performer of his songs; in 1963, at age ninety-four, she was interviewed by Tumanov in Moscow. By that time Olenina-d=Alheim had outlived everyone (the best part of her life had ended in 1922, in France) and she could not remember large stretches of the twentieth century. But with the reflexes of a professional singer and the capriciously functioning memory of the very, very old, she could vividly recall details of rhythm, text, and musical interpretation from the 1880s. This volume closes with a transcription, in Russian, of taped master classes on Musorgsky=s vocal cycle >Nursery,= conducted by Olenina-d=Alheim with two young singers in the 1960s; she was transmitting advice on performance technique she had heard from an intimate of the composer himself. In the aural arts especially, this sort of continuity is thrilling. Tumanov befriended the nonagenarian singer, uncelebrated in the capital despite her legendary services to Russian song, and was given access to her unpublished archive. His decision to stitch together a chronicle of her life out of her memoirs, correspondence, and others= reminiscences was a wise one, and Christopher Barnes=s translation catches perfectly the naïvety and passionate stubbornness of the Russian text. The basics of her biography are as follows. Plucky, strong-willed, vision-impaired, Maria Olenina was born in the provinces and moved to St Petersburg in the 1880s, where her extraordinary renditions of declamatory songs by composers of the Balakirev Circle won high praise from Vladimir Stasov. In 1893 she left for Paris, where she married the writer Pierre [Pyotr] d=Alheim, her Russian-French second cousin; together they began to offer >conférences= (lecture-recitals) on Russian song and European lieder. For the next decade the d=Alheims travelled back and forth, singing for Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, stunning the Russian Symbolists Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok with their integrated programs of music and word, collaborating with Darius Milhaud, Claude Debussy, Nadia Boulanger. But only in 1908, with the founding of Dom Pesni (The House of Song) in Moscow, was Russia introduced to vocal chamber music as a complete art form. Recitals, lecture series, voice coaching, publishing efforts (a monthly bulletin), and vocal competitions were undertaken on an ambitious scale. An uncompromising foe of the large hall, Olenina-d=Alheim was also wary of the virtuoso singer, who, in her view, used the song as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement, HUMANITIES 313 ignoring both words and context. The singer, she taught, should be a conduit for the composer, whose genius could unfold more honestly in these modest genres than in the luxuriant, hyper-stimulated opera. Her repertory included German, French, and English song, in addition to folk music. But Musorgsky remained at the core. That composer was hardly remembered in Russia at the time; thanks to this couple, his fame was growing in Western Europe. In November 1918 the d=Alheims, who were French citizens, left Russia in what was part emigration, part expulsion. Pierre went slowly insane from syphilis and died in an asylum in 1922. The widowed Marie tried to revive a >Maison du Lied= in Paris, but without success (she was impractical and proud of it); her pro-Bolshevik sympathies and outspoken intelligentsial ways alienated her from the Parisian émigré community. Despite intervention from Gorky and Romain Rolland, attempts to return to Russia fell through. For forty years she hung on in Paris, giving the occasional recital (her last was in 1942, at age seventy-three), supporting herself by a tiny pension and by selling leftist newspapers on the street. She never complained about her poverty. Although she joined the French Communist party in 1945, she was not allowed to repatriate until 1959, when she...