Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture (review)

Between 1863 and 1890, Russian literature and music appear to evolve along very disparate lines. A side-by-side chronology of major works sees Chernyshevsky's polemical What Is to Be Done, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment belonging to the same decade (the 1860s) as Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, Borodin's Prince Igor (both operas left incomplete at the composers' deaths), and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. This pattern continues into the 1870s and 1880s, with Dostoevsky's disturbing novel The Brothers Karamazov sitting incongruously alongside Rimsky-Korsakov's sparkling early fairy-tale operas, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina (also left incomplete). At first glance, this looks like a clear case of a lack of social engagement on the part of Russian composers, with perhaps Musorgsky's Boris Godunov (premiere 1874) serving as the sole honourable exception. And it is at this point that Boris Gasparov invites the reader to think again: to look more closely at those operas that are so often consumed uncritically and to see that they, too, are as typical of their epoch as the weighty historical novels whose philosophical message is rather harder to miss.

There can be few who would not welcome Gasparov's stated aim: to analyse 'the relation between the voice of Russian music and its message, in a broader historical and aesthetic sense' and to 'view music as a formative cultural force' (p. xxi). This has been the thrust of some fine scholarship on Russian music over the last fifteen years, as Gasparov acknowledges, crediting Richard Taruskin (Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, 1993); Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Oxford, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, 1996); Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, 1997)), Caryl Emerson (The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge, 1999)), Laurel Fay (Shostakovich: A Life (New York, 2000)), and Rosamund Bartlett (Wagner in Russia (Cambridge, 1995)). However, buried in those innocently laudable phrases lurks a major pitfall: the assumption that there is such a thing as the 'voice of Russian music' for us to extract and analyse in the first place. As with most culturally based assumptions, it contains a grain of truth; but Gasparov's claim that this voice is unfailingly recognizable in Russian music from Glinka to Gubaidulina is stretching a point. To a non-Russian, for example, the Soviet national anthem (discussed in the Epilogue) does not sound unmistakably Russian at all; like much Soviet 'pomp' of the 1930s and 1940s, it sounds the same as other self-celebratory national music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether from England, France, Italy, or Germany.

These claims would matter less if they were not accompanied by a number of generalizations on the nature of the West's reception of Russian music that are not only easily refutable but also add nothing to Gasparov's wider arguments. His assertion that Western audiences tend to listen more uncritically to the 'cozily expressive' Russian 'voice' than they do to, say, Mahler, Sibelius, Strauss, or Schubert (or indeed almost any popular composer) cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, even for the simple reason that most of us now listen to almost all music uncritically anyway. Though Gasparov is right to note that the history of Western music and aesthetics has tended to overlook Russian composers, or at least to ghettoize them, their exclusion is by no means unique. Nor is it true that Western critics are more obsessed with the biography of Russian artists than with those of any other nation (p. xv): Shostakovich may be the current favourite, but it is not so long ago that we were similarly fascinated by Beethoven and Mozart. And when Gasparov maintains that it is only Russian composers whose biography and sexuality have been brought to bear on discussions of their music, the reader does begin to wonder if he is aware of...