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

Boris Gasparov begins his book with the assertion that Russian music is "subservient" to literature (p. xxi). Music acts to express and affirm literature's "intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings" (p. xvii). In light of this posited hierarchy, it may come as a surprise that Gasparov wants "to view music as a formative cultural force, to show cultural trends and patterns in the characteristic features of the music" (p. xxi). In this book he attempts to explore the relationship between Russian music and its message. To this end, he offers a reading of six musical works, covering a hundred-year period beginning in the late 1830s, revealing how each work reflects the cultural and social trends of its time.

What gives Russian music its unique identity? In chapter 1, "Sound and Discourse: On Russian National Musical Style," Gasparov sets up and explores the dichotomy between European (read: German) and Russian musical traditions, the former personified by Wagner, the latter by Musorgsky. Russian musical language, according to him, seems to have a single meta-source, "the Russian chorale," though this genre remains undefined. Gasparov argues that the parallel European and Russian lines of development offer "alternative path[s] into modernity." The Wagnerian line leads to "the expressionist style" and, eventually, atonality; the "Russian chorale" line, shedding its garbs of national uniqueness and assuming universality, culminates in "the loosening of harmonic functions by Debussy ... the extending of tonal harmonies by Shostakovich, and ... Stravinsky's bitonality" (pp. 7–8). As these quotations attest, the author's view of the development of music and its history is rather simplistic and conventional.

In chapter 2, Gasparov traces Glinka's transformation between the premiere of A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Ludmila (1842). The triumph of the composer's first opera and the prospects that followed eventually gave way to disappointment with his career, problems in personal life, and discontent with creative plans, leading him to abandon high aristocratic society for the "brotherhood" of close friends by 1840 (pp. 23–24, 27). To Gasparov, Glinka's personal crisis reflects the larger crisis experienced by Russian society during the reign of Nicholas. The 1830s, with their "conflation of populism, Romantic exaltation, and ardent patriotism" (p. 27) realized at the level of the "imperial 'national idea'" (p. 54), yielded to the 1840s—"an epoch that turned out to be introspective, self-searching, withdrawn into a private space, creating a culture of tight friendly circles" (p. 55). Nothing reflected this cultural transformation better than Glinka's Ruslan.

Glinka's second opera was conceived in the late 1830s in "the vein of imperial 'omnihumanity'" and promised "to conquer the world by absorbing it" (p. 35). But by 1840, having composed some of the most diverse and colorful pages of his score, Glinka simply "turns his back on [the] deceptive magnificence" (p. 44) of this cosmopolitanism, as he does (symbolically) on the decade of the 1830s. Gasparov believes that the characters in the opera mirror this change in attitude. Unlike their counterparts in Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmila, Glinka's characters are transformed by their experiences—they undergo a musical metamorphosis from being stock operatic characters to flesh-and-blood people. Gasparov finds little that is specifically Russian in the music of Ludmila's cavatina. Because of its Italianate sound, her "personality [is] thoroughly polished and conventionalized" (p. 45). However, when we meet Ludmila again in the fourth act, her music is no longer Italianate or "fully operatic;" it is now the music of the romans—a Russian high-art song genre that "presented a fusion of generic sentimental features with some nationalistic musical element" and formed part of domestic music making (p. 49). The romans transforms Ludmila from an operatic type into a real, intimate human being. Gasparov develops this idea further and illustrates how Ruslan and other main characters undergo a...