A History of Russian Music (review)

Francis Maes makes it very clear from the beginning of this book that he intends to thoroughly and entirely rewrite the history of Russian music. Instead of unthinkingly copying the nationalistic discourse of the early Russian music historian Vladimir Stasov, Maes builds on research of the past decades by many Russian and non Russian musicologists to re-appraise the work of icons like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. There is no doubt that he succeeds in all respects and does so in a book that reads like a novel but still holds up against the criticism of musicologists and specialists.

The first question when writing a history of any country's music is how to define one's subject. For instance, is all music written in Russia Russian? Maes deals with this question by discussing the alleged "nature" of Russian music as it was understood by its inventors. He shows that what some ideologists identified as genuine, original, native and pure in music was either absent or totally rejected in Russian music. This is exemplified by Glinka, the so-called "Father of Russian music," who thought Russian folklore utterly uninteresting as a source of musical material. In A History of Russian Music, Maes tells a multifaceted tale of conflicting ideologies: conservative and progressive nationalist, progressive classicistic, Soviet, "formalist" and "cosmopolitic," each one influencing and influenced by composers of different stature.

The book deals at length with all the great composers and compositions, from Glinka's Kamarinskaya to Shostakovich's Babi Yar (Thirteenth Symphony). The yarn is, unsurprisingly, spun around individuals and their work, but includes threads on politics, social background, international development in music and power and performance practice. It is precisely here that Maes' strength lies: without oversimplifying, he paints a history of Russia from the latter half of the 19th century up to the 1960s, always keeping an eye on his main subject and simultaneously avoiding a myopic analysis of biographical anecdotes.

The most interesting part, and certainly the part by which most contemporary readers will judge this book, is of course the section containing the chapters on early Soviet music and the fates of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and their likes. Here again, the author shows how the black-and-white of earlier historiography should be replaced with a balanced analysis of intra-musical developments, which follow a logic of their own, as well as biographical accidents and the pressures of social and political life. Here Maes is at his best, showing insight and independent thinking, even if his appreciation of the Soviet regime is at times a bit blunt.

There are two serious comments to be made about the limits Maes imposes on his work—first, his treatment of Russian music after about 1930 is far too focused on a small number of wellknown composers, as if no one else had been composing anything of any value. This is, of course, a Western bias. Maes implicitly admits that interesting things have happened from the 1960s until today, leading to the works of Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina and Schnittke. Clearly the Soviet regime was not supportive of experiments, or even the thought of an avant-garde, but one must also admit that the musical atmosphere was not actually so stifling. In the conservatories of Moscow and Leningrad and in smaller cities, many composers had contacts with their Western (as well as Polish and Hungarian) colleagues, who were exploring new avenues, and they let themselves be profoundly influenced. Their work has never been promoted by the regime and has never attained cult status in the West.

The book's second limitation is its inclusion of a lengthy part on Stravinsky (who, although born in Russia, resided in the U.S.). Maes actually admits that Stravinsky was Russian only in his imagination and that the Russian elements in his music are merely exotic or, at best, literary. So why give him...