Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (review)

In Philip Ross Bullock, Rosa Newmarch has finally met her match. Alike Russianists, literary professionals, and cultural critics, both Bullock and Newmarch bring breadth, perceptiveness, and linguistic skill to the task of public communication. In choosing music as their arena, both engage in acts of cultural translation crossing national as well as disciplinary boundaries. The wonder is not that a young Oxford academic should have found common cause in the work of a well-travelled Victorian intellectual—long known for her formidable if oblique hand in the musical transformation of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century England—but that almost despite his specialist knowledge of Russian culture, he captures her broader historical contribution to music and musical audiences in Britain. Few musicologists of any age or persuasion could do the same.

What is so refreshing about this book (number eighteen in the Royal Musical Association Monograph series) is that Bullock tackles head-on the research and interpretative problems associated with Newmarch, her writings, and her readers, using his detailed observations as springboards for argument and speculation. Nothing is guessed at or assumed. Bullock's effort to ground and understand is palpable in his fresh treatment of Newmarch's far-flung correspondence (from Austin to Helsinki) as well as period and later discourses of identity, nationalism, feminism, modernism, and the so-called English Musical Renaissance. Starting from first principles, Bullock offers the most thorough list to date of Newmarch's published output, including her original books, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, poetry, periodical essays, and collected programme notes; her translations of other people's books, book chapters, opera librettos, and song texts; and her edited works, including a series of musical biographies for John Lane. The whole, presented as an eighteen-page appendix, runs from 1888 to 1948 and shows at a glance how diverse were her interests, and how, chronologically, she traversed overlapping subjects, from Russian music and poetry (including song and opera), to heard works in English concert life, to Scandinavian music (especially of Jean Sibelius), and finally from 1919, Czech music (notably by Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáçek).

The range in this impressive list will come as small surprise to students of literate musical culture in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Newmarch was well known, outspoken, and prolific. Careful to sign her work and to demand fair pay, she defended her sometimes edgy views in private letters and public print—a rare enough action for male writers of secondary and ephemeral literature (that is, translations and programme notes), practically unheard of for female ones. By force of personality, as well as affiliation with important concert-giving bodies including the Queen's Hall Orchestra and, later, the British Broadcasting Company, she extended and consolidated her early repute as an English expert on Russian and Slavonic music. At a time long before musicology was taken seriously by British academe, and when professional music criticism still fell to a few male pens, her level of public recognition was remarkably high—and it lasted.

Only in the late twentieth century was her position assailed, by the well-known American musicologist and Russian specialist Richard Taruskin. Although he reinscribes Newmarch's importance each time he dismisses her work in his own, Taruskin does have a critical point. For him the real devil is Vladimir Stasov, Newmarch's original mentor in St. Petersburg from 1897. Architect of The Mighty Handful as a nationalist-composer construct, Stasov is fair game in current critique of encrusted (anti-Semitic) rhetoric around Russianness, including Soviet dictats on socialist realism and music. So Taruskin easily finds Newmarch guilty by association—a reductive sideswipe that may have helped stimulate the deeper consideration here.

Bullock sets the record straight. Usefully examining earlier reception patterns for Russian literature and music in England prior to Newmarch, he then focuses on her personal engagement with Russian culture and society to...