Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera by Rutger Helmers (review)

In recent times in the West (that is, within living memory), Russian opera in performance here essentially meant the two masterpieces—Musorgsky’s Boris Godunovand Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with an occasional airing (always of short duration) of more exotic items, and the whole subject of Russian opera for the English-speaking readership was largely limited to the valuable, if dated, writings of specialists such as Rosa Newmarch, Michel-Dimitri Calvo-coresssi, or Gerald Abraham. All this has changed. The expansion of the operatic repertoire, technological advances of recording and distri bution, tours by Russian companies, regime changes in Russia itself, as well as a new generation of musicologists and critics in Russia, the U.K., and the U.S., has led to a widening of our knowledge of the Russian operatic repertoire, along with a desire on the part of the opera-going public to learn more about this expanded repertoire, with more nuanced (and less politicised?) interpretations of both the operas and the contexts within which they were composed and first performed.

In Not Russian Enough?, Rutger Helmers sets out to examine the question of “Russian-ness”, as indicated by the book’s subtitle—“Nationalism and Cosmopoli tanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera”, a topic which has exercised critics and commentators from the day the works were composed to the present, touching, as it does, on wider questions of political and cultural significance. Rather than attempting to present an overview of the whole of the Russian operatic repertoire of the nineteenth century, he has chosen as subject for discussion and detailed analysis, four operas—two on Russian subjects (Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar[1836] and Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride[1899]), and two on non-Russian subjects (Serov’s Judith[1863] and Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orléans[1881]). Each of these operas has a special place in its composer’s oeuvre and received an ambivalent response from critics as well as audiences, thus serving as valuable source material for the author’s researches.

At the heart of the investigation into this subject is the question of a definition for the elusive quality of “Russianness”, a quality which competent and experienced listeners of Russian music the world over confidently recognise as “Russian”, but yet is almost indefinable, and in different contexts may refer to various constituent elements, such as content, style, and local colour. From the 1860s and earlier, fierce debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers in Russia reflected the existing antagonisms in Russian society, relating to politics, religion, philosophy, and culture; this also found its way into the polemical writings of those who maintained that it was in the music of the “Mighty Handful” school of composers, with its connections to folk-music, that lay the true path for the development of Russian opera. These writings (both at the time and later), have frequently contributed to a denial of the essential truth that Russian nineteenth-century operatic writing had always been a part of Western music, and was largely influenced by the success in Russia and internationally of the enormously popular operas of the Italian, French, and German schools, and the desire on the part of Russian composers to emulate these successes with similar works of their own. After the 1917 Revolution, Soviet commentators, with their own interpretations of pre-Revolutionary works, often laboured to find a “Nationalist” element in works which may have had little true connection with “Nationalism”, in any real sense of the word.

From his detailed examination of these four operas, Helmers provides many fascinating new insights for anyone anxious to learn more about the works that make up this still emerging repertoire. What do these four operas tell us?

Glinka’s opera, although recognised at the time as a watershed in the...