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

Perhaps I'd better begin straight out with the Full Disclosure. I was present at the creation of most of the essays that have gone into this absorbing book. They were mainly conceived during the halcyon era when the author's presence in the Berkeley Slavic Department, together with Simon Karlinsky and Robert Hughes, made that department virtually a second music department on campus, which I (as the Slavist in the "first" department) happily frequented as a colloquium speaker and discussant, as they did ours. Those discussions were the incubator for a lot of thinking on both sides about the musical and literary arts in 19th-century Russia and their mutual relations, with occasional forays into the 20th. And here are seven chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue, that testify to the splendid gestation these colloquium-inspired zamysli have undergone since Boris Mikhailovich's deeply lamented departure from the Pacific Coast.

He and I loved to face off. We were a virtual Mutual Resistance Society, acting upon one another the way sandy irritants act on oysters. ("You say MuSORGskii and I say MUsorgskii," I once blurted in exasperation. "Let's call the whole thing off.") The result, in his case at least, has been a string of pearls—not all perfectly shaped, but precious. My brief evaluation will emphasize points of difference, but all disputation should be placed in the context of my overriding debt to a scholar from whose matchless interdisciplinary scope and dizzy flights of erudite fancy I have drawn inspiration and stimulation for many years.

I would guess most readers will agree with me that the third chapter, "Eugene Onegin in the Age of Realism," is the zenith of the collection. If my memory serves, it had its origin in a colloquium I was giving at the Slavic Department, in which I attempted a defense of Chaikovskii's opera against the legions of offended Pushkinists who have inveighed against it since its premiere, lately under the banner of the militantly tone-deaf Nabokov. My defense focused on Chaikovskii's parody of the Russian romance idiom of the 1830s—that is, of Pushkin's time—and the way he made that idiom comment (in part through abstracted "intonations," to use Boris Asaf´ev's word) on the action in the manner of Pushkin's detached and ironic narrator. Simon Karlinsky was unconvinced. He parried my thrust with the comment that, music or no music, Chaikovskii's characters were denizens of Turgenev's world (that is, creatures of Chaikovskii's coarser, more sentimental time), not Pushkin's. Semyon Arkadyevich meant it as derogation, but Boris Mikhailovich was listening and realized that the point, well enough taken, could actually be transformed into a compliment, and a pregnant one, the ability to effect a compelling "transposition" being the symptom of a robust creative personality. In backing up this insight, Gasparov brings to bear some of the same biographical details—Chaikovskii's disastrous marriage in defiance of sexual preference, his quixotic obsession with emotional authenticity—that in the hands of fools have led to so much ghastly trivialization. In his hands, by contrast, they lead to illumination.

The finest moment comes in a new reading of the duel scene in novel and opera, where Gasparov clinches Karlinsky's point, exposing the inability of Chaikovskii, or the composer's contemporaries, to respect the social codes that motivated Pushkin's characters in a manner that fully satisfied the poet's contemporaries. Here is its terrific conclusion:

To the audience of Chaikovsky's opera, the scene of Onegin's and Lensky's duel looked...