Historicism and the Dialogue

People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?

—Rodney King

Let me begin with one of Richard Taruskin's wonderful aphorisms, which I never tire of repeating: "Verdi and Wagner are heroic individuals. Russians are a group."¹ He aimed it at summary pronouncements about "the Russians" (alternately, "the Soviets") that tend to supplant specific historical knowledge in some studies of Russian music. Throughout his career, Taruskin has fought with vehemence against "the fools" (his word again) whose vision of even the plainest things could be obstructed by clichés etched in their minds; he has done it with formidable intellectual force, breathtaking erudition, and inimitable rhetorical ingenuity. For me, his books have always been a source of learning and inspiration; so also was our interaction in the years—alas, too few—we spent together at Berkeley.

So how did it happen that Taruskin's sarcastic maxim could now be applied to the approach he himself takes in his review?² To learn that, after so many years, the author of the book under review could be seen as a cultural curiosity for whose "background" the enlightened world would need to make certain "allowances"—that was instructive. Curiously, such a thought could never have occurred to me 15 or 20 years ago. The halcyon years, when walls were crushed and cracking, are gone; time to build new, bigger ones.

Of course, the only thing the admirable but exotic subject of the essay could produce was another exercise in Russian gasping utopianism, with its perpetual search for ultimate meanings and all-encompassing unities whose essential inanity the enlightened world understands all too well. That the actual theme of my book was the multiplicity and discontinuity of Russian cultural tradition, the features that are highlighted when it is viewed from the perspective of its musical culture; that the book's noncommittal fragmentariness (its "five operas and a symphony") was meant as a position (in a way, a response to "defining" Russia, musically or otherwise)—could not be accommodated into this scheme.

Every chapter of the book explores displacements and discontinuities that occur, most obviously, when a prominent work of national literature or historiography becomes an opera written 20 or 40 or 60 years later, by a composer and for an audience belonging to a different social milieu and shaped by different ideological and aesthetic values. This happened, for instance, when Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmila, a nonchalantly brilliant pastiche written by the poet in his teenage years in the late 1810s, achieved its musical reincarnation in the early 1840s, in a world split between the weighty splendor of the "globalized" Russian empire under Nicolas I and the shy privacy and intense introspection of the "men of the '40s." Or when Eugene Onegin—a novel whose contemporary literary company included Byron, Constant, and Chateaubriand—reappeared in the age of high realism as a musical counterpart of Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Goncharov. Or when Musorgskii took as his starting point Sergei Solov´ev's account of the Khovanskiis' mutinies and Peter's rise, in which all the diverse historical sources were merged into a powerful "grand narrative" of the rise of the Russian national state, and returned to those voices their cacophonous contradictions, making the epic picture tragically splintered, permeated with obscure hints and ambiguous clues, and doomed never to be finished.

Another kind of displacement occurs when music itself migrates from one epoch and cultural tradition to another. This is what happened to Boris Godunov when it arrived in a big way on the cultural scene of European modernism in the 1900s–20s. Its background presence could be sensed not only in Debussy (a fact that is well known) but in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and, particularly, in Puccini's Turandot. In both latter cases, Musorgskii's musical image of 17th-century Muscovy reappears as modernist chinoiserie; the features of Moscow and Peking, of the Muscovite sage Pimen and Mahler's "lonely in the autumn" conflate in a syncretic image of the Eurasian "other." It is this image, with its implied "Eurasian" message, and its subliminal Russian...