This erudite study uses three themes to draw together an elegant panorama of Russian culture from the early nineteenth century to the Stalinist era. Boris Gasparov’s primary concern is the significance of the distinctive sound of “Russian music,” whose direct emotional appeal is universally acclaimed even as its meaning in different historical contexts is often discounted or overlooked. The implications of this paradox, underscored by music’s prominence in a “national cultural consciousness” (P. vii) that puts “messianic expectations” on writers (P. xx), defines the book’s second theme, namely, the interaction between word and music (presented in its most extreme binary formulation as the tension between the domain of logos or reason and that of the emotional and psychological), in the context of broader intellectual trends, psychological shifts, and political tides. Gasparov’s final theme is music and meaning. Rather than merely lamenting the literary bias that informs so many approaches to Russian culture, Gasparov exploits the dependence of Russian music on literature as a heuristic tool to reveal the unique cultural forces exerted by the “five operas and a symphony” in the book’s title. In examining four masterworks of the nineteenth-century Russian operatic tradition, together with Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, and Shostakovich’s symphonies written between 1936 and Stalin’s death, Gasparov reveals much about the relationship between the voice of Russian music and its message. The sophistication with which this book charts the shifting contours of “Russianness” in music both over time and in the broader European context should make it of particular interest to the readers of this journal.
In both methodology and substance, this is a book of ironies and paradoxes. In an effort to turn the literary bias of Russian culture on its head, Gasparov uses his extraordinary fluency in “word and music” to address the marginalization of music. The first chapter provides a sophisticated, but clear description of the characteristics of the Russian chorale and explains how these musical qualities contributed to broader aesthetic and ethical trends in the nineteenth-century. Rooted both in the music of the church and in folk melos, the harmonic hallmarks of the chorale became synonymous with the “sound” of Russian music by the late nineteenth century. In contrast to its West European relative, the Russian chorale was distinguished by its structural simplicity, the reduction of harmonic tensions, a reliance on triads in inverted positions, and the liberal use of 7th chords (except for the conventional dominant 7th). Echoing native critics who fault Russian operatic composers for their desecration of literary classics, detractors of the Russian musical style have often framed its philosophical and aesthetic implications in terms of an overarching rubric of “backwardness,” condemning the Russian chorale as formally archaic and underdeveloped, flawed by its vague tonality, its lack of formal cadences, and its refusal to expand in an orderly way via chromatic secondary dominants. Yet these same conventions facilitated the development of the artificial scales and exotic sonorities that convey the aural stamp of fairytale “Russianness” in music ranging from Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila to Scriabin’s Prometheus. Without diminishing the centrality of Richard Wagner to the crisis of classical harmony and conventional musical form, Gasparov presents the Russian tradition as an alternate path to musical modernism. While Wagner used the “Tristan chord” to postpone the final resolution of dissonance demanded by classical harmony indefinitely, thus extending musical forms by means of an increasingly complex internal logic, the loosening of harmonic function in the Russian chorale enabled composers from Musorgsky to Debussy to Stravinsky and Shostakovich to pursue tangential paths – dissolving dissonance, extending episodic development and layering tonalities – with equally radical results.
In this first chapter, and throughout the book, Gasparov necessarily relies on the vocabulary of music theory to describe and analyze his subject matter. Readers without a basic familiarity with this nomenclature will no doubt be lost, a fact that points to the difficulty of negotiating one of the fundamental tensions informing this book and the scholarly practice of musicology in general – namely the widespread recognition of music’s direct, emotional appeal and its universality, at the same time that musical language and structure remain inscrutable to those without some specialized training or knowledge. While this paradox helps explain why the significance of music is often overlooked or discounted in favor of literary texts and images whose messages seem more accessible, it hardly justifies the practice. After all, where would scholars be if they routinely discounted other forms of creative expression, or that which they did not understand, as meaningless or marginal?
As with his method, Gasparov’s subject is rich in ironies. His essay on Ruslan and Ludmila (1842) examines the message of this operatic adaptation of a Pushkin classic whose drama of a Western woman rescued from captivity in an Oriental harem to be reunited with her true love conforms to a common Orientalist trope. While Mikhail Glinka’s first opera, A Life for the Tsar (1836), elevated the Italian-trained musician to the status of Russia’s first national composer, it was in Ruslan and Ludmila that those vociferous proponents of the national style, Vladimir Stasov and Ceasar Cui, later found their ideal. Gasparov charts how Ruslan and Ludmila projected the same kind of “omni-Russianness” and “universality” that informed the deification of Pushkin, whose “omnireceptiveness” (vseotzyvchivost’) as an “omnihuman” (vsechelovek) embodied the national ideal of a “haughty messianism” poised to conquer the world by absorbing it. But the music of Ruslan and Ludmila extended and modified the claims of its literary predecessor. Its initial success was hardly unqualified – the music was too difficult for most ensembles and the rage for Italian opera overshadowed its domestic appeal. Yet its individual numbers became staples in concert halls and in private homes after the opera’s Russian revival in 1871 because the music conveyed a fundamental psychological shift in Russian culture at mid-century away from the theatricality of imperial power in favor of intimate, personal relationships, domesticity and private spaces.
Music’s effectiveness in conveying psychological depth and nuance also emerges as a common theme in Gasparov’s discussions of two Tchaikovsky operas based on Pushkin’s texts. In the case of Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890), psychological analysis by musical means conveys an introspective and memorable emotional landscape in the first instance and a tormented, intoxicating, and revelatory atmosphere anticipating musical modernism in the latter. In both instances, lamenting Tchaikovsky’s desecration of Pushkin’s masterpiece is common. Gasparov urges readers to move past debates about the operas’ rights to their own aesthetic existence (a claim he regards as obviously valid), and to quit insisting that they not be seen in their literary forbearers’ shadow (a cause he sees as futile). The “right” question, he suggests, would consider how both musical and literary works benefit from mutual reflection. This approach works especially well in his analysis of Eugene Onegin. Again Gasparov attends to the ironies of the work’s inception and reception: Tchaikovsky conceived it as a “modest” work of intimate self-expression, pinning his hopes for large scale success on his other operas. Yet Onegin garnered its creator fame on a national and global scale. Its stock increased after the composer’s death, and still matches or exceeds the fame of Pushkin’s novel, which is rarely read after high school. While generations of readers have learned to revere the elegance and refinement of Pushkin’s original, in which meaning inheres in silence, artifice, and omission, Tchaikovsky’s opera offers a compelling, socially-charged drama that made Pushkin’s classical characters “real” to post-reform society and subsequent generations of audiences.
Gasparov pursues the idea of an “alternate path” to musical modernity most vigorously in the essay on Modest Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina. Unfinished at the composer’s death and endlessly fascinating to subsequent disciples and detractors, Khovanshchina is unconventional in every aspect. The musical narrative, which Musorgsky envisioned as a “people’s musical drama,” has no literary prototype, depicting instead a chronologically jumbled amalgam of the political, religious and social strife that dominated the seventeenth century. Musorgsky composed the music non-sequentially at the piano, turning to the libretto only after most of the music was completed. Between the opera’s unfinished state and incoherent structure, the recurring concerns that the work cannot stand on its own clearly carry some weight. But Gasparov urges us to consider “the indeterminacy” of Khovanshchina as an inherent property, situating the opera favorably amidst other literary and musical works such as Anna Karenina, Robert Musil’s Der Man ohne Eigenschaften, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and suggesting that like Wagner, Musorgsky tried to overcome the predictability of conventional functional harmony but via opposite means. Where Wagner deferred the resolution of harmonic tension, Musorgsky reduced that tension and thereby loosened functional ties in a manner not unlike the strategies Tolstoy and Dostoevsky pursued to break away from the causal links in the plot of a novel. Like Dostoevsky’s Demons, Khovanshchina is true to the spirit of the epoch it depicted – a world permeated with moral turmoil and terror of the apocalypse.
The influence of Musorgsky’s only completed opera on a famous Italian composer’s unfinished work about a Chinese princess leads Gasparov to consider the prism through which West Europeans refracted the Russian musical style in the interwar period. Noting the many structural and stylistic similarities between Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, Gasparov probes the ironies of the marginalization of Russian music in the broader European context, and the double edges of Eurasianism, which despite its explicitly anti-European orientation, found a certain resonance in the West. Situating Puccini’s musical depiction of Peking in terms of Musorgsky’s rendition of Moscovy, Gasparov shows how Europeans engaged both venues through a kind of interchangeable Orientalism, where one exotic, yet benighted “other” served as a model for another.
Deliberately sidestepping the ongoing controversy over the composer most closely associated with the vicissitudes of Soviet politics, Gasparov’s essay on Shostakovich returns to the volume’s concern with the evolution of literary and musical form. Gasparov considers the composer’s Fourth Symphony (finished in 1936, but premiered only in 1961) as an aesthetic and intellectual phenomenon in its own right. His analysis of the work situates it as a watershed for the composer, wherein the industrial sound and episodic development of musical modernism combine brilliantly with the broad contours of symphonic allegro form. More successfully than Khovanshchina, Shostakovich’s Fourth engages and undermines the philosophical and psychological premises that underpinned the major symphonic and literary traditions of the nineteenth century.
A concise survey of the genealogy of the Russian national anthem provides a marvelously conclusive epilogue to Gasparov’s study. Charting the changing tunes that have represented the Russian state, Gasparov retraces the major shifts in political and imperial tone identified elsewhere in the volume – from the Western flavored Polonaise of Catherine the Great’s era, to the majestic strains of “God Save the Tsar” in the nineteenth century, to the internationalist, martial rhythms of “The Internationale” in the early Soviet period, and finally, to Aleksandr Aleksandrov’s “Anthem of the Party of the Bolsheviks.” Composed by the former conductor of an archpriest’s choir in 1939 and adopted as the national anthem in the middle of World War II, Aleksandrov’s hymn has endured – with revisions to the lyrics, and a brief abandonment altogether – the collapse and post-Soviet refashioning of the polity it commemorates. Gasparov attributes this remarkable staying power to the anthem’s unique balance between “the native and the universal” and its effective combination of the Russian choral style and conventional Western hymn structure. The book ends where it began, taking the emotional appeal of the Russian musical voice seriously, on its own terms, and offering valuable historical insight in the process.