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

Abstract

Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Culture. By Boris Gasparov. (Russian Literature and Thought.) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. [xxii, 268 p. ISBN 0-300-10650-5. $45.] Index, bibliographical reference, examples. Boris Gasparov begins his book with assertion that is subservient literature (p. xxi). Music acts express and affirm literature's intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings (p. xvii). In light of this posited hierarchy, may come as a surprise that Gasparov wants to view as a formative cultural force, show cultural trends and patterns in characteristic features of music (p. xxi). In this book he attempts explore relationship between and its message. To this end, he offers a reading of six musical works, covering a hundred-year period beginning in late 183Os, revealing how each work reflects cultural and social trends of its time. What gives its unique identity? In chapter 1, Sound and Discourse: On National Musical Style, Gasparov sets up and explores dichotomy between European (read: German) and musical traditions, former personified by Wagner, latter by Musorgsky. musical language, according him, seems have a single meta-source, the chorale, though this genre remains undefined. Gasparov argues that parallel European and lines of development offer alternative path[s] into modernity. The Wagnerian line leads the expressionist style and, eventually, atonality; Russian chorale line, shedding its garbs of national uniqueness and assuming universality, culminates in the loosening of harmonic functions by Debussy ... extending of tonal harmonies by Shostakovich, and ... Stravinsky's bitonality (pp. 7-8). As these quotations attest, author's view of development of and its history is rather simplistic and conventional. In chapter 2, Gasparov traces Glinka's transformation between premiere of A Life for Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Ludmila (1842). The triumph of composer's first opera and prospects that followed eventually gave way disappointment with his career, problems in personal life, and discontent with creative plans, leading him abandon high aristocratic society for brotherhood of close friends by 1840 (pp. 23-24, 27). To Gasparov, Glinka's personal crisis reflects larger crisis experienced by society during reign of Nicholas. The 183Os, with their conflation of populism, Romantic exaltation, and ardent patriotism (p. 27) realized at level of 'national idea' (p. 54), yielded 184Os-an epoch that turned out be introspective, self-searching, withdrawn into a private space, creating a culture of tight friendly circles (p. 55). Nothing reflected this cultural transformation better than Glinka's Ruslan. Glinka's second opera was conceived in late 183Os in the vein of imperial Omnihumanity' and promised to conquer world by absorbing it (p. 35). But by 1840, having composed some of most diverse and colorful pages of his score, Glinka simply turns his back on [the] deceptive magnificence (p. 44) of this cosmopolitanism, as he does (symbolically) on decade of 183Os. Gasparov believes that characters in opera mirror this change in attitude. Unlike their counterparts in Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmila, Glinka's characters are transformed by their experiences-they undergo a musical metamorphosis from being stock operatic characters flesh-and-blood people. Gasparov finds little that is specifically in of Ludmila's cavatina. Because of its Italianate sound, her personality [is] thoroughly polished and conventionalized (p. 45). However, when we meet Ludmila again in fourth act, her is no longer Italianate or fully operatic; is now of romans-a high-art song genre that presented a fusion of generic sentimental features with some nationalistic musical element and formed part of domestic making (p. …