Frolova-Walker , Marina Rimsky-Korsakov and His World (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 551 working practices and concerns also emerge clearly from the letters, including his intense restlessness when without creative activity, and his serious doubts about some of his weaker works, as well as disgust at the incompetence of proof readers; other major themes in this section are money and health, both relating to his relatives and servants. Another interesting part of the book is entitled ‘Musical Souvenirs’, comprising messages and jokes sometimes destined for albums or as lively letters and squibs to friends, revealing a sense of humour that is rare but not completely absent in his mostly passionate and emotional or gently sentimental work. The book’s next section, entitled ‘Key Documents’, begins with his birth certificate and continues with documents relating to his ‘personal and professional life in the administrative, economic and political context of the time’ also shedding ‘new light on the composer’s public image and social status in Imperial Russia’ (p. 199). Finally, a brief Chronology will help readers to follow the considerable peregrinations of Chaikovskii and his family. This composer’s great popularity has survived waves of snobbery in the twentieth century and continues strongly more than a century after his death. It must therefore be assumed that all aspects of his musical and personal heritage will be of interest not only to musicologists but also to a far wider public. This English-language version of the ground-breaking original Russian text has been prepared with great skill and care. The notes are particularly admirable, and the translations of the letters and other documents impeccable. Chaikovskii’s world of sentimental and highly emotional letter writing has long gone, but, for all that, this handsomely produced book should find much to fascinate those who want to know more about one of the world’s most popular composers. London Arnold McMillin Frolova-Walker, Marina (ed.). Rimsky-Korsakov and His World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2018. xiii + 369 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Index. $35.00: £27.00 (paperback). Scholarly attempts to rehabilitate the musical legacy of Nikolai RimskiiKorsakov (1844–1908) have been gathering pace for some time now, prompted in part by an article by Richard Taruskin, first published in Music Theory Spectrum in 2011, and also by the ongoing re-evaluation of almost every aspect of Russian music history since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whilst contributing to this specific academic development, Rimsky-Korsakov and His SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 552 Worldalsopromisestoraisethecomposer’sprofilewithmoregeneralaudiences and cultural organizations. Attractively priced, elegantly produced, cogently organized and often accessibly pitched, it deserves to be read and discussed widely, and if it leads to new priorities when it comes to artistic programming in our concert halls and opera houses, then its editor’s efforts will have been more than amply rewarded. The volume opens with a selection of thirty-two of the 189 letters exchanged between Rimskii-Korsakov and his late muse, the soprano Nadezhda ZabelaVrubel ´. Shedding light on musical politics, repertory and aesthetics around the turn of the century, they also portray the composer in a more personal, even flirtatious light than his often rather dour, academic image suggests. There then follow two articles examining the historical, intellectual and aesthetic contexts of two of Rimskii-Korsakov’s fifteen operas. Emily Frey’s outstanding analysis of Snegurochka (1880–81) deftly traces the impact of populism on its composer, tracing not just his evolution from radical young nationalist to academically respectable professor, but also his shift from the kuchkist values of the 1860s to something more timelessly idealized. Frey’s article is a model of nuanced, sensitive interdisciplinarity, lightly yet authoritatively bringing together elements of intellectual history, historical musicology and analysis to transform our understanding of both a key work and its composer. Anna Nisnevich’s account of Mozart and Salieri (1897) is a bracing and bravura attempt at reading a much overlooked work which sits uneasily between mid-nineteenthcentury nationalism and twentieth-century neo-classicism, but which is here revealed to be a crucial document in the composer’s endless process of selfrefashioning . The final opera to be discussed is Rimskii-Korsakov’s last stage work, The Golden Cockerel (1907), which is the subject of...