From Criticism to Practice: Music in the Early Literary Heritage of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between the literary work of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko that preceded the opening of the Moscow Art Theater, and his directorial activity. For him, journalism, fiction and drama formed a unity that had a serious impact on his pedagogical and staging practice. The main issues related to the topic of the work have been repeatedly raised by researchers of theater and literature, but have not yet come to the attention of musicologists, which determines the main parameter of the study’s novelty. In this context, the article aims at pinpointing the actual musical textual details, and its main methodology is based on the interpretation of statements and their comparison with the factual theater history. The article attempts to review the “favorite repertoire” of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko as a writer — the musical works mentioned in his novels, stories and plays. There is also identified the “projections” of such sympathies on the design of performances. The article reveals fundamental differences in V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko’s attitude to vocal and instrumental music, the special role of opera in his perception of the world. There is noted the tendency to attach special semantic and moral-ethical meaning to sound components, as well as the affordance, opened in dramas of the late 1890s, of maximum avoidance of noise elements for the sake of relief identification of a word. The article ends with an attempt to substantiate from a musical standpoint the failure of the drama “In Dreams” at its first and only staging at the Moscow Art Theater (1901). The conclusion contains a number of findings characterizing the musicality of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, at the time of the opening of his theater. There are partially highlighted the stages of his evolution not mentioned before, which led the director to experiments in the genre of tragedy at the turn of the 1910s and 1920s, the foundation of his own opera studio and the revision of literary positions that remained relevant for the last decades of his life and work.