Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié. Ed. by Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison

Abstract

Not many have encountered the name of the Russian composer and music essayist Arthur Lourié (1892?–1966) and most of those who have will most likely have been offered an introduction that involves Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, in many respects Lourié could be said to have been the Robert Craft of Stravinsky’s Parisian years, serving as his right-hand man, but also as his propagandist. Yet, he failed to capitalize on the service he offered his friend Igor—or, in fact, on his contribution to various chapters of music history in pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia, interwar Europe, and post-war America, a contribution that goes hand in hand with his association with such weighty names as Anna Akhmatova, Anatoliy Lunacharsky, Serge Koussevitzky, and Jacques Maritain. As the editors of the present volume put it, ‘Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history’ (dust jacket). This edited volume (which originated at a symposium on Arthur Lourié at Amherst College in 2009), dedicated to the composer’s life, work, and aesthetic views, and featuring an impressive roster of scholars, is the most substantial and systematic attempt so far to examine Lourié the composer and intellectual. But what did Lourié do to deserve the attention of such a ‘stellar constellation of scholars’ (from a review on the back cover) that will surely earn him wider appreciation in the future? As the composer moves through a number of movements, ideologies, and world-views (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism, Modernism, Ultra-chromaticism, Bolshevism, Neoclassicism, Eurasianism, NeoThomism), the reader is guided through key aspects of the history, politics, and culture of the twentieth century. Yet, given Lourié’s lifelong attachment to his motherland, especially St Petersburg—initially as a contributor to this hub of artistic creativity and innovation, and subsequently, in exile, through his growing nostalgia—the editors have decided to anchor all those ‘-isms’ to the so-called ‘Petersburg Text’, the ‘dense intertextual network of literary texts that have shadowed the imperial city since the nineteenth century’ (p. 3), thus expanding its chronological and typological boundaries (p. 4). To this end, Lourié’s unperformed opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1941) is discussed in most of the chapters, and features as a significant addition to the ‘Petersburg Text’. The degree to which the authors of various chapters feel committed to this methodological orientation varies across the volume, and the outcome is effectively (and thankfully) a much richer soundscape. On a second level, this book highlights important aspects of the cultural space of the twentieth-century Russian émigré and of the history of Russian emigration itself. It brings out the practical and psychological difficulties surrounding emigration by following the itinerary of an artist who struggled to make his way to the West and to survive there, to integrate with host countries, artistic circles, local and émigré communities, to flourish professionally and to come to terms with separation from his homeland and unfulfilled professional aspirations.