Helmers, Rutger Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 340 mission: ‘to borrow Nabokov back from the scholars’ (p. 7) and to demonstrate the ways in which Nabokov transformed himself into an American writer. Some may think that he achieves his aims, but the character he portrays is rarely appealing, inspiring bewilderment more than wonder, whilst the provocative, audacious America into which Nabokov so eagerly immersed himself is reduced, by the end of the book, to something drab and indistinct. Others, therefore, might feel better served by going back to Boyd and Schiff, and to the letters, interviews and reminiscences, and ultimately to the texts themselves, for it is through these that the real Nabokov and his world come truly and vividly to life. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Helmers, Rutger. Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera. Eastman Studies in Music. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2014. xvi + 233 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Musical examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. Nationalism has been such a decisive and productive category in Russian music studies for some time now, so it is refreshing to see Rutger Helmers’ emphasis on the neglected, yet equally significant notion of cosmopolitanism. Amply justified by the quality of his interpretations of four nineteenth-century operas, Helmers’ approach illuminates an inherent tension in Russian culture that goes back to at least the Petrine reforms, when ‘Western art music and opera were among the many imports that came to Russia in the course of the eighteenth century’ (p. 4). Nonetheless, a tendency to assume that Russian operacanonlydealwithsubjectstakenfromnationallifeandhistoryhasmeant that a number of key works have been overlooked in criticism and scholarship; furthermore, even canonical works in the supposedly ‘nationalist’ tradition evince cosmopolitan elements that refute a single, stable interpretation in terms of their innate, or essential Russianness. Challenging such assumptions, Helmers takes four operas and examines the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in both their genesis and reception. Strikingly, he begins with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, widely seen as the foundational work of the Russian national opera tradition, yet equally a work that found itself at the centre of a polemic about national identity in music in the nineteenth century. Arguing that Glinka adapted much of the musical language of the work from contemporary Italian examples (most notably Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Bellini’s La sonnambula, both of which the composer heard in Milan in 1830– 31), Helmers advances an interpretation of the work in terms of its musical and national hybridity. His next chapter — on Serov’s Judith — illuminates the REVIEWS 341 role played by Old Testament narratives in the history of Russian opera. Here, Helmers suggests that contemporary audiences might well have read the plot as an allegory of the recent Siege of Sevastopol (there are perhaps unintentional echoes here of the reception history of Handel’s oratorios in Hanoverian London), and uncovers a debate about the appropriateness of using either Russian national or oriental music to depict the opposing forces in the Biblical story. The next opera to be considered is Chaikovskii’s Maid of Orleans, whose German source text (a play by Schiller), French subject matter and Russian composer have long proved a stumbling block for critics and audiences alike. Finally, Helmers explores Rimskii-Korsakov’s Tsar’s Bride, which — despite its echt-nationalist subject matter — marks a departure from the values of the nationalist school, constituting a stylistic embrace of the melodic charm of Mozart and the Italian school instead. Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in NineteenthCentury Russian Opera is certainly a welcome contribution to the history of Russian music, and its analysis of the ‘various cosmopolitan practices and discourses’ (p. 159) that were inherent in nationalism is timely. If its handling of nationalism is well rooted in the existing secondary literature, one might still wish for a more nuanced and critical handling of the notion of cosmopolitanism, which here seems to figure primarily as the attempt ‘to transcend the petty bordersbetweennational cultures’ (p. 159). This is true as far as it goes, but what is the specific intellectual, cultural, political and ideological role of cosmopolitanism within nineteenth century Russia, which functioned as a multilingual and multi-ethnic empire, yet...