Issues in Russian Musical Identity

Abstract

‘Tardy growth and tardier professionalization, remote provenience, social marginalism, the means of its promotion, even the exotic language and alphabet of its practitioners have always tinged or tainted Russian art music with an air of alterity, sensed, exploited, bemoaned, asserted, abjured, exaggerated, minimized, glorified, denied, revelled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without.’ Thus Richard Taruskin sums up in a sentence the problematic issue of Russian musical identity in the essay that prefaces his seminal collection, Defining Russia Musically. 1 Russian music and musical life may have often been seen as different from that of the West, for good or ill, but, as Taruskin points out, it is also true that Russian composers always ‘construed their identities in a larger European context’. 2 The resulting tension was central to the composition, performance, and reception of music in the imperial period, and remained so after 1917, as the four articles collected here show. Taruskin’s investigation into the ‘myth of otherness’ provides a useful point of departure for these articles, each of which illustrates one or more of its dimensions. Spanning a period from the rule of Nicholas I to the presidency of Vladimir Putin, they are in certain important respects variations on a common theme, while also illuminating under-researched areas in Russia’s musical life. If the terms associated with national identity have been changing (imperial, Soviet, postSoviet, Putin-era, not to mention the long-established distinction between russkii and rossiiskii, now increasingly being replaced by gosudarstvennyi), so too has music scholarship, both in Russia and in the West. In Russia, after so long being vitiated by ideological concerns, and often marginalized, the incipient discipline of professional musicology launched before the Revolution by such figures as Nikolai Findeizen has begun to recover. In the West the lead has been taken by Richard Taruskin, whose root and branch re-evaluation of Russian music has set an inspiring example in both methodology and approach. Such is the lack of reliable accounts — Boris Schwarz’s classic study shines out as a beacon 3 — that histories written by scholars with no knowledge of Russian-language sources (e.g., Francis Maes) are still valuable, 4 but they will inevitably be superseded as our picture of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet music becomes more complete, 5 thanks to the work of Peter Schmelz, for example. Having at last been able to gain access to a large array of declassified archival documents, scholars have started to transform our understanding of the personalities, institutions, and processes that shaped Soviet cultural production. Leonid Maksimenkov’s scrupulous investigation of the circumstances surrounding the scandalous reception of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 challenges existing accounts of the affair, 6 while Levon Hakobian’s incisive survey of developments since 1917 draws usefully on contemporary periodical literature to set Soviet music in a wider social and political context. 7 Such historians as Amy Nelson, Kiril Tomoff, and Neil Edmunds, meanwhile, have drawn on archival material to paint vivid pictures of the practicalities of composing and music-making in the Soviet Union,