Morrison, Kenneth and Roberts, Elizabeth. The Sandak: A History (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 365 that E minor opening of the symphony is in fact a subdominant preparation for the movement’s home key of B minor, whereas E minor is the home key for Bach). The link between the symphony’s opening theme and Bach’s ‘Erbarme dich’ are altogether more forced. They may look possible on paper, but they do not account for the experience of listening; Chaikovskii’s common time allegro non troppo is full of semiquaver filigree movement, whereas Bach’s aria is a lilting silicienne in compound time, where each individual note is invested with extraordinary rhetorical force. Elsewhere, Ritzarev’s account relies on a great deal of suppositio, yet is decidedly short on evidence and argument. Certainly this reader was unsure as to whether her reading of ‘the rooster call of anxiety’ — based on a playful association between the name of the apostle Peter, that diminutive form of the composer’s own name (‘Petia’) and the Russian word for rooster (‘petukh’) — was meant entirely seriously, and her discussion of ‘the humorous association of Tchaikovsky with the cock’ (p. 71) adds a further note of seemingly unintentional ribaldry. It is a shame that this reading of the Pathétique is — to quote Ritzarev herself — ‘overly hypothetical’ (p. 71), as a sensitive elucidation of the programmatic elements in Chaikovskii’s symphonic works, rooted in a nuanced, flexible and historically contextualized form of musical semiotics, would do much to enrich our understanding of his successful appeal to audiences, as well as complementing more formalist analytical approaches. To hear the Sixth Symphony as encoding the ‘objective material’ (p. 7) of a hidden plot fails to account for the remarkable encounter between the subjectivity of its composer with that of its various audiences across time and space. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Morrison, Kenneth and Roberts, Elizabeth. The Sandžak: A History. C. Hurst & Company, London, 2013. xxv + 285 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £18.99. With The Sandžak: A History, Kenneth Morrison and Elizabeth Roberts have written the first English-language historical survey of this academically neglected region on the present-day Serbian-Montenegrin border. In doing so, the authors not only help fill in the Balkan scholarly landscape, but provide a useful reference point for students and scholars interested in the history and politics of the southern reaches of the former Yugoslavia. The book essentially consists of two halves, with Roberts covering the region’s history through 1918, and Morrison continuing with its experience in the twentieth century. Initial chapters cover the ancient and medieval past, during which the area gave rise to the Slavic principality of Rascia and played SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 366 a key role in the development of the Serbian Orthodox Church. While later Serbian monarchs would shift their attention to Kosovo in the southeast, the historic core of Rascia retained importance as a commercial corridor linking Constantinople and the central Balkans with Bosnia and Dubrovnik. The name Sandžak itself dates to the Ottoman conquest of the region in the fifteenth century, when the new rulers reconstituted the territory as an imperial sub-province (Turkish: Sancak) centered on the newly established town of Novi Pazar. Although the Sandžak maintained its commercial importance in subsequent centuries, eventual Ottoman territorial losses endowed it with strategic significance as well. In particular, the development of the modern Serbian and Montenegrin states over the course of the nineteenth century turned it into a tenuous link between Bosnia and the remainder of the Ottoman lands. Roberts’s narrative ably alternates here between the high politics of great power diplomacy and reactions on the ground. The 1878 Congress of Berlin marks a particular watershed, with Austria-Hungary occupying BosniaHerzegovina and maintaining a small garrison in the Sandžak of Novi Pazar. Habsburg statesmen hoped that an eventual railway over its territory would underpin their imperial ambitions in the remainder of the Balkans, but the geopolitical tumult of the early twentieth century instead saw it switch hands several times between Vienna, the Ottomans and the nation states of Serbia and Montenegro. When the dust settled in 1918, the Sandžak emerged as part of the new Yugoslav...