M�ricz, Kl�ra and Morrison, Simon (eds). Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 550 talent and sadness at its loss (especially the premature deaths of his protégés Leopold Sulerzhitskii and Evgenii Vakhtangov); anger at drunken colleagues and pleas on behalf of arrested relatives. Other entries include a reverential allusion to Lenin and a seemingly sincere encomium to Stalin. Laurence Senelick has done a superb job as editor and translator, the only slight concern being whether the fastidious Russian would have penned some of the colloquialisms (e.g. an actor’s performance described as ‘gobsmackingly disgusting’, p. 454) in quite the translated form they assume here. London Nick Worrall Móricz, Klára and Morrison, Simon (eds). Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. ix + 303 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Bibliographical sketch. Notes. Index. $74.00. Arthur Lourié (1892?–1966), was a fascinating, yet very neglected Russian composer whose life was almost certainly more interesting than his music. This splendid book attempts to describe his fragmented and little heard musical heritage, as well as piecing together the sometimes contradictory elements of his beliefs. It also provides rich detail of his life in Silver-Age Russia, a friend of poets including Akhmatova and Blok, and shows him as part of the ‘Petersburg Text’, followed by brief service to the new Soviet state and, after predictable disillusion, exile to Berlin (1922), Paris (1923, where residence was delayed on account of his Communist past) and finally, with the coming of Hitler, in 1941 to the United States. Funeral Games is the first study of Lourié since a German biography by Detlef Gojowy in 1993 (Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus), and presents, apart from anything else, rich material for a future fuller biography. It consists of five chapters with an introduction and epilogue: Klára Móricz’s ‘Introduction: Endgames and Funeral Games’ (pp. 1–27); a biographical sketch by Olesya Bobrik (pp. 28–62); ‘Turania Revisited, with Lourié My Guide’ by Richard Taruskin (pp. 63–120); ‘Koussevitsky’s Ghostwriter’ by Simon Morrison (pp. 121–50); Móricz’s ‘Retrieving What Time Destroys: The Palimpsest of Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’ (pp. 150–96); ‘Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds’ by Caryl Emerson (pp. 196–268); and finally Morrison’s ‘Epilogue: The Silver Age and Tinseltown’ (pp. 269–87). The comprehensively annotated Introduction outlines Lourié’s disjointed and in many ways disappointing career as a composer, and introduces REVIEWS 551 elements of his life, particularly in respect of the funeral games of the book’s title. These complex texts have for the most part been prepared with great care, but something has gone awry on pp. 17 and 22, with, for instance, ‘chortï’ for ‘cherti’, ‘Grafine rostopchine’ more often than with the name capitalized, and Lourié’s cantata given variously as ‘Sibylla Dicit’ and ‘Sibylla dicit’. Despite these small errors, the Introduction presents the subject in a way that is clear and yet full of detail. Bobrik’s excellent biographical sketch, translated by the editors, is straightforward and informative. Taruskin’s characteristically lively and informative piece begins by debunking Stravinskii’s outrageous remark to Suvchinskii after Lourié’s death that he had never heard a line of the latter’s music (p. 63). In fact they had worked together, with Lourié playing a role later performed by Robert Craft as Stravinskii’s publicist and factotum; moreover, Lourié not merely imitated aspects of his friend’s work, but also transcribed several of his works for piano. Taruskin’s main theme begins with discussion of his subject’s contribution to the Schönberg/Stravinskii debate, ‘Neogothic and Neoclassic’, going on to discuss Eurasianism, to which Lourié, a former Petersburg dandy, became entirely devoted. Turania, incidentally, for this loose ideology was ‘the ur-Russia of [the Eurasianists’] fantasies’ (p. 78). From this chapter, as from other parts of the book, emerge some of the many contrasts and contradictions of Lourié’s thought: for instance, he saw Stravinskii’s classical period as that of his truest genius, whilst openly admiring the playing and compositions of Rakhmaninov (p. 91). Next comes a brief illustrated discussion of Louri...