Tchaikovsky, Psychology, and Nationality: A View from the Archives

Abstract

19th-Century Music, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 144–62. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2011.35.2.144. In light of the nationalist question central to all three articles in this issue, we thought it might be revealing to look at some of the Anglophone literature on Russian music in the early years of the twentieth century. The spur to much of this discussion (reflected in Richard Taruskin’s article) was the problem of how to assess Tchaikovsky at the time when, even into the 1920s, his music still counted as modern. In both the United States and Britain, no strangers to questions of music’s national character, the issue provoked a great deal of attention—and debate; the little anthology here, reprinted from encyclopedia entries, musical journalism, and guidebooks to “great music,” is only a small sample, though a representative one. These forgotten texts suggest that the issue of musical nationalism was at once robust, controversial, and complicated. They also, incidentally, offer a vivid snapshot of the kinds of discourse and the depths of passion that what we faute de mieux call “classical music” used to provoke. —Lawrence Kramer Richard Alexander Streatfeild, Modern Music and Musicians (New York: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 312–17.