Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives by Anastasia (eds) Muir, Stephen and Belina-Johnson Musique et opéra en Russie et en Europe centrale by Pascale (ed.) Melani (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 757 political focus obscures the issues at hand, for instance when discussing Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which in spite of all its Keaton-esque stunts is dismissed as ‘far more indebted to the example of Mack Sennett’s pre-1920 Keystone Kops series’ (p. 89). Nevertheless, Hatherley persuasively gives credence to the notion that Soviet left artists were committed to the new nation’s utopian project and American-inspired industrialization. It would not last, but Chaplin and co. provided an ideal, albeit paradoxical grounds for Soviet avant-garde creativity to coexist with all the ambitious state planning. Department of Russian Tim Harte Bryn Mawr College Muir, Stephen and Belina-Johnson, Anastasia (eds). Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013. xxxvii + 216 pp. Musical examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. Melani, Pascale (ed.). Musique et opéra en Russie et en Europe centrale. Special issue: Revue des études slaves, 84, 2013, 3–4. L’institut d’études slaves, Paris, 2013. 279 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. €30.00 (paperback). ‘The reviver of pure drama, the discovered of the place of art in true human society, the poetic exponent of bygone views of life, Wagner the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of language, the student and creator of myths.’ Friedrich Nietzche’s all-too-capacious summary of Richard Wagner’s many roles — here cited as an epigraph to Richard Taruskin’s foreword to Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives — functions as both a tempting invitation and an implicit warning to those who would trace his influence in European art and culture. Wagner’s impact was so pervasive, so seemingly absolute (whether positively or negatively), that it can be taken as a given; yet at the same time, actual debts, borrowings and homages are often harder to pin down, especially in the realm of music itself (the absence of ‘Wagner the composer’ in Nietzsche’s list is telling, as Taruskin reminds us). As the subtitle of Stephen Muir and Anastasia Belina-Johnson’s edited collection of essays makes clear, they have heeded Nietzsche’s words, rightly widening their purview to include ‘literary’ and ‘cultural’ perspectives alongside the more purely ‘musical’ ones. To be sure, it is entirely possible to trace Wagner’s impact on other composers, as chapters on Antonín Dvořák (by Jan Smaczny) and Leoš Janáček (by Michael Ewans) demonstrate. And the chapters by Muir and Belina-Johnson — on Rimskii- SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 758 Korsakov and Taneev respectively — also attempt to identity potentially Wagnerian borrowings in their works, as well as tracing each composer’s views on the German master through letters and other documents. Much as they drew on certain of Wagner’s innovations, however, these composers showed themselves to be decidedly ambivalent about his music too, and it is more often in the works of writers and critics that one finds a properly ardent embrace of his ideas. Accordingly, Rebecca Mitchell’s chapter sheds welcome new light on music criticism in the early twentieth century, exploring how Wagnerite and Wagnerophile thinkers negotiated the tension between his German national identity and his ‘universal’ artistic potential around the time of the First World War. In addition these Russian, Bohemian and Moravian contributions, the volume also contains a pair of articles dealing with the Polish scene. The first, by Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, situates Wagner’s influence on Stanisław Wyspiański and on the post-Romantic atmosphere of the Polish fin de siècle, whilst the second — by Magdalena Dziadek — offers a useful survey of changing Polish attitudes during the Communist period. The collection is well presented by its editors, although it is something of a shame that the opportunity was not taken to write a longer and more programmatic introduction that would have linked the individual essays more coherently. Instead, this task is left to Taruskin, who comes close to contradicting a number of the authors’ claims (suggesting, for instance, that ‘Taneyev’s modest leitmotif technique […] amounts to not much more...