A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2003 by Woodside, Mary

Francis Maes. A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xiv, 427 pp. Plates. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, cloth.

This history of Russian music appeared originally in Dutch, and was the first such survey in that language. Addressed to the general public, it presents an overview of what might be called the American school of Russian music history, which emerged in the last two decades and represents a truly new viewpoint on the subject. For anyone who was already acquainted with the literature on Russian music prior to this period, this new scholarship is an enormously refreshing change. Where the narrative used to follow the emergence and triumph of an almost mystical Russian musical style to the exclusion of all that did not, this new scholarship produces a balanced account of human endeavour coupled with reasoned assessments of musical excellence.

Maes, who is presently Artistic director of the Flanders Festival and editor of a publication on the music of the court of Charles V, traces his interest in Russian historiography to a period spent as visiting professor at the University of California. Making the personal acquaintance of the foremost scholars of Russian music in America-Richard Taruskin, Malcolm Brown, Laurel Fay, Alexander Poznansky, and Anne Swartz are the ones he mentions-gave him the impetus to try to resolve the diametrically opposed viewpoints that are still represented in today's writing on the subject. Finding that impossible, he has identified himself with the new approach to such a degree that his book is almost literally a precis of the many books and articles produced by the scholars listed above and many others too numerous to name. The bibliography attests to the productivity of the leading scholars: seven entries under Brown, six under Fay, three under Poznansky, and a whopping thirty-two under Taruskin, many of them massive books (the record is set by the two-volume, 1757-page Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, University of California Press, 1996) and ground-breaking articles.

Putting all this material into a readable account was no doubt a Herculean task, for which Maes is to be congratulated. The new picture of Russian music and musical life is much more complex than the old one. Where previously all Russian music was measured by nationalist standards, and there was an assumption that nationalism and progressive social and political ideas went hand in hand, the new image gives a much more sophisticated picture. The two central principles of this new approach are: first, that much fine music from Russian composers was related to western European music, with which it was intertwined-to suggest this at one time was to be sent to scholarly purgatory or worse-and, second, that leading 'nationalist' composers were not necessarily progressive in other areas, indeed they were sometimes quite the opposite. The realistic portrayal of music and musical life for the period between 1848 (Glinka's Kamarinskayd) and 1975 (the death of Shostakovich) involves an understanding of the personal rivalries and professional jealousies as well as the nationalist/internationalist split in nineteenth-century Russian musical life. Replacing that tendentious issue in twentieth century Russian music history is the assessment of Shostakovich's position as either an apologist or a dissident vis-a-vis the Soviet regime. The hysteria in scholarly meetings and in print on this topic has attracted the attention of the whole of music academia, rivaling the furor over the "suicide" of Tchaikovsky in decibel level.

In a general history such as this one, choices have had to be made and Maes is wise to follow the topics treated by his chosen scholars very closely, resulting in a narrative that does not attempt to fill in every aspect of music history. Fourteen chapters intersperse general topics with treatments of individual composers: Glinka, Chaikovsky (the spelling favoured by Taruskin), Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. Endnotcs meticulously chart the way through the source articles or books on each topic. One indication of this is that almost all quotations are of the "as quoted in" variety, taken from the work of the target scholar rather than from the original publication. This close tracking is fortunate for the English reader, who can always turn to the original book or article (one can only offer sympathy to Dutch readers who do not have that option) to complete the picture. And complete it one must, because for whatever reason of economics or copyright law, there are no musical examples in this book. The reader, then, must take the author's word for every statement without being able to see musical excerpts illustrating the points being made. To give a single but significant example, the protyazhnaya style of folk song is defined on page three as "a splendid form of melismatically decorated song set to poetry of great expressive power and lyrical intensity." That is a meaningful description but when it is called upon several times in the subsequent text to define the musical style of particular passages in the work of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Chaikovsky, Stravinsky and others, how many general readers will be able to identify it in the listening? And how many scholars, for whom this book is a useful distillation of recent research, will find themselves searching for examples of protyazhnaya songs in their own desire to verify the author's statements?