CHAPTER 9
THIS CHAPTER originated as a contribution to a symposium organized by the Dallas Opera and Southern Methodist University around the Opera’s production of Borodin’s Prince Igor in November 1990. Because many Soviet guests had been invited, the poster and program book were printed in English and Russian side by side. I found that the word “orientalism” in my title had become tema vostoka—”the Eastern theme”—in translation, even though ori-entalizm, or more commonly, orientalistika, are perfectly good Russian words (well, Russian words, anyway). It was a sensible precaution. “The Eastern theme” is neutral: from a paper with that phrase in the title one expects inventories, taxonomies, identification of sources, stylistic analysis. “Orientalism” is charged. From a paper with that word in the title one expects semiotics, ideological critique, polemic, perhaps indictment. The translator was quite right to err on the side of innocuousness, rather than saddle me with a viewpoint I might not wish or manage to live up to.
Yet orientalism in Russian art music, and especially in opera, is the topic this chapter addresses, not “the Eastern theme.” One could not possibly do the latter justice in anything less than a book, what with the hundreds of Russian operas, ballets, tone poems, instrumental pieces, and songs with oriental subject matter that appeared over a rough century between Catterino Cavos’s Firebird and Stravinsky’s.1 Any adequate taxonomy of this richly variegated material would first have to separate it into what we might call intra-imperial and extra-imperial categories (which already raises the specter of orientalism), dividing the intra-imperial, following the movements of the Russian army, into Siberian, Caucasian, and Central Asian phases, cutting the extra-imperial first into vastly unequal Near and Far Eastern shares, and then apportioning the Near Eastern into Arabian, Persian, Turkish, and Levantine strains. So prevalent for a while was the “Eastern theme” that when Vladimir Stasov, the great mythologizer of Russian music, looked back in 1882 at “Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art” (the title of one of his most famous essays), he could name “the oriental element” as one of the four distinguishing—and, of course, progressive—features of what he called the “New Russian school,” the others being skepticism of European tradition, “striving for national character,” and “extreme inclination toward ‘program music.’“2
Leaving taxonomy for another day, then, we are left with orientalism: the East as a sign or metaphor, as imaginary geography, as historical fiction, as the reduced and totalized other against which we construct our (no less reduced and totalized) sense of ourselves. As Stasov implied, as we knew to begin with, and as we have been forcibly reminded of late, it is not possible to separate this constructed East from “the real one.” The East is the East only to the West: the very act of naming it is already constitutive and heavily invested, consciously or not, with theory. The history of “the Eastern theme” is thus willy-nilly a facet of the history of ideas, and there can be no investigation of it that is not both itself an ideological critique and subject to ideological critique in its turn.
The only question is how overt shall we make our critique, and how bluntly accusatory. If I had wanted to put my enlightened scholarly and human perspective on display by attacking the subject of the Dallas symposium it would have been all too easy. I could have pointed out that throughout Prince Igors notorious eighteen-year gestation (1869-87) its plot was being uncannily re-enacted in real life: Russia was just then competing avidly with Britain in what Kipling (and others) called the Great Game, a protracted imperialist war in Central Asia against a Muslim Holy League led by the Khan of Bokhara. I could have shown that, along with most of educated Russia, Borodin and Stasov enthusiastically endorsed this war, which came to an end only with the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan. As evidence I could have cited virtually all the differences between the libretto—or, better yet, Stasov’s original scenario—and its literary source, the twelfth-century epic known as “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign” (Slovo o polku Igoreve).
As regards the relations between the Russians and their antagonists, the Polovtsï, there were two main inventions: on the one hand there was the egregious Ovlur—an unidentified name in the Lay but in the opera a turncoat “good Indian” straight out of Fenimore Cooper—who arranges Igor’s escape; on the other, there was the interpolated love intrigue between Igor’s son Vladimir, who does exist in the Lay of Igor s Campaign, and Khan Kon-chak’s daughter, “Konchakovna,” who does not. Later, it will be evident that Konchakovna was an absolutely essential character for the sake of her music. The pretext for her invention, however, was very slim: just a few lines in the Lay between Khans Gzak and Konchak in which they briefly consider “entoiling the falconet by means of a fair maiden” as Nabokov translated it.3
Stasov’s scenario ended with an epilogue Borodin never composed, in which the wedding of Vladimir and Konchakovna was celebrated after a second, successful campaign. It was a transparent derivation from the last scene of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, the opera on which Prince Igor was modeled in countless ways great and small. Except for the final chorus, which would have incorporated the last few lines of the Lay (including the famous concluding Amen), the epilogue had no precedent in Russian literature or history, yet it epitomized the scenario’s ideology: while in captivity Igor would not assent to a marriage that would make his son a Polovtsian, even postponing his escape to prevent it; and yet he rejoices at home in the same marriage when it “annexes” the Khan’s daughter as a Russian and a Christian.
Thus Prince Igor, which chiefly differs from the more innocently “magical” Ruslan precisely by virtue of its aggressive nationalism, finally made overt the pervasive subtext to nineteenth-century Russian essays in orientalism: the racially justified endorsement of Russia’s militaristic expansion to the east. “We go with trust in God for our faith, our Russia, our people,” the operatic Igor anachronistically proclaims, very much in the spirit of Tsar Alexander II. As a matter of fact, Borodin’s exquisite “musical picture,” V Sredney Azii (“In the Steppes of Central Asia”), was explicitly composed–along with Musorgsky’s orchestral march “The Taking of Kars” and Chaikovsky’s lost “The Montenegrins Receiving the News of Russia’s Declaration of War on Turkey”—to glorify Alexander’s expansionist policy. It was intended as an accompaniment to one of a series of tableaux vivants planned in celebration of the Tsar’s silver jubilee in 1880.
These, then, are some of the points I might adduce were I interested in “unmasking” Prince Igor or in making Stasov and Borodin out as a pair of feckless “orientalists.” But that would be a bore, and so I will not mention them. Yet (to drop the Ciceronian mask and don another) just as the prosecutor knows that the jury cannot really disregard the inadmissible evidence just because the judge has so instructed them, I do intend these “unmentioned” points to equip us with a context, and a subtext. If one is going to talk about oriental style as a sign, one must specify its referents.
Foundation thus laid, I shall try from here on to let the music speak for itself by way of examples chosen and arranged so as to let a certain semiotic point emerge. Again, I have scamped the inventory and the taxonomy. Some kinds of musical orientalism passed the Russians by. There is no Russian equivalent to Félicien David’s symphonic ode Le Désert, famed for its transcription of the muezzin’s call to prayer; Islam as such seems to have left the Russians cold. There are many kinds of specifically Russian musical orientalism that I will not mention either. Some, like biblical orientalism, while very prominent and telling, are not particularly relevant to Prince Igor. Others, like the representation of oriental military hordes, or of barbarian magnanimity, are very pertinent indeed. But instead of covering the whole field with a thin film, I prefer to concentrate on one aspect and get somewhat beneath the surface.
AS ALREADY suggested, Russian orientalism can be divided into periods roughly corresponding to the phases of Russian imperial expansion. The heyday of Russian romanticism, as every lover of Pushkin and Lermontov knows, coincided with the Caucasian campaigns. One of the best-loved souvenirs of that period (best loved by musicians, anyway), was an untitled lyric by Pushkin dating from 1828:
Ne poy, krasavitsa, pri mne
Ti pesen Gruzii pechal’noy:
Napominayut mne onye
Druguyu zhizn’ i bereg dal’nïy.
Uvï! napominayut mne
Tvoyi zhestokiye napevï
I step’, i noch’—i pri lunye
Chertï dalyokoy, bednoy devï.
Ya prizrak milïy, rokovoy,
Tebya uvidev, zabïvayu;
No tï poyosh’—i predo mnoy
Yevo ya vnov’ voobrazhayu.
Ne poy, krasavitsa, pri mne
Tï pesen Gruzii pechal’noy:
Napominayut mne onye
Druguyu zhizn’ i bereg dal’nïy.
Sing not in my presence, O beauty,
Thy songs of sad Georgia;
They remind me
Of another life, a distant shore.
Alas! they remind me,
Thy cruel melodies,
Of steppes, of night—and ‘neath the moon
The features of a poor far-off maid.
This lovely, fateful vision
I can forget on seeing thee;
But you sing—and before me
I envision it anew.
Sing not in my presence, O beauty,
Thy songs of sad Georgia;
They remind me
Of another life, a distant shore.
Between 1829 (the year of the poem’s publication) and 1909 at least twenty-six settings of it were published by Russian composers (and a couple of non-Russians, too, such as Pauline Viardot, who set it as a concert vehicle for her Russian tours).4 We shall consider three, beginning with the one by Glinka, the patriarch himself, which he published in 1831 at the age of twenty-seven, five years before his first opera, A Life for the Tsar, was performed and he became a “nationalist.” Subtitled “Georgian Song,” it incorporates the first two stanzas of the poem (See example 9.1).
According to the composer’s memoirs, the melody of this song, which he learned from the poet and playwright Alexander Griboyedov, was an authentic Georgian tune, the very one to which Pushkin reputedly composed the poem.5 From the music alone there is no way of guessing that. Nothing about the song sounds the least bit exotic. The diatonic melody seems perfectly ordinary to Western ears, Glinka’s harmonization humdrum, the prosody straightforward. Already we have a warning that musical orientalism is a matter not of authenticity but of conventions—conventions that had not yet been established by 1831.
Now compare Balakirev’s setting, published under the actual title “Georgian Song” a generation later in 1865 (see example 9.2). It has Eastern export written all over it. The melody is full of close little ornaments and melismas with telltale augmented seconds (even though the singer—that is, the speaker of the lines—is not supposed to be an oriental), and the beautiful woman has evidently brought her band with her. It is easy to find authentic recorded prototypes for this setting, much as we can imagine Balakirev, who spent a good deal of time in the Caucasus, encountering them in situ. Folkways FE 4535 (“Folk Music of the USSR,” compiled by Henry Cowell) has two conveniently consecutive cuts, the first of which exemplifies the melodic style, the second the oriental orchestra with its characteristic drum pattern.6
The interesting thing is that these “prototypes” are Armenian, with strong Turkish and Persian influences, not Georgian. Georgian folk music does not sound anything like them, or like Balakirev’s “Georgian Song,” and obviously Balakirev knew that perfectly well. But he wanted us to get the point, and that meant sacrificing real verisimilitude—pardon the pleonasm—to something higher, or at least more legible—what Russians call khudozhest-vennaya pravda, “artistic truth.” The critic Hermann Laroche, pondering the matter of what I have called biblical orientalism, put it this way: “In what does [Alexander] Serov’s masterly characterization of the extinct Assyrians [in his opera Judith] consist, or [Anton] Rubinstein’s of the ancient Semites [in his “sacred opera,” The Tower of Babel]! Obviously in one thing only: the composers have successfully reproduced our subjective idea of the Assyrians and the Semites”—as Balakirev reproduced his contemporaries’ idea of the contemporary orient, indeed as romantic composers, increasingly a rare breed in Russia, usually did.7
EXAMPLE 9.1. Glinka, Ne poy, krasavitsa (1831)
So far we have had an example that was authentic but not exotic, and one that was exotic but not authentic. It is the latter that we take for verisimilar, hence “truly” oriental. But Balakirev’s setting has little going for it except its seeming verisimilitude, an infusion of stereotyped local color that connotes little and does nothing to redeem what might seem a negligent reading of the poem.8 If that seems an injustice, compare a third setting of Pushkin’s poem, the most famous one, written by Rachmaninoff another generation later in 1892 (the same year as the Prelude in C(t minor), when the composer, a prodigy of nineteen, had just been hatched from the Moscow Conservatory (see example 9.3).
EXAMPLE 9.2. Balakirev, Ne poy, krasavitsa (1865)
Rachmaninoff’s setting is far less verisimilar than Balakirev’s and makes no pretense at authenticity. Yet with hardly an augmented second it speaks the sign language of Russian orientalism in a highly developed form, adding a great deal to our experience of the poem. We can trace that language back to Glinka (though not to his “Georgian Song”), passing optionally through Balakirev but necessarily through Borodin and Prince Igor, which was first performed only two years before Rachmaninoff composed his song. The young composer was evidently emulating the opera, although the opera was not the source of the tradition in which he was participating. Rachmaninoff was also probably responding to Balakirev’s setting, to judge from the way the voice, on its first entrance, dramatically interrupts the melody with a recitative, interpreting the first line of the poem, with its request not to sing, as an actual command to leave off singing.
His setting also has conspicuous melismas: not little decorative authentic-sounding ones like Balakirev’s, which sound strange in the mouth of the poet-speaker, but great sweeping ones that have a motivic consistency deriving from the opening neighbor-note. The neighbor-note motif is usually sounded in pairs or in threes, with ties that connect resolution tones to the next preparation tone. The result is a syncopated undulation that is sounded in conjunction with two other distinctive musical gestures to complete a characteristic semi-otic cluster: a drone (or drum) bass such as even Glinka had suggested, and—most important of all—a chromatic accompanying line that in this case steadily descends along with the sequences of undulating melismas.
EXAMPLE 9.3. Rachmaninoff, Ne poy, krasavitsa, Op. 4, no. 4 (1892)
To anyone privy to the tradition on which it depends, the song’s opening ritornello quite specifically conjures up the beautiful oriental maiden the song is about—not the one singing, but the one remembered. And the ritornello also tells us that she was the poet-singer’s erotic partner; for the cluster of signs (undulating melisma, chromatic accompanying line, drone) evokes not just the East, but the seductive East that emasculates, enslaves, renders passive. In a word, it signifies the promise of the experience of nega, a prime attribute of the orient as imagined by Russians. The word, originally spelled with a “yat” (a vowel confiscated by the Bolsheviks after the revolution) and drawled voluptuously by those who know that fact, is usually translated as “sweet bliss,” but it really connotes gratified desire, a tender lassitude (or “mollitude,” to rely once more on Nabokov’s vocabulary).9 In opera and song, nega often simply denotes S-E-X à la russe, desired or achieved.
The syncopated undulation itself is iconically erotic, evoking languid limbs, writhing torsos, arching necks. The drum bass and the melismas are an echo of the stereotyped musical idiom Balakirev had primitively evoked, nega’s necessary ticket of admission (for Russian necks do not arch and writhe). It is the descending chromatic line—neither iconically nor stylistically verisimilar, but a badge worn by exotic sexpots all over Europe (only connect with a certain Habanera)—that completes the picture of the seductive East. The climax of the song—undeniably a climax despite the soft dynamic—occurs at the setting of the last two lines, when the chromatic line is suddenly transferred from the middle of the texture to the voice part, at the top. It is by no means a unique or original touch; in fact it is rather typical. Indeed, everything about Rachmaninoff’s setting is both typical and extreme. No masterpiece of the genre, it lays the nega on with a trowel, what with the threefold sequential repetition of the undulating melisma, and particularly with a chromatic line that descends through almost an entire chromatic scale. When it comes to suggesting nega, less can definitely be more.
HAVING ARRIVED at Rachmaninoff’s locus classicus by way of antecedent settings of Pushkin’s “Georgian Song,” let us turn around and press back again in time, to discover the origins of the particular orientalist trope it embodies. Borodin has been already named as immediate precursor. Before getting to Prince Igor it will be useful to have a look at a little-known spinoff from the opera, a posthumously published song entitled “Arabian Melody” (Arabskaya melodiya), composed in 1881 at the request of the contralto Darya Leonova. It is a harmonization of a “khasid” (qasida), a North African improvisatory vocal solo to the text of a classical Arabic poem, which the composer found in a book his librarian friend Stasov procured for him, Alexandre Christianowitsch’s Esquisse historique de la musique arabe aux temps anciens (Cologne, 1863). In the source the melody is labeled “Insiraf Ghrib,” meaning a fast section from a qasida performed in the evening. Notwithstanding, Borodin’s setting is a slow one, marked Andante amoroso (alternating, it is true, with piano ritornelli marked Allegro passionato). The text, about the lover’s sweet death in love, is Borodin’s paraphrase of Christianowitsch’s French translation of the Arabic original. Translated into suitably archaic Italian, it could pass for a madrigal text. The melody is another oriental tune, like that of Glinka’s “Georgian Song,” that happens to coincide with a normal Western diatonic mode and so does not immediately give away its origin to the Western ear. What marks Borodin’s song as “oriental” is the snaking chromatic accompanying line, so obviously related to the one in Rachmaninoff’s “Georgian Song.” While the song is often performed by male singers (notably Boris Christoff in a well-known recording), it is important to keep in mind that it was written for a contralto; the voice range, too, was a marker, as we shall see. Borodin would never have composed such a song for a bass (see example 9.4).
Where Rachmaninoff’s chromatic line made a straightforward descent, Borodin’s is serpentine, adding a new dimension of erotic undulation. The point at which the change of direction takes place is very significant. The line descends to the fifth degree, then passes chromatically up to the sixth, then down again through the same interpolated half step, joined now by a middle voice that proceeds to repeat the same double pass twice, not counting a couple of extra undulations between the fifth degree and its chromatic upper neighbor. When the climax is reached (“But even death is sweet to me, the death born of passion for thee”), the rhythm of the undulation is excited into diminution and begins to spread out to neighboring scale degrees, ontogeny thus foreshadowing phylogeny, as we know from Rachmaninoff.
EXAMPLE 9.4. Borodin, “Arabskaya melodiya,” second strophe
The reversible chromatic pass between the fifth and sixth degrees is in fact the essential nega undulation, as a little snatch from the Chorus of Polovtsian Maidens at the beginning of Prince Igors second act will prove (see example 9.5). Brief as it is, this little passage summarizes with great economy everything we have learned thus far: the text is about creature comfort and gratified desire (in this case the image of nocturnal dew following a sultry day is acting as nega-surrogate); the sopranos contribute the melodic undulation, here a sort of pedal; the altos contribute the harmonic undulation, from the fifth degree to the sixth and back through a chromatic passing tone each way; and the orchestral bass instruments supply the drum/drone. Even the ritornello at the end is a marker, for it is played on the English horn. We will encounter that timbre again.
Now we are equipped to get the full message from the most famous music in all of Prince Igor (see example 9.6). The famous “Polovetsian Dance” displays the whole cluster—melodic undulations tied over the beat, a chromatic pass between degrees 6 and 5, pedal drum/drone, English horn timbre—just as they are displayed in the “oriental” theme that confronts a Russian one directly in the “musical picture” In Central Asia. The theme makes its first appearance, predictably enough, as a long English horn solo. Illustrated here is the final statement, in which the chromatic inner voice grows to encompass a whole scale, as in Rachmaninoff’s modeling of it, and is climactically repeated in an outer voice, in this case the bass (see example 9.7). It was a telling touch—and again, a typical one—to extend the length of each phrase to five bars through one extra languorous undulation (“please, just once more . . .”). What it tells us is why those hedonistic Central Asians were simply no match for the purposefully advancing Russians.
EXAMPLE 9.5. Borodin, Prince Igor, no. 7 (ten bars before figure 2)
EXAMPLE 9.6. Borodin, Prince Igor, no. 17 (four bars after figure 2, orchestra only)
EXAMPLE 9.7. Borodin, In Central Asia, mm. 175-92
What I have been calling the “markers” have long been recognized as essential features of Borodin’s personal style (compare Ravel’s A la manière de Borodine for piano [1913], where they all pass in review). They did achieve what we might call maximum strength in Borodin—who, by the way, though the illegitimate son of a Georgian nobleman, was born in St. Petersburg and never visited the orient—but they were none of them his invention. Compare the beginning of the Maidens’ Dance from act 2 of Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon, composed in 1871 after Lermontov’s famous romantic poem set in Georgia (see example 9.8). It, too, could be titled “A la manière de Borodine.” Or, conversely, Ravel’s piano piece could have been entitled “A la manière de Rubinstein.”
But both would have been misnomers; the origin of the style, as of so much in Russian music, lay in Glinka—in particular in the third act of Ruslan and Lyudmila, the opera Glinka based on the mock epic Pushkin had written between 1817 and 1820 during the first flush of Russian orientalism. The setting of Glinka’s third act is the magical garden of the sorceress Naína, who keeps a chorus of sirens handy to enchant errant heroes. It goes without saying that these seductresses sing oriental tunes of promiscuous origin. Their first is called the Persian chorus, and it set the tone for all the exercises in nega-evocation that we have been examining (see example 9.9). Here is the fount and origin, the passage that established the voluptuous undulation and the chromatic pass as emblems to be displayed by oriental singing or dancing girls in future operas and songs. Glinka claimed the melody was truly a Persian one that he heard sung by a Persian-born secretary in the St. Petersburg Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The claim must be true, because Glinka was not the only one who used the tune; it also figures in the middle section of Johann Strauss’s Persischer Marsch, first played in Vienna’s Volksgarten in December 1864 to welcome the visiting Shah. To compare Strauss’s boisterous march with Glinka’s dreamy chorus is revealing: what made the chorus a marker of nega and a model for generations to come were the elements Glinka brought to it, not any “oriental” essence. As a recent impassioned authority has observed, “Orientalism overrode the Orient.”10
EXAMPLE 9.8. Rubinstein, Demon, act 2, Maidens’ Dance
EXAMPLE 9.9 Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila, no. 12, mm. 93-112
NOWHERE is this dictum better corroborated than in the archetypal embodiment of oriental luxuriance in Russian opera: Ratmir, the first of Naína’s victims in the magic garden. He is an easy mark. One of three suitors in quest of the abducted Lyudmila, Ratmir is a young Khan of the Khazars, a nomadic Turkic tribe, famous for its eighth-century conversion to Judaism, and indigenous to areas lately acquired as of 1817 by the Russian empire. Pushkin introduces him as being “full of passionate daydreams,” and that is why he fails in his quest: he simply cannot keep his mind on it. The fact that he is cast as a trouser role for a contralto has been ascribed to the composer’s insistence on writing a major part for Anna Vorob’yova, the singer who made a sensation in the trouser role of Vanya the orphan boy in Glinka’s first opera, A Life for the Tsar. But the contralto timbre also symbolized the torpid and feminized East.
Ratmir’s big aria in act 3 of Ruslan shows him literally torpid, wandering into Naína’s garden in a state of exhaustion, complaining that “sultry heat has replaced the shade of night,” and longing for the sweet bliss of sleep. At this point he is musically characterized by a pedal bass, by the melismas he sings, and by an ornate English horn obbligato—in other words, by the trappings of local color. The melody is supposedly a Tatar (i.e., Mongol) tune Glinka had learned from the great seascape painter Ivan Aivazovsky; a near relative of it figures in David’s Le Désert (see example 9.10).
This is obviously no characterization of a hero. It is the portrait of a loser, and so will the same set of markers characterize the ill-fated Georgian Prince Sinodal thirty years later in Rubinstein’s Demon. Though a traditional tenor, Sinodal becomes an honorary contralto, emasculated by his Ratmirish melismas and the pedal bass. Note, too, the extraordinary economy of the English horn obbligato, which dooms the singer as lover even before he opens his mouth (see example 9.11). When the bass moves it does so in order to reestablish the tonic through the chromatic pass we have learned by now to associate with nega. This, too, is something Sinodal shares with Ratmir—though not in the example we have so far examined.
EXAMPLE 9.10. Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila, no. 14 (Ratmir’s cavatina)
For all his impotence Ratmir is a noble character, and to Glinka that meant Ratmir’s big musical number had to get the full cantabile-cabaletta treatment. We have seen the opening cantabile. Now for the cabaletta, in which Ratmir has one of those “passionate daydreams” of his, mopishly recalling his harem. It has raised many eyebrows, this cabaletta, for it is cast as no oriental dance but in what Glinka frankly marks “Tempo di valse.” Glinka’s most recent biographer wrings his hands over the “stylistic non-sequitur” here, by which “the languishing oriental, approaching the height of passion, is converted into a waltzing Westerner.” “Glinka,” he concludes, “betrayed Ratmir badly in Ruslan and Lyudmila,” and this proves that he was “simply unable to express real physical passion in music.”11
Is “real physical passion” what Ratmir is all about? Of course not. Ratmir is an avatar of nega, the passive, feminine embodiment or enjoyment of “molles délices,” as Nabokov has it.12 Let us recall what constitutes nega in music at a minimum: tied or syncopated melodic undulations, and the reversible chro matic pass between the fifth and sixth degrees of the scale. And now look at the offending waltz—in which the text, not by Pushkin but by a poetaster named Valerian Shirkov, makes a rare, explicit reference to nega. Leaving that term untranslated so that it may incorporate all its associations, the words are these: “A wondrous dream of quickening love rouses the fire in my blood; tears scald my eyes, my lips burn with nega” Susan McClary might wish me to say something at this point about autoeroticism,13 but I will be true to my promise and let the music do the speaking (see example 9.12).
EXAMPLE 9.11. Rubinstein, Demon, act 1, scene 3 (Sinodal’s arioso)
EXAMPLE 9.12. Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila, no. 14 (cabaletta)
The voice part is nothing but syncopated neighbors and appoggiaturas that could easily be extended into Rachmaninoff’s quintessential oriental melisma, and the English horn does nothing but signal the chromatic pass, immediately reversed in the bass so that it becomes a harmonic undulation—a veritable mug. Far from playing the character false, the waltz is another locus classicus of oriental languor seen through European—well, Eurasian—eyes. Again, orientalism overrides the orient. Putting the two halves of Ratmir’s aria together we have a complete catalog of the devices that would be mined by Russian composers bent on depicting that languor all the way to Rachmaninoff and beyond.
And now for the climax. Ratmir never achieves it; it had to wait until Prince Igor, in which the ultimate Ratmir surrogate finally made his/her appearance. Konchakovna is unique in the annals of opera: an ingénue role played by the throatiest contralto imaginable. Ratmir’s voice range, as we see, has by now become an indispensable signifier. In the act 2 love duet with Vladimir, Igor’s son (the ostensible heroic tenor), her voice coils all around and beneath his to startling effect. The falconet is indeed “entoiled by means of a fair maiden”—and emasculated. Nor had there ever been such an emphasis on raised fifths, flattened sixths, and chromatic passes in general. Rather than compile a tedious list, let us just note a few salient points.
At the very beginning of the excerpt (see example 9.13), which is cast over the harmony of the dominant ninth, Konchakovna’s part obsessively applies the flattened sixth to the fifth while Vladimir, having gone through a variety of other passes, finally adopts hers at the fermata; she then turns around and makes another pass at him, from raised fifth to sixth, while he yelps in response, his répliques narrowed down to the sign of chromatic passing in its minimal, most concentrated form—what we might call the very morpheme of nega. The orchestral bass meanwhile gives out one of those complete chromatic descents that signal nega at full sensual strength. Again, she entoils him and he replicates her pass; they reach their first climax on a question (“Will you/I soon call me/you your/my wife?”), supported in the orchestra by a prolonged harmony rooted on the flat sixth, which finally makes affirmative—indeed climactic—progress through the dominant to the tonic. The change from question to affirmative reply itself takes the form, for Vladimir, of a chromatic inflection (the earlier sustained high A
now trumped by sustained high A
). And while they hold their final notes the orchestra harps repeatedly on the hypnotic undulation of fifth degree and flattened sixth. Vladimir is now thoroughly lost: Ratmirized, his manhood negated, rendered impotent with respect to his (and his father’s) mission, he must be left behind. No less than Ratmir, he has been the victim of a sinister oriental charm.
AND NOW, a few parting ironies. While something that could certainly be indulged for its own sake as soft porn, the orientalist trope associated with nega—a flexible amalgam of ethnic verisimilitude, sensual iconicity, characteristic vocal or instrumental timbres and Glinka-esque harmony—nevertheless functioned within the Victorian conventions of its time. In most of the examples discussed (and in any number of others) nega, associated with the orient, is held up as a degenerate counterpart to more manly virtues associated with Russians. It marked the other—marked it, in fact, for justified conquest.
With this in mind, a list of the Russian compositions through which Sergey Diaghilev and his ballet company conquered Paris in their first two saisons russes (1909-10) makes droll reading. Besides the Polovetsian Act from Prince Igor, they include the “Apparition of Cleopatra” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera-ballet Mlada: the Dances of the Persian Slave Girls from Musorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina (presented, like the Mlada music, in an omnium gatherum choreographed by Mikhail Fokine under the title “Cléopâtre”); the Arabian Dance from Ruslan and Lyudmila, presented as part of another Fokine salade russe entitled “Le Festin”; Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, choreographed by Fokine to a murder-in-the-harem scenario by Alexander Benois; and Stravinsky’s Firebird, the first original ballet Diaghilev ever commissioned. Clearly, nega was having a field day in Paris, and Stravinsky’s first ballet was created in part to supply a new infusion of semi-Asiatic exotica-cum-erotica, the sex lure that underpinned Diaghilev’s incredible success.
EXAMPLE 9.13. Borodin, Prince Igor, no. 12 (duet), eighteen bars after figure 3 to the end
Of course, nega had a meaning for the French vastly different from what it meant to the Russians. For the French it meant Russia, for to them Russia was East and Other. The heavy emphasis on oriental luxus in his early repertory was something Diaghilev had calculated coldly, one could even say cynically. It accounts for the disproportionate popularity of Russian musical orientalia in the West to this day, and for the notion (abetted, of course, by Stasov’s influential propaganda) that it was one of the main modes of Russian musical expression, if not (next to folklore-quoting) the dominant one. The ploy eventually held Diaghilev captive, preventing him from presenting to the West the musical artifacts of Europeanized Russia, beginning with Chaikovsky’s operas and ballets, with which he personally identified. That Russia has always been despised in the West as inauthentic. It is one more reason why Chaikovsky, who outside of one little dance in The Nutcracker and one little aria in his opera lolanta never mined the orientalist vein (and who alone among the major Russians has therefore gone practically unmentioned in this chapter), is still considered somehow less Russian—ergo, less valuable—than Musorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov or Glinka.
And yet, as we have had ample opportunity to observe, the orientalist trope comprises far more than ethnic verisimilitude, and Chaikovsky, once this is realized, turns out to have been by no means immune to its lure. He made telling and (by now, to us) obvious recourse to it, quite early in his career, in the love themes from Romeo and Juliet (1869; revised, 1870, 1880), written just as the composer was getting over his infatuation with the soprano Désirée Artôt, the one woman known to have aroused his sexual interest, who had disappointed him by marrying the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos.
The frank sensual iconicity of this music is often remarked. Usually it is the throbbing, panting horn counterpoint that is so recognized; but the themes evoke nega just as surely by means of the strongly marked chromatic pass between the fifth and sixth degrees, and the first love theme (the one generally associated with Romeo) features, on its first appearance, the equally marked English horn timbre (example 9.14a). Juliet responds to Romeo’s advance by mirroring his descending chromatic pass with an ascending one that is then maintained as an oscillation (or better, perhaps, an osculation), while Romeo’s ecstatic reentry is prepared by reversing the pass and linking up with the striking augmented-sixth progression that had launched Chaikovsky’s “balcony scene” to begin with (example 9.14b). At the climax, delayed until the recapitulation, Chaikovsky enhances carnality by adding one more chromatic pass at the very zenith of intensity to introduce the last full statement from which the love music will then gradually subside (example 9.14c). Steamier than this Russian music would not get until Scriabin discovered Tristan, a good three decades later.
As to the source of the steam, we have corroboration from the best of witnesses. In a marvelously cruel letter to Chaikovsky (1/13 December 1869), Balakirev, the inspirer and the dedicatee of Chaikovsky’s “Overture-fantasia” and of course a connoisseur nonpareil of musical orientalism, reacted to the four main themes of the work, which Chaikovsky had sent him for inspection while composition was still in progress. Here is what he had to say about the big love theme:
EXAMPLE 9.14 Chaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet (1869 version)
. . . simply enchanting. I often play it and have a great wish to kiss you for it. It has everything: nega, and love’s sweetness, and all the rest. ... It appears to me that you are lying all naked in the bath and that Artot-Padilla herself is rubbing your tummy with hot scented suds. I have just one thing to say against this theme: there is little in it of inner spiritual love, only the physical, passionate torment (colored just a wee bit Italian). Really now, Romeo and Juliet are not Persian lovers, but European. . . . I’ll try to clarify this by example. I’ll cite the first theme that comes to mind in which, in my opinion, love is expressed more inwardly: the second, At-major, theme in Schumann’s overture The Bride of Messina. 14
Indeed, Schumann’s long wet noodle of a love theme, which reaches no climax, does seem as if by design to moderate the orientalism of Chaikovsky’s, diluting the chromatic passes and replacing the lascivious English horn with a chaste clarinet.
Balakirev’s letter confirms the surmise that Chaikovsky used the orientalist trope metonymically, to conjure up not the East as such but rather its exotic sex appeal. The little tease about Artot is provocative indeed, precisely because it is so plausible. If, as Balakirev seems to suggest, Chaikovsky had cast himself as Romeo to Artôt’s Juliet, then the theme becomes a self-portrait. And if so, then it is another instance where, in a manner oddly peculiar to the Russian orientalist strain (and one that, unhappily, can give encouragement to essentialist assumptions), the eastward gaze is simultaneously a look in the mirror.
1 The genre had a quaint eighteenth-century forerunner in Fevey (1786), a singspiel by Vasiliy Pashkevich to a libretto by Catherine the Great, which sports a chorus of “Kalmyk” (Mongolian) kumiss-drinkers.
2 “Dvadtsat’ pyat’ let russkogo iskusstvo: Nasha Muzïka,” Vestnik Yevropï (six installments, 1882-83), reprinted in V. V. Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya v tryokh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 522-68; the discussion of the four points is on pp. 525-29. For a translation, see Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), pp. 390-94.
3 The Song of Igor’s Campaign, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 70.
4 For the complete list see Georgiy Ivanov, Russkaya poeziya v otechestvennoy muzïke, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1966), p. 288.
5 Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), p. 47.
6 Side 3, bands 5 (“Machkal,” duduks instrumental) and 6 (Shirak Folk Dance with Tara).
7 Hermann Laroche (German Larosh), “‘Der Thurm zu Babel’ Rubinshteyna,” in Larosh, Muzïkal’no-kriticheskiye stat’i (St. Petersburg: Bessel, 1894), p. 117.
8 “Might seem,” since on deeper reflection it might also seem a manifestation of a characteristic ambivalence that Russian composers (unlike French or German one) felt toward “the Eastern theme.” Russia was a contiguous empire in which Europeans, living side by side with “orientals,” identified (and intermarried) with them far more than in the case of the other colonial powers; and, as we have already learned from Stasov, oriental coloration was one of the ways by which the composers of the “New Russian school” strove to distinguish themselves from those of Western Europe. It was simultaneously and ambiguously a self-constructing and an other-constructing trait. This irony will find echo at the end of the chapter.
9 See Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, trans, from the Russian, with a commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pantheon, 1964), vol. 2, p. 186, where Nabokov speaks of the word’s “emphasis on otiose euphoria and associations with softness, luxuriousness [and] tenderness.” As an alternative he proposes “dulcitude.”
10 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 196.
11 David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 223.
12 Eugene Onegin, vol. 2, p. 186.
13 Compare her remarks on Don Jose’s “Flower Song” from Carmen, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 59ff.
14 Sergey Lyapunov, ed., Perepiska M. A. Balakireva s P. I. Chaikovskim (St. Petersburg: Zimmerman, 1912), pp. 49-50.