PART I
Too many people in the past have been terrifyingly certain about what Jewish music is or should be. . . . This cataclysmic string of definitions warns us not to define.
—Alex Ross (1995)
CHAPTER 1
TO BEGIN WITH, Russian national consciousness was an aspect of Westernization. The same eighteenth century that witnessed the Petrine reforms and their aftermath—the construction of an Italianate “window on the West” atop the Neva marshes at the cost of untold thousands of indentured lives, the adoption of “German” technology and the quasi-militarization of civilian life in the name of the bureaucratic “service state,” the importation and imitation of foreign artifacts of every description—was also the century in which the cultivated Russian elite first established a national literary language distinct from the archaic ecclesiastical idiom, first wrote up the national history, first began to look upon the livers of those indentured lives as repositories of a tradition worth knowing and preserving. At a time when the inhabitants of the Russian countryside thought of themselves simply as “Christian folk” (krest’ yanye) or “the Orthodox” (pravoslavnïye) and would never have dreamed of claiming their barin (the owner of the land to which they were confined by law) as their countryman, the most enlightened (that is, Enlightened) and Westernized barins were already thinking of their “souls,” together with themselves, as constituting the narod, the Russian “people.” In the words of Prince Antioch Dmitriyevich Kantemir (1709-44), Russia’s first belletrist in the modern Western sense and author of an influential “Letter on Nature and Humanity,” noble and serf were united by “the same blood, the same bones, the same flesh.”1
This expanded, as it were “verticalized” sense of blood kinship was a revolutionary notion in an age that had traditionally formed political solidarities entirely along class-based “horizontal” lines—lines that we would call international—of family, clienthood, and personal fealty. Nor did vertical political relations necessarily imply nationhood. When Immanuel Kant, along with the rest of the faculty of the University of Königsberg and the assembled local nobles and burghers, took a compulsory oath of allegiance to Tsar Paul I after the Russian army had annexed the city and its environs to the contiguous territory of Russia, the great philosopher had no sense that by becoming a Russian subject he had become a Russian. Nor do we. To become a subject, an oath would do. Being a Russian, like being a noble, required the right blood.
The idea of a national identity vouchsafed by “blood, bones, and flesh”—read: common language, customs, religion, and history—was one of the many imported concepts Westernized Russia made her own in her ambitious bid for recognition on the world (well, the European) stage. Only a nation, after all, can be a nation among nations. Not for nothing, the Moldavian-born Prince Kantemir was a diplomat by profession, and spent his last dozen years—his “Letter”-writing years—abroad as the Tsarina’s ambassador in England and France. And as there can hardly be any sense of the self without a sense of the other, there could be no Russian nationalism until there was Russian cosmopolitanism. “And what should they know of Russia,” to paraphrase Kipling, “who only Russia know?”
It was in this urbane, aristocratic spirit that the “discovery of the folk” took place in eighteenth-century Russia, alongside similar discoveries in England (Cowper), France (Rousseau), and Germany (Herder). Among its protagonists was Nikolai Alexandrovich Lvov (1751-1803), a noble landowner and world traveler with multifarious artistic and scientific interests and the leisure to indulge them all. As a member of both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts, and as the maintainer of a famous artistic salon, Lvov cultivated a wide circle of distinguished friends, among them leading poets (Gavrila Derzhavin, Vasiliy Kapnist, both his brothers-in-law), artists (Dmitriy Levitsky, Vladimir Borovikovsky), and musicians (Giuseppe Sarti, the Empress Catherine’s protégé). As an architect he upheld the neoclassical conventions of his time, but in literature he was a pioneering challenger to neoclassicism in the name of “sentiment,” detecting a great reservoir of spontaneous, great-hearted sincerity in the Russian peasant, whose peculiar traits defined the unique national character and whose expressive culture, of which Lvov was in his day a matchless connoisseur, could provide artists of the high culture with worthy models for emulation.
Lvov set an example for such appropriation in a verse letter to a friend and fellow littérateur, unpublished until 1933, extolling the Russian national character:
Zaletél sokol / uzh za óblako . . .
Chto za óblako / luchezárnoye,
Luchezárnoye / inozémnoye,
Lyubo tám tebe? / —v molod
kh letakh
Na zamórskoy krai / mï v rayók glyadim,
Bleskom ráduzhnïm / ya prel’shchálsya sam;
No iz zá morya / vse domóy glyadel,
Net utékh pryamïkh, / mne kazálos’, tam,
Gde nel’zyá imi / podelít’sya s kem!
Gde prolít’ nel’zya / zhivotvórnïy dukh
Schast’ya rússkogo / v nedrï rússkiye.
S kem podérish’ tam / bogat’rsku rech’?
S kem otvázhnuyu / gryanesh’ pésenku?
Ispolínskoy dukh / nashikh ótchichets
Vo chuzhíkh zemlyakh / lyudyam kázhetsya
Sverkh”yestéstvennïm / isstupléniyem!
Da i kák yemu / ne kazát’sya tak
Vo chuzhíkh zemlyakh / vsyo po nítochke
Na bezmén slova, / na arshín shagi.
Tam sidyát sidyat, / da podúmayut,
A podúmavshi / otdokhnút’ poydut,
Otdokhnúvshi uzh, / trubku vkuryat
I zadúmavshis’ / rabotát’ nachnut.
Net ni pésenki, / net ni shútochki.
A u náshego / pravoslávnogo
Delo vsyákoye / mezhdu rúk gorit.
Razgovór yego / gromovóy udar,
Ot rechéy yego / iskrï splyutsya,
Po sledám za nim / koromslom pïl’!2
The hawk flew off beyond the cloud . . .
Such a radiant cloud,
Radiant, exotic,
You like it there? —When we are young
We look at land beyond the sea as if at heaven,
I myself was attracted by its rainbow gleam;
But from beyond the sea I kept looking homeward.
There are no unmixed pleasures, so it seemed to me,
Where there is no one to share them,
Where the animating spirit of Russian joy
Cannot diffuse itself in the Russian midst!
With whom there can one hold forth in speech heroic?
With whom strike up a song so bold?
The giant spirit of our forefathers
In foreign lands strikes people
As some sort of unnatural frenzy!
And how else could it appear to them?
In foreign lands all goes by design;
Words are weighed, steps are measured.
There they sit and sit, consider well,
And having considered, rest awhile,
And having rested, smoke a pipe,
And only then, so heedfully, they go to work.
They have no songs, neither do they joke.
But with our Orthodox, meanwhile,
Any undertaking blazes in his hands.
His words are thunderclaps,
From his speech sparks fly,
In his wake he leaves a cloud of dust!
The remarkable thing about this doggerel is that not only does it sing the praises of folk song, it is itself an imitation folk song, one of the very earliest representatives of what would be one of the commonest nineteenth-century poetic genres in Russia. Beyond the appropriation of folk imagery (the soaring hawk, a fixture of peasant wedding songs) and the evocation of folk antiquities (the bogatïri, heroic warriors celebrated in the venerable bïlina, Russia’s then recently recovered oral epos), Lvov demonstratively cast his verse in a meter endemic to the wedding song, the type regarded by connoisseurs of his generation as the most ancient and the most indigenous of all folk poetic genres, consisting of pentasyllabic hemistichs, each with a single tonic accent on the third syllable. You could sing Lvov’s poem to the tune of either of the wedding choruses in Glinka’s operas (the bridesmaids’ “Razgulyálasya, razliválasya” in A Life for the Tsar, act 3; “Lei’ taínstvennïy, upoítel’nïy!” in Ruslan and Lyudmila, act 1) that marked a musical epoch some decades after Lvov’s decease (example 1.1).
If he called it anything at all, Lvov would merely have called this meter a pesennïy razmer (song meter). A few decades later, when in the brief heyday of Russian romanticism folk song imitation was practiced on a grand scale, the meter would be christened the kol’tsovskiy stikh after Alexey Koltsov (1809-42), the premier lyricist of the early Russian romance.3 Lvov’s foreshadowing of Koltsov’s technique is a remarkable early testimony to the new status of the folk song (narodnaya pesnya) in Russian letters, and to its cultural meaning, coeval and coextensive with that of the emergent concept of narod itself.
EXAMPLE 1.1
a. A Life for the Tsar, act 3
b. Ruslan and Lyudmila, act 1
Lvov’s activities on behalf of folk lyric and folk epos took many forms. Macpherson-like, he confected an original bïlina in tonically stressed free verse about the bogatïr Dobrinya Nikitich (although unlike Macpherson he never tried to fool anyone with it). He also collaborated with Yevstigney Ipat’yevich Fomin (1761-1800), a cannoneer’s son who was far and away the ablest native-born Russian art composer of his generation, on a singspiel called Postal Coachmen at the Relay Station (Yamshchiki na podstave, 1787).4 It opens with a pair of remarkable stylizations of the elaborately melismatic folk genre now universally known in Russia (following Lvov’s coinage) as protyazhnaya pesnya (literally, “drawn-out song”), in authentic responsorial style replete with intoner (zapevala) and heterophonic chorus (podgoloski). The second of them, of which the first strophe is given as illustration in example 1.2, was called “The Hawk Soars Aloft” (Vïsoko sokol letayet).
There is nothing else like these grave, stately, intricately woven choruses in the whole literature—an embryonic literature, admittedly—of eighteenth-century Russian art music. For the most part, when proles or serfs got to do their own thing on urban stages, it was apt to be a form of cute girlish ritual (bridal shower or yuletide fortune-telling) cast in Frenchified couplets with orchestral ritournelles or, for the boys, strophic fun and games. Yamshchiki na podstave contains a rather celebrated example of the latter. A newly wed driver named Timofey, spared from an unjust conscription that would have separated him from his bride, Fadeyevna, whips out his balalaika and dances with her, the two of them (joined later by another dancing driver and the chorus) singing lustily the while (example 1.3).
What has attracted so much notice to this little number is the fact that the dance song the characters sing, “A Birch Tree Rustled in the Field,” is familiar to concertgoers the world over thanks to Chaikovsky, who adopted it ninety years later (but not from Fomin, needless to say) for the finale of his Fourth Symphony—and also thanks (in Russia, anyway) to Balakirev, whose appropriation of it in his first Overture on Russian Themes (1858) is discussed in detail in chapter 8. Another precocious touch is the hocketing pizzicatos that represent the balalaika (even though Lvov’s libretto calls for a pit mandolin), anticipating by half a century the accompaniment to the oarsmen’s chorus in the first act of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar.
EXAMPLE 1.2. Fomin, Yamshchiki na podstave, second chorus (“The Hawk Soars Aloft”), first verse
Yet despite all these adumbrations of the standard Russian repertoire, there is nothing in the least “nationalistic” about Fomin’s use of folklore here. His trio is an essay in “low” style as befits low-born characters. Their lowness, in fact, is given explicit emphasis by Count Lvov’s libretto: they sing not in spontaneous exuberance but, at the behest of Timofey’s father, to entertain and thank the noble officer who has intervened as stand-in for the Empress (who could not appear as a character on stage) to straighten out their predicament, and they even adapt the words, at the end of the song, to praise him, the boys at that very moment going v prisyadku, into their “typically Russian” squatting dance (“Golden days have dawned, / the fair maid and her love have been reunited, / oh, yes indeed, reunited / by our kind commanders, / oh yes indeed, our commanders”).
This number falls right into line, then, with contemporary European representations of the folk. Lvov and Fomin’s Timofey, Fadeyevna and Yan’ka are not so far from Simon, Jane, and Luke, the trio of rustics in Thomson and Haydn’s The Seasons. For that is what folklore and folklorism represented in aristocratic eighteenth-century Europe: in a (Russian) word, kresfyanye, as (yet) opposed to narod—rustics, as opposed to “the people,” let alone “the nation.” (And to Chaikovsky, in Eugene Onegin, that is what they still represented a good ninety years later: witness the serfs’ choral songs and dances in scene 1, performed to entertain and thank the barïnya’, or even more to the point, the chorus of decorative berry-picking maidens in scene 3, which frames the turning point in the drama involving the opera’s “real people.”)
EXAMPLE 1.3. Fomin, Yamshchiki na podstave, no. 8 (trio with chorus), opening ritournelle and first strophe
Fomin’s opening choruses are utterly different from the trio, and from any previous artistic representation of the Russian folk. They are in a demonstratively “high” style—the highest at which any Russian opera before Glinka ever aimed (and what truly distinguished Glinka from his predecessors, it is no longer so novel to point out, was never his sheer Russianness but the height of his style). The choruses stoutly evince the new view—a proto-Herderian view—of the folk as unself-conscious bearer of native wisdom, lore in its most ancient and distinguished sense. The subject matter is literally lofty; the singers do not entertain their betters but gladden or console themselves; theirs is music not for listeners but for the singers’ sake—an artless art for the sake of art. And it is transcribed by the “art” composer, at his barin’s behest, with a reverence and an accuracy of observation that bespeaks magnanimous esteem.
It is an interesting question, though, just what it was that was being transcribed and transmitted here, as representative of the newly envisaged Russian popular spirit. One can only guess at accuracy of observation when the thing observed is no longer available for comparison, and no corroborating transcription of Vïsoko sokol exists. But the opening choruses in Yamshchiki na podstave remained for practically a century the single attempt in Russian art music to reflect in their fullness the traditions of Russian folk choral singing; and Lvov’s literary description of the custom, in the unsigned preface to his folk song anthology of 1790, would remain an isolated one until the publication of polyphonic field transcriptions of podgoloski by Yuliy Melgunov, a Moscow pianist who in the late 1870s “discovered” the heterophonic practices Lvov had already detailed and illustrated more than eighty years before. The leading Russian experts had by then forgotten what Lvov already knew, and rejected Melgunov’s transcriptions, which began appearing in 1879, as “barbarous.”5
The choral textures in the Lvov-Fomin choruses are astonishingly faithful, for the date, to those of genuine oral heterophony. Unlike virtually any choral texture by a composer in the cultivated tradition (even those who, in the next century, purported to base their styles on native folklore), these choruses of Fomin’s are genuinely heterophonic: at virtually no time can any one voice in them be unequivocally identified as the carrier of the main tune. The mode hovers between the minor (with cadences on the tonic) and the relative major (with cadences on the dominant), reproducing the salient characteristic of the so-called mutable mode (peremennïy lad) of genuine folklore. At the same time, aspects of the harmony show definite “Westernized” traits, such as the use of applied dominants and the harmonic minor. The easy assumption would be that, in the process of transcribing them, Fomin had corrected the podgoloski of his rural informants, adapting them to the habits of harmony and voice-leading he had picked up from old Padre Martini, with whom he had studied in Bologna on a government stipend in the early 1780s.
There are good reasons to distrust the easy assumption in this case. Fomin was born and died in St. Petersburg, Russia’s most—indeed, only— completely “European” city. Orphaned at an early age, he was admitted before his sixth birthday to the Foundling School of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, a charitable institution set up by Catherine II to foster a new generation of Europeanized Russian artists. His first teacher in composition there (beginning in 1777), was a German, Hermann Friedrich Raupach, who was then serving as harpsichordist and conductor in Catherine’s court orchestra. On his graduation in 1782 Fomin was packed right off to Italy, where he remained until the year before his collaboration with Lvov. Where would this utterly urbane composer have heard a Russian peasant choir? What rural informants could he—or Count Lvov himself—have counted on?
The answer is suggested by Lvov’s verse preface, in twenty-eight lines of flowery iambic hexameter, to the libretto, published in 1788 (without attribution) in the provincial town of Tambov. It is headed “An offering to his excellency [yego vïsokoblagorodiyu], S.M.M.” This personage is invoked (in the familiar second person) as a muse and described as a helpmeet, most concretely in lines 10-16:
No na golos stikhov naladit’ ya ne znayu
I dlya togo, muzh zvuchniy, prebegayu,
Plenyonnïy zvonkoyu ya shaikoyu tvoyey,
Soglasnoy peniyem, a vidom na razlade,
Yavlyayushchey organ s pokhmel’ya v maskarade,
Veli tï golosom chudesnoy shaike sey
Dat’ silu, zhizn’ i blesk komedii moyey.
But how to set my verse to tunes I know not
And for that, O sonorous sir, I turn to you,
Enthralled by your clarion crew,
Harmonious in song if motley to the eye,
To one intoxicated a seeming organ in disguise,
Command this splendid crew of yours with voice divine
To lend strength, life, and sheen to this comedy of mine.6
The manuscript of the libretto, which established Lvov’s authorship, was discovered in the archive of the neoclassical poet Derzhavin, Lvov’s brother-in-law, who in 1788 was governor of Tambov;7 and it is Derzhavin who provides the key to identifying “S.M.M.” His ode-parody, “In Praise of the Mosquito” (Pokhvala komaru), begins with an in-joke: “Pindar sang the praises of the eagle, Mitrofanov of the hawk” (Pindar vospevál orlá, I Mitrofánov sokolá). The poet himself provided an explanatory note identifying this Mitrofanov as “the famous singer who used to sing the Russian song ‘The Hawk Soared Aloft’ (Vïsoko sokol letal).”8
The one corroborating document concerning this far from “famous” figure is a letter from T. P. Kiryak, the director (“inspector”) of the Smolnïy Institute, St. Peterburg’s most fashionable finishing school, concerning the lavish festivities organized by Potyomkin on 27 April 1791 to commemorate the Empress Catherine’s recent victory over the Turks.9 The letter refers to “a certain court counselor named Mitrofanov,” who was to lead a group of “carolers” (pesel’niki) stationed aboard a “Chinese sloop” in a group of oarsmen’s songs.10 This Mitrofanov’s midgrade civil service rank (nadvornïy sovetnik or “court counselor”) entitled him precisely to the honorific visokoblagorodiye, as in Lvov’s affably ironic dedication to “S.M.M.” One may conclude from this that the two references are to the same individual.
Thus it transpires that at least one, and probably both, of the impressive choral protyazhnïye with which Fomin’s opera begins was imparted to Lvov and his musical collaborator by a local connoisseur, S. M. Mitrofanov by name, who was Lvov’s intimate acquaintance and (presumably, therefore) not too distantly his social inferior, who sang and possibly composed “Russian songs,” of which “The Hawk Soars Aloft” was the best known, and who led a group of local amateurs—evidently somewhat ragtag if well liked, as both Lvov’s reference (to a shaika, a “crew” or “gang”) and Kiryak’s (to pesel’niki, “choirfolk” or “carolers”) suggest —on whose participation in performances of his singspiel (which seem never to have taken place) Lvov was counting. These were the “informants”—not rural at all, as it turns out, and not particularly lofty, one suspects—on whose renditions Fomin’s high-toned transcriptions were based. It is even conceivable that Fomin worked from a score supplied by Mitrofanov, to which he may have added no more than the orchestral accompaniment.
If these surmises are correct, then Fomin probably did not adapt or adulterate his “folk” material to any great extent; in all likelihood it came to him from its urbanized source already highly adulterated. Or rather, less invidiously, its style already represented an urban redaction of a rural prototype, leading tones and all. The “enlightened” perspective from which the trained arranger approached the “natural” folk artifact predisposed him to expect, and to value, kindred rather than alien characteristics. Sought and prized was a reinforcement of a sense of kinship (“same blood, same bones, same flesh”), not a frisson of otherness.
The same can be said of many of the songs, and all of the arrangements, in Lvov’s “Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes” (Sobraniye narodnïkh russkikh pes en s ikh golosami) of 1790, an epoch-making compendium of one hundred Russian folk songs that was reissued in 1806 with 97 of the original songs plus 53 new ones for a total of 150.11 This glorious anthology, Lvov’s main claim to immortality, was inspired directly by Herder’s compilations of Volkslieder (1778-79), from the title of which Lvov adopted what is now the standard Russian term, narodnaya pesnya, for a “folk” (= Volk, — narod) song, rather than prostaya pesnya (“simple song”) or sel’skaya pesnya (“rustic song”).12 In an unsigned introduction to the original edition, Lvov called attention in self-conscious and fairly self-congratulatory (if also self-contradictory) fashion to its unprecedented fidelity to the peculiarities of the folk original, ending with a thinly veiled dig at all predecessors and rivals:
Anyone can easily see how hard it was to collect the tunes of these unwritten folk songs, dispersed over thousands of versts, and to notate them as often as not from the faulty singing of untrained singers. But no less difficult was the task of—without spoiling the folk melody—accompanying it with a correct bass, itself in the folk character. These tasks, however, have been accomplished with all possible diligence, and the bass has been set almost everywhere just so; and even very close to what an impeccable chorus [viz., Mitrofanov’s] might sing when performing these songs. Having thus preserved all the peculiarities of Russian folk singing, this collection possesses as well all the virtues of the original: its simplicity and integrity are uncompromised, whether by correcting the sometimes strange melodies or by embellishing them.13
These remarks had mainly to do with the contribution of Lvov’s shadowy collaborator, one “Ivan Prach” (d. ca. 1818), a Bohemian from Silesia whose original name was either Jan Bogumir Prac or Johann Gottfried Pratsch, who wrote the keyboard accompaniments to the tunes (as well as transcribing at least some or, likely, most of them).14 Pratsch settled in St. Petersburg sometime in the 1770s and supported himself as a piano teacher to fashionable girls, serving for many years on the faculty of the Smolnïy Institute. It has been suggested, as a way of accounting for his involvement with the song anthology, that Pratsch was music tutor to the Lvov family. In any event, only Pratsch’s name appeared on the title page of the collection, or in any of the editions appearing within his lifetime, which has led to some exaggeration of his role in selecting and organizing the contents. That job was Lvov’s entirely; the musical arranger was just a hired hand.
Pratsch’s work has received harsh judgment from musicians and scholars of a later time. His employer’s generous evaluation of his “basses” will evoke a smile from those familiar with this tradition of abuse. Yet Lvov’s remarks are amply justified by contemporaneous standards, and are even farsighted in their attempt to relate the matter of practical harmonization to the traditions of folk choral polyphony, even in its urbanized manifestations. Pratsch’s arrangements, moreover, naive as they may seem with their right-hand doubling of the voice and their “Alberti’s” and “murky’s” in the left, are much more than mere “basses.” They are convincingly artistic in a way that previous arrangements (i.e., those in Trutovsky’s collection, mentioned in n. 12, which did assume the form of a simple melody-plus-bass on two staves) were not.
In effect Pratsch transformed each narodnaya pesnya entrusted to him into a diminutive art song with a well-wrought if conventional keyboard accompaniment prefiguring the idiom of the so-called domestic romance (bitovoy romans) of the next generation, thus actively collaborating with the “folk,” in the spirit of the Enlightenment, to produce a new genre that purposely mediated or transcended the borders between genres (read: social classes).
The stylistic traits thus arrived at manifestly reflected the tastes of the intended audience—Pratsch’s pupils at the Smolniy, for example, for whom he elaborated several songs in variation sets, or Lvov’s literary circle. For thus catering to the haute bourgeoisie Pratsch has been roundly abused by later generations of scholars and musicians from standpoints by turns romantic, positivist, and Marxist-Leninist. Yet as much as folkloristically inclined musicians of the later nineteenth century, from Balakirev and Serov in the sixties to Lyadov in the nineties, may have railed against Pratsch in word or in musical deed, and however they may have striven for a more (by their lights) authentic harmonization, they all tacitly accepted his method of showcasing the native material with a decorative accompaniment for the pianoforte in the established European manner.
And that is because neither his aim nor theirs was purely (that is, merely) curatorial or documentary: the idea was to return what was the people’s to the people, to make the products of oral tradition available to the literate by allowing the music of the countryside to reach the parlor piano. The dissemination of a patriotic sort of aesthetic enjoyment was the object. Romantic collector-arrangers, beginning with the so-called pochvenniki (“men of the soil”) of the 1850s, could delude themselves that they were realizing the “inherent nature” of the folk product, or even its “soul,” and could debate endlessly the proper means toward such an end.15 But if such were truly their aim they would have kept their hands to themselves. What their quest for “the immutable primordial Russian folk song”16 was really after, and what it never occurred to Lvov or Pratsch to crave, was exoticism—fetishized difference.
It was not until the days of institutional field collecting within an explicitly “scientific” (that is, academic and anthropological) purview—the expeditions sponsored by Tsar Alexander III’s own Imperial Geographical Society in St. Petersburg (beginning in 1893), and those of the Musical Ethnographic Commission at Moscow University (around the turn of the century)—that Pratsch’s presentational format, and the aesthetic it implied, would be effectively challenged. The MEC publications were “phonographic,” representing the last word in hardware. They specialized in descriptive scores of what was termed podgolosochnoye mnogogolosiye (podgoloski polyphony). The IGS publications, in the interests of scientific chastity, eschewed accompaniments altogether, even those of peasant informants, and presented no more than a single-line melodic transcription. Ironically, of course, this was a considerable step backward from Lvov’s standards of fidelity to folk performance practice. The reduction to a single definitive line reflected an unconscious Utopian idealization.
Lvov and (following his instructions) Pratsch were not Utopians or idealists. In a seemingly artless but in fact quite sophisticated fashion, they were realists whose collection “enables us,” in Margarita Mazo’s shrewd estimation, “to glimpse the [actual] musical milieu and to sample the [actual] musical environment which nurtured Russian composers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” without cosmetic or ideological equivocation.17 The most immediate musical consequence of the Petrine reforms was the sudden mass transplantation of folk song, together with its singers, into Peter’s newly created metropolis on the Neva. It would be naive to expect that it would escape modification in the process of transplantation; and it would be just as prejudicially invidious to regard the modified or newly minted product as inauthentic as it would be so to regard the transplanted peasant or second-generation urban dweller who sang it.
Unlike their romantic successors, Lvov and Pratsch did not entertain such prejudices. They happily included in their anthology many examples of what today’s ethnographers call “literary songs,” army songs, and even rossiyskiye pesni, “Russian (-style) songs,” an early type of art song to a Russian text, dealing characteristically with “urban” sentiments like “the passion of love, previously almost ignored” (according to a contemporary witness) in song,18 and incorporating resonances from a wide variety of surrounding musics: “arias and songs from popular European operas, French minuets, Italian sicilianas, polonaises, etc.,” as Krader lists them in the introduction to the sixth edition (p. 7).
As Margarita Mazo, an exemplary postromantic ethnographer, emphasizes, these urban mongrels were not confined to the “literate” tradition. Widely disseminated in theaters, streets, and barracks, they joined the oral tradition and must necessarily have influenced genres that originated in that tradition, eventually even in villages.19 Thus Pratsch’s redactions (like Fomin’s in Yamshchiki na podstave) do not represent “simplifications . . . made to accomodate the songs to European metric and harmonic practice” as much as they “reflect urban singing traditions at the time.”20
There is every reason to suppose, in particular, that Pratsch’s notorious leading tones, long regarded as “Western” disfigurements, were endemic to the melodies in question at the time and in the place of their collection. If the concepts of purity that governed the study and collection of folklore during the romantic period were foreign to eighteenth-century (and late twentieth-century) collectors, still less did they ever constrain informants. Approaching their task without idealistic preconceptions, Lvov and Pratsch did not scruple (the somewhat grandiose rhetoric of the preface notwithstanding) to collect their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity—and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances (i.e., Lvov’s circle of artists, litterateurs, aristocratic dilettantes, not to mention “amateurs and relatives, who were forever singing in his house”),21 from earlier printed and manuscript sources, and even from popular singspiels.
The last point is especially significant. As many as forty songs known from seven eighteenth-century Russian operas and singspiels, by composers domestic and imported alike, appear in the collection.22 What is important to realize is that although the assumption (even by the editors of the sixth edition) has always been that the collection was the source from which the composers of the stage works drew the tunes, most of the stage works in fact predate the first edition of the collection, and the relationship between borrower and lender is more likely the reverse.23 The collection thus contains an untold number of what can only be described as musical “back formations” from the artistic tradition. The most obvious instance of this is Mitrofanov’s celebrated song about the hawk, already encountered in its choral guise in Yamshchiki na podstave. It is evident that Pratsch was directed to transcribe the song directly out of the 1787 score, meanwhile adapting it for a single voice with keyboard accompaniment. Confronted with the impressive contrapuntal texture shown in example 1.2, the hapless arranger could only thread his way through it (for the most part, predictably enough, following the soprano), producing an ersatz “tune” the likes of which could never have been sung in steppe or village, or even in Peter’s town (figure 1.1). It exemplifies to perfection, however, what Mazo calls “the complex symbiotic relationship that existed in the late-eighteenth-century urban tradition in Russia,” whereby new songs were born and style characteristics freely exchanged.24
FIGURE 1.1. Pratsch’s arrangement of Vïsokol (The Hawk Soars Aloft) (Lvov and Pratsch, Sobraniye russkikh narodnïkh pesen, 2d ed. [St. Petersburg, 1806], vol. 2, protyazhnïye no. 24)
Viewed in this way, from a standpoint that accepts its emphasis on currency and contemporaneity, rather than from the Utopian, anachronistically censorious vantage point romantic ethnographers and conventional music historians have adopted, the Lvov-Pratsch collection all at once seems to seethe with creative life—far more so, in fact, than those later anthologies (especially the self-consciously scientific ones of the Imperial Geographical Society) that purported to embalm the artifacts of an undefiled rural tradition and thus preserve them from the inevitable ravages of the life process.25 Such a project can only be described today as quaint, or worse. Mazo observes with engaging cheek that “modern-day ethnomusicology’s notion of what is to be considered a folk song is closer to the viewpoint expressed in the LPC [Lvov-Pratsch Collection] than it is to the more exclusive views of some nineteenth-century and even twentieth-century collections.”26
It was precisely because of that creative life, that currency and contemporaneity, that the Lvov-Pratsch collection was able, as Mazo points out, to “influence the folk tradition itself, even in the outlying regions, as a consequence of the numerous reprints of the songs taken from the LPC and published in school songbooks circulated throughout the vast reaches of Russia.”27 The collection, in other words, and uniquely, fulfilled the role its compilers (but particularly Lvov) envisioned for it, as a cultural uniter—indeed, as a creator—of the Russian nation.
This achievement gives the ultimate lie to those who, proceeding from a fastidious romantic-nationalist conception of a native spirit at once preternatural and inborn, have denied the authenticity of this greatest and most culturally significant of Russian folk song collections, owing in the first place to its urban origins and in the second to its musical arrangements having been fashioned by an ethnic alien. Any privileged conception of an “authentic Russian folk song” of course implies a similarly intransigent notion of what constitutes an “authentic Russian.” Once this is grasped, Lvov’s leading tones begin to look downright precious; nor will it seem impertinent to note that Balakirev, who will emerge in chapter 8 as the musician most avid to rid folk song harmonizations of their leading tones (thus as representative of his historical moment as Lvov had been two generations before), was also avid to rid Russia of her Jews. But Russia is large and contains multitudes. The work of Nikolai Lvov and his Bohemian assistant is a monument to that largeness and to those multitudes, and a memento of the Russian nation’s brief flicker of Enlightenment.
1 Sochineniya, pis’ma i izbrannïye perevodï knyazya Antiokha Dmitriyevicha Kantemira, ed. P. A. Yefremov, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Glazunov, 1867), p. 54.
2 Z. Artamonova, “Neizdannïye stikhi N. A. L’vova,” Literaturnoye nasledstvo 9, no. 10 (1933): 275. (The addressee is Ivan Muravyov-Apostol.)
3 See Malcolm H. Brown, “Native Song and National Consciousness,” in Theofanis George Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 75-76.
4 The full score is published, edited by Irina Vetlitsina, as no. 6 in the series Pamyatniki russkogo muzïkal’nogo iskusstva (Monuments of Russian Art Music), Yuriy Keldïsh, general editor (Moscow: Muzika, 1977).
5 The ill-tempered word, strange as it may seem, was Rimsky-Korsakov’s, in his “Chronicle of My Musical Life” (trans. Judah A. Joffe as My Musical Life [London: Eulenburg Books, 1974], p. 257).
6 Quoted from Yuriy Keldish, “K istorii open ‘Yamshchiki na pastave’” (first published in Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 10 [1973]), in Keldish, Ocherki i issledovaniya po istorii russkoy muzïki (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1978), p. 133.
7 Artamonova, “Neizdannïye stikhi,” pp. 285-86.
8 G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniya, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1886), p. 401; quoted in Keldïsh, “K istorii operï ‘Yamshchiki na podstave,’” p. 134.
9 It was for this very celebration that Osip Kozlovsky composed the choral polonaise “Thunder of Victory, Resound!” (Groin pobedï, razdavaisya), to panegyric verses by Derzhavin, which will figure so prominently in the discussion of Chaikovsky’s neoclassicism in chapter 11.
10 T. P. Kir’yak to I. M. Dolgorukov, first published in the almanac Russkiy arkhiv (1867), quoted by Keldi’sh (pp. 134-35) from annotations by I. N. Rozanov to a collection of song texts (Pesni russkiye izvestnogo okhotnika M. . . [St. Petersburg, 1799]) thought possibly to be Mitrofanov’s (I. N. Rozanov, ed., Pesni russkikh poètov [XVIII-pervaya polovina XIX veka] [Leningrad, 1936], p. 88).
11 There have been six editions in all. The third (St. Petersburg: Meditsinskya tipografiya, 1815) was a reprint of the second from the same plates. The fourth edition (St. Petersburg: Suvorin, 1896), ed. with an introduction by A. E. Pal’chikov, was the first to name Lvov, formerly anonymous in deference to the traditions of noblesse oblige, as the collector; his identity was attested by various letters and documents, in particular a memoir by his younger cousin Fyodor Petrovich Lvov called O penii v Rossii (On Singing in Russia), published in 1834. The fifth edition (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955), ed. with an introduction by Victor Belyayev, is unreliable, the texts having been purged, primarily of their religious content, for Soviet consumption. (For a piquant example involving the famous coronation hymn from Boris Godunov, see R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], pp. 300-312.) The sixth edition (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), ed. Malcolm H. Brown, is a facsimile of the second edition with an invaluable apparatus (introduction and appendices) by Barbara Krader and Margarita Mazo.
12 The earliest printed collection of Russian folk songs (texts only), by Mikhail Chulkov, issued in four volumes beginning in 1770, was called, simply, Sobraniye raznïkh pesen (Collection of Various Songs). The first anthology to include tunes, by Vasiliy Trutovsky (four volumes, 1776-95), was called Sobraniye russkikh prosti’kh pesen s notami (Collection of Russian Simple Songs with Musical Notation).
13 Cited from P. A. Vulfius, Russkaya mïsl’ o muzïkal’nom fol’klore: Materials i dokumentï (Moscow: Muzïka, 1979), p. 78.
14 Transliterating his name from Russian might suggest a rhyme with Bach rather than Crotch, so the unambiguous German form will be used here from this point on; it would be a good idea to make it standard “English” usage.
15 For an introduction to the debates, and the early romantic solutions, see “‘Little Star’: An Etude in the Folk Style,” in Taruskin, Musorgsky, pp. 38-70; Mazo’s annotations to the sixth edition of the anthology contains a sampling (on pp. 29-32) of disparaging romantic commentary on the arrangements, beginning with contemporaries who resented Pratsch’s foreign birth, up to and including folklorists and historians of the early Soviet period.
16 Boris V. Asafyev, introduction to Jacob Stahlin, Muzïka i balet v Rossii XVIII veka, p. 8; quoted by Barbara Krader in the introduction to the sixth edition of the Lvov-Pratsch collection, p. 4.
17 Introduction to the sixth edition, p. 75.
18 Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, quoted in D. D. Blagoy, Istoriya russkoy literaturï XVIII veka (2ded., Moscow: Prosveshcheniye, 1951), p. 59.
19 This applies particularly to “literary songs,” a genre especially despised by later collectors and discreetly soft-pedaled in the Soviet scholarly literature, which were anonymous but obviously recent orally disseminated settings of texts by contemporary authors, both known and unknown. (A choice example of an urban “literary song” is the first of the two organ-grinder tunes accompanying the episode of the street dancer in the first tableau of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, a setting, universally known by Russians from its oral transmission, of a verse, “ ‘Twas on a Night in Rainy Autumn” [Pod vecher, osen᾿yu nenastnoy, 1815] by the young Pushkin.) As Mazo explains, the genre had its ironies: “Many poems by Lomonosov, Tredyakovsky, and Sumarokov [i.e., poets of the neoclassical school] earned popularity as songs, and in this form became well known to the general public of the middle and lower classes and found their way into many manuscript collections. These literary songs were as essential a part of the urban tradition then as songs written by contemporary poets are in today’s [Soviet Russian] tradition. More than any other type of song, they reflected changes in public taste and musical style. Some of these songs eventually achieved a measure of popularity in Russian villages; as time went by, they became a part of rural traditions and gradually absorbed some features of the local styles. The Lvov-Pratsch collection must have played an important role in this process” (introduction to the sixth edition, pp. 45-46).
Indeed, the ironies go even further than that. One of the “literary songs” Mazo singles out for discussion is “How Have I Aggrieved Thee?” (Chem tebya ya ogorchila), classified by Lvov as a protyazhnaya. The text had been published as early as 1781 in the collected works of Sumarokov (who had oskorbila [offended] in place of ogorchila [aggrieved]), and, as Mazo notes, the setting by Lvov and Pratsch is especially close to the style of an urban “romance with instrumental accompaniment, such as became popular later in the eighteenth century.” The tremendous vogue of this particular song as household music throughout the nineteenth century is attested not only by contemporary witnesses (Mazo cites two, one from 1809 and the other from 1912!) but also by the number of arrangements in which it was issued, and the frequency of its adoption for variations or other sorts of reworking by composers of art music, both Russian (e.g., an early trio by Borodin for two violins and cello [1853]) and Western (e.g., Fernando Sor, “Souvenir de Russie” for two guitars, Op. 63 [ca. 1839]). What she does not mention is that a variant of this tune, the very epitome of what the romantic purists of later Russian generations would have called a poddelka (counterfeit) or a hhe-narodnaya pesnya (fake song), had been adopted as the first of the “Two Russian Themes” on which Glinka himself, to whom purists inevitably trace their line, tried to base his unfinished symphony of 1834. For Glinka, too, then, the “literary” urban style was quite sufficiently “narodriiy.” (Another example of a song by Sumarokov turning up both in the Lvov-Pratsch collection and in Trutovsky’s collection of 1776-79 is discussed by Yuriy Keldish in Istoriya russkoy muzïki v desyati tomakh, vol. 2 [Moscow: Muzïka, 1984], pp. 167-69.)
20 Preface to the sixth edition, p. 44; even more provocatively, Mazo suggests that such apparent simplifications and accommodations “may be ‘corrections’ made not by Pra[ts]ch, but by everyday musical practice” (p. 37).
21 Fyodor Petrovich Lvov, O penii v Rossii, quoted in Yuriy Keldish et al., Istoriya russkoy muzïki v desyati tomakh, vol. 2, p. 238. As already noted, this testimony by Nikolai Lvov’s cousin was the chief basis for ascribing the collection to Lvov, beginning with the fourth edition in 1896. It furnished the purist annotator of that edition, A. E. Pal’chikov (whose brother Nikolai was one of the first connoisseurs of podgolosochnoye mnogogolosiye), with one of his principal causes for complaint: Pratsch, he charged, arranged “only tunes sung to him by people invited by Lvov. This is probably why there are the inevitable major and minor in songs of an entirely different nature, and why the song harmonizations throughout are done in the manner of romances at the end of the eighteenth century (preface to the fourth edition, p. ix, quoted in the preface to the sixth edition, p. 30). Palchikov thus backhandedly confirms Mazo’s supposition concerning the actual state of the oral tradition from which the collectors drew their material.
22 In addition to the Lvov-Fomin Yamshchiki na podstave, the stage pieces include the following: Mel’nik—koldun, obmanshchik i svat (The Miller Who Was a Wizard, a Cheat, and a Matchmaker, 1779) by Mikhail Sokolovsky; Sankt-Peterhurgskiy gostinniy dvor (1782), and Fevey (1786, vocal score arr. Pratsch) by Vasiliy Pashkevich; Nachal’noye upravleniye Olega (The Early Reign of Oleg, 1790) by Pashkevich, Giuseppe Sarti, and Carlo Cannobio; Fedul s det’mi (Fedul and His Children) by Pashkevich and Vincente Martin y Soler; and Le astuzie femminili (Feminine Wiles, 1794) by Domenico Cimarosa. The songs are identified, in an alphabetical list by title, in appendix C to the sixth edition (pp. 434-41) and, according to the works into which they are incorporated, in Nina Bachinskaya, Narodniye pesni v tvorchestve russkikh kompozitorov (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962).
23 This applies as well to the many variation sets, both for keyboard (by Pratsch himself, as well as such other composers as Wilhelm Palschau and a certain Karaulov, designated “amateur” to identify him as a nobleman) and for violin (by the famous eighteenth-century virtuoso Ivan Khandoshkin), which circulated in manuscript over the decades preceding (as well as following) publication of the Lvov-Pratsch collection. Several of the keyboard sets have been published in Lev Barenboim’s and Vladimir Muzalevsky’s Khrestomatiya po istorii fortep yannoy muzïki v Rossii (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1949); Khandoshkin’s works are listed in Anne Mis-chakoff, Khandoshkin and the Beginning of Russian String Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).
24 Introduction to the sixth edition, p. 49.
25 See Sergey Lyapunov’s “Report to the Imperial Geographical Society,” following the first of its officially sponsored musical collecting expeditions in 1893 (reprinted in Vulfius, Russkaya mïsl’ o muzïkal’nom fol’klore, pp. 231-34.
26 Introduction to the sixth edition, p. 14.
27 Ibid., p. 76.