CHAPTER 3

P. I. Chaikovsky and the Ghetto

VIEWING Glinka through the eyes of his British biographer, we begin to see why it remains the Western habit to group all Russian composers, like any others who do not hail (in a word to be much rehearsed throughout the “Notes on Svadebka” in chapter 13) from the “panromanogermanic” mainstream, as “nationalists” whatever their actual predilections;¹ why composers of the panromanogermanic mainstream are rarely described as nationalists whatever their actual predilections; and why, for “peripheral” composers, stylistic dependency on autochthonous folklore is taken in the West as an indispensable earnest of authenticity, a virtual requirement. It is yet another manifestation of fetishized difference. And that is why conventional musicology, perhaps alone among the humanistic disciplines, and in seeming inattention both to the most inescapable headline realities and to the most elementary moral imperatives, continues, uncritically and embarrassingly, to celebrate “nationalism.”

But it is really no celebration. In conventional “canonical” historiography Russian (or Czech, or Spanish, or Norwegian) composers are in a double bind. The group identity is at once the vehicle of their international appeal (as “naifs”) and the guarantee of their secondary status vis-à-vis the unmarked “universal.” Without exotic native dress such composers cannot achieve even secondary canonical rank, but with it they cannot achieve more. However admiringly it is apparently done, casting a composer as a “nationalist” is preeminently a means of exclusion from the critical and academic canon (though not, obviously, from the performing repertoire).

The double bind operates most transparently in the case of Chaikovsky and has functioned this way since the beginning of the century now ending, when Russian music, thanks in large part to Diaghilev’s promotion, began its conquest of Paris. The appealing orientalist myth of the “âme slave,” the primi-tivistic, neo-Scythian, collective Russian consciousness played an important part in this promotion (as witness the repertoire adduced and discussed at the end of chapter 9). This mythology, and the ecstatic reaction to it on the part of the French press and public, was painstakingly nurtured and manipulated by Diaghilev once he began creating (with The Firebird) a “Russian” repertory earmarked expressly for a French audience. One of its unintended side effects was to aggravate the backlash against Russian composers who did not conform to the exotic stereotype purveyed by the Ballets Russes, and first among them was the composer whose Europeanized outlook and manner most nearly matched Diaghilev’s own aristocratic predilections. Not until 1921 would Diaghilev dare present Chaikovsky in any but tiny doses to his audience; and when he did (with the London Sleeping Beauty) he nearly lost his shirt.

Even before Diaghilev, French critical antipathy to Chaikovsky ran high. Its source probably lay in César Cui’s outrageously partisan survey La Musique en Russie, a reissue in book form of a series of articles originally published in 1878 in the Revue et Gazette musicale, which furnished a whole generation of French critics and writers on music with virtually their sole source of information on Russian music. Cui had dismissed Chaikovsky as “a musician of extraordinary talent, except that he abuses his technical facility,” and, most unfairly, as being “far from a partisan of the New Russian school; he is more nearly its antagonist.”²

Though this last assertion was no truer than the notion of a monolithic “New Russian school” itself, it played into the Western prejudice about exotic group identities and formed French opinion irrevocably. By 1903, the composer Alfred Bruneau—in Musiques de Russie et Musiciens de France, a book that slavishly recycled Cui’s old “kuchkist” propaganda despite its author’s having made a personal goodwill tour of Russia in 1901-2 as the quasi-official emissary of the French government—embroidered on Cui’s account of Chaikovsky with astonishing animus: “Devoid of the Russian character that pleases and attracts us in the music of the New Slavic school, developed to hollow and empty excess in a bloated and faceless style, his works astonish without overly interesting us,” the critic sneered.³ Again, without an exotic group identity a Russian composer can possess no identity at all. Without a collective folkloristic or oriental mask he is “faceless.”

The recent British biographers who have meant to vindicate Chaikovsky. against this sort of dismissal have not questioned the orientalist premises on which the dismissal has been based. Vindication on their terms has meant vindication as a “nationalist.” That is, the critic must “succeed” where Cui and Bruneau had “failed,” in uncovering Chaikovsky’s all-validating group identity. So his folk song quotations are toted up and, owing to the requirements of concerto finales and operatic second acts, the stats are impressive. Passages from his correspondence evincing devotion to birch trees and mud are adduced. Benevolently, but far from benignly, Chaikovsky’s Russianness, like Glinka’s, is reduced to a set of “racial characteristics and attitudes” cast in rigorous opposition to those of the West.

The locus classicus for this position is the penultimate chapter (“The Russian Composer”) in David Brown’s four-volume biography of Chaikovsky. The author’s stated aim is to “pinpoint a little of the Russianness of Tchaikovsky’s music” and in so doing to provide a model that might “suggest to other present or future Tchaikovsky scholars lines of investigation they might pursue.” And yet from the very beginning the focus is less on the music than on the man who made it, toward whom a typical attitude of condescension is adopted: “His was a Russian mind forced to find its expression through techniques and forms that had been evolved by generations of alien Western creators, and, this being so, it would be unreasonable to expect stylistic consistency or uniform quality.”⁴ The best that can be said of Chaikovsky the symphonist is that “a composer who could show so much resourcefulness in modifying sonata structure so as to make it more compatible with the type of music nature had decreed he would write was no helpless bungler.”⁵ This is what the Russians (before 1861) used to call the krepostnoye pravo: to the land the serf was born and on the land he shall remain.

Radical essentialism of this kind is not at all a new approach. It characterized a great deal of Victorian scholarship and has long been recognized as an aspect of romanticism that is especially liable to degenerate into racialist bombast. With no basis save bias, and in spite of all the evidence we have of Chaikovsky’s social environment, his tastes, and his education, Brown insists on educing the essentials of the composer’s musical style directly from “pure folksong,”⁶ peasant lore, the unmediated musical mirror of “the Russian mind.”⁷ Chaikovsky, it is categorically asserted, was “endowed with a mind of this nature.”⁸ His musical style was thus innate, biologically determined, and there was simply nothing the poor man could do about it.⁹ He is cast as a victim of his racial endowment, a casualty of the unbridgeable gap between “Russian instinct” and “Western method,” the latter as dogmatically and re-ductively conceived as the former.¹⁰

Such a view of the Russian style and the Russian mind can only lead to an obsession with purity. When such an obsession is voiced from the Russian side, of course, we call it “nationalism.” But a nationalism that insists on purity is no longer a benign or liberating nationalism. It has turned aggressive and intolerant. We will reencounter it in the old Balakirev and the young Stravinsky. When the obsession with Russian purity is voiced from the Western side, though, what shall we call it? What shall we make of the frequent chiding Chaikovsky receives from his British biographers for lapsing, for not being Russian enough?

In the finale of the Fourth Symphony, Edward Garden declares, the pure folk song (the familiar “Birch Tree”) is “dragged in most inappropriately, squared off with two extra beats and ruined in the process.”¹¹ Chaikovsky gratuitously “mars” an aria in one of his operas, Brown declares, and “turns traitor to its essential Russianness by extending it with vocal sequence and operatic cadenza.”¹² There are even passages where the British biographer presumes to instruct his Russian subject in the ways of Russianness. Complaining that in one of Chaikovsky’s operatic finales “loud and vapid tumult replaces genuinely inventive conflict,” he notes “one precious moment of respite” where the tenor takes tender leave of the soprano:

“We will wash away our grief on mother Volga,” he sings, pouring out a pure Russian cantilena supported by male chorus, as beautiful a melodic passage as any in the opera. Even here, however, Tchaikovsky cannot let slip the opportunity for harmonic “cleverness,” and his sudden shift into neapolitan regions . . . compromises for a moment that Russian world so clearly conjured up in the vocal part.¹³

These are the words of a fatherly “bwana,” celebrating the picturesqueness of the quaint aboriginal world he patronizes, ever watchful lest the natives, forsaking their essential natures, lose their exotic charm and start acting like his equals.

That is why Brown is so concerned to insist, even devoting a separately titled chapter addendum to it, upon “the Russianness of Eugene Onegin” the one Chaikovsky opera to have achieved supreme repertory status the world over, and a work in which the musical idiom is not stylistically marked with national character in a way that immediately advertises itself to the “Western” ear. Yet where elsewhere Brown can cite technical features in support of his diagnoses of (rustic) Russianness, here all he can do is adduce without commentary or amplification the testimony of authorities, chiefly Stravinsky and Prokofiev, to the effect that “Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true popular sources of our race” (Stravinsky)¹⁴ and that “Eugene Onegin is the most intrinsically Russian opera” in which every role “corresponded completely to the Russian character, each in its own way” (Prokofiev).¹⁵

Anyone who really knows Russia, or Russians, or the cultural politics of interwar Paris (where both Stravinsky and Prokofiev made their pronouncements, Stravinsky’s as promotional propaganda for his boss), will know how to read these comments and deconstruct their mystique. Even old Boleslaw Przybyszewski, the hopelessly doctrinaire “vulgar-Marxist” critic whom we will encounter again in chapter 11, had it right when he spoke, albeit clumsily, of Chaikovsky as a “musical realist” who “drew his melodic style from the melodic springs of surrounding Russian reality,” that is, the music of the Europeanized urban class to which the composer himself belonged.¹⁶ With cunning insight (no “instinct” here!) Chaikovsky was able to abstract musical morphemes (what the shrewd if politically contemptible Soviet musicologist Boris Asafyev later christened “intonations”)¹⁷ from this mongrel “town-song” idiom, instantly recognizable as indigenous by Russians, but accessible to Westerners as “universal.”

And it was naturally that urbanized, sophisticated, cosmopolitan Russian style that émigré modernists like Stravinsky and (at the time) Prokofiev would have sought to advance against the folkloric idiom that had become de rigueur in Red Russia, where the slogan “an art national in form and socialist in content” (in Stalin’s very words) had forged a link that tainted idioms Westerners could apprehend as indicatively “Russian.”¹⁸

AS IN the case of A Life for the Tsar, the critically relevant point about Yevgeniy Onegin is neither to establish nor to falsify its essential “Russianness,” but to investigate the purposes and the results of a calculated stylistic construction. It is another matchless test case, in its way just as programmatic an effort toward defining Russia (and Russians) musically; and it has been just as comprehensively misunderstood from the outside.

In addition to the general problems Chaikovsky has had with Western connoisseurs, Yevgeniy Onegin has one all its own: its relationship to its literary source, one of the most revered monuments in all of Russian literature. Although the snobbish solecism according to which an opera derived from preexisting literature is judged by a simple yardstick of fidelity—correspondingly exigent as the source is valued—has happily been losing ground (in the case of Russian works partly through a timely dissemination of Bakhtin’s ideas),¹⁹ in the case of Chaikovsky’s masterpiece it obstinately persists. The opera has been the bane of Pushkin-lovers from the beginning (Tur-genev to Tolstoy: “Undeniably notable music ... but what a libretto!”).²⁰ By now, on the authority of the militantly tone-deaf Vladimir Nabokov, for whom “the ideal state” was one in which there was “no torture, no executions [and] no music,”²¹ denigration of Chaikovsky’s work has become literary dogma.

The novel’s greatness is assumed to lie in its irony, vouchsafed by its gloriously intrusive narrative voice—”a kind of spiritual air conditioner,” as one commentator has colorfully put it. When that machine is turned off, as it is assumed to be in the opera, “the atmosphere becomes sticky, the underpinnings of the wonderfully delicate, intricate, balanced structure rot, and it collapses. You are left with a banal, trite, and sentimental bore—which may nevertheless be a vehicle for some delightful music.”²²

This formulation shows magnificent incomprehension of what the music in an opera does—but particularly in this opera, where the music, quite simply, is the narrator. From the very first sung notes, Olga’s and Tatyana’s duet to the harp, the music acts as a very busy and detached mediator of situations and feelings. As Asafyev was the first to demonstrate in detail, Chaikovsky “sings” his opera in an idiom intensely redolent of the domestic, theatrical, and ballroom music of its time and place—its, not his—and in so doing he situates it, just as Pushkin situates the literary prototype, in the years 1819—25. And just as Pushkin’s characters achieve their “reality” by virtue of a multitude of precisely manipulated codes, so Chaikovsky’s express themselves through a finely calculated filter of musical genres and conventions.

To express the passions and spontaneous reactions of the characters by means of stereotyped melodic and harmonic figures, however freshly and virtuosically recombined, makes exactly the same point Pushkin makes in his novel: feelings are never spontaneous but always mediated by the conventions and constraints, as often learned from literature as from “life,” to which we have adapted. Therein lie both the tragedy (the constraints) and the salvation (the adaptation) of human society.

Moreover, where the novelist must arrange things in a temporal sequence, the musician can simultaneously present and comment without recourse to digression. The best possible illustration comes at the very outset, with the eccentric “quartet” for women’s voices in which that very typical period duet-romance (to an early verse by Pushkin), sung offstage by Tatyana and her sister, accompanies a speech-song conversation (unlike Glinka’s speech-song, truly conversational in its contours and rhythms) between their mother, Mme Larina, and Filipp’yevna, their former wet nurse. The foreground conversation begins with an invocation to the books in Larina’s life (“O Grandi-son! O Richardson!”) and ends with a modest paean to habit (“given to us from above as substitute for happiness”; the music is quoted in chapter 10).

“It seems to me,” Chaikovsky later wrote to his friend Vladimir Pogozhev, a theater official, “that I am truly gifted with the ability truthfully, sincerely, and simply to express the feelings, moods, and images suggested by a text. In this sense I am a realist and fundamentally a Russian.”²³ The opening quartet in Yevgeniy Onegin, and the whole opera that follows, wonderfully bears out this self-characterization. The realism and the Russianness of this opera are equally profound and profoundly interrelated; and they are equally likely to be missed by those who equate realism with “formlessness” and can discern national character only in the sort of folklore that exists in Yevgeniy Onegin (like the “folk” itself) only as an aspect of decor.

Another example of Chaikovsky’s diegetical skill—his ability at once to present and to comment—comes at the moment when the title character together with his friend, the poetaster Lensky, make their first appearance. The comically exaggerated courtly flourishes in the orchestra that accompany their bows to the Larin ladies instantly sketch their foppish histories, accomplishing much of the work of Pushkin’s chapter 1, the absence of which is so often and so severely held against the opera’s libretto. In their startling anticipation of Pulcinella, these “eighteenth-century” curlicues also call attention to Chaikovsky’s underappreciated mastery of the grotesque.

These points apply not only to the characters’ public behavior and to the obviously “generic” ballroom scenes but even, or especially, to their most private and personal utterances. Tatyana’s Letter Scene, the most private and personal in the opera, is in effect a string of romances linked by recitatives:

1.“Puskai pogibnu ya” (“Even if it means I perish”): Allegro non troppo, D major, 4/4, da capo form (18 bars)

2.“Ya k vam pishu” (“I’m writing to you”): Moderato assai quasi Andante, D minor, 4/4 strophic form (56 bars, including recits)

3.“Net, nikomu na svete ne otdala bï serdtse ya!” (“No, there is no one else on earth to whom I’d give my heart”): Moderato, C major, 2/4 (accompaniment in 6/8), da capo form (80 bars, including recits and transitions)

4.“Kto tï: moy angel-li khranitel’“ (“Who art thou—my guardian angel?”): Andante, D major, 2/4, da capo form (75 bars, 129 counting orchestral introduction and orchestral/vocal coda).

The resonances between the music of this scene and the duet-romance within the opening quartet are many, conspicuous, and (yes, most consciously) calculated: they are the resonances between Tatyana’s inner and outer worlds. To cite the most obvious correspondence, both numbers incorporate Tatyana’s leitmotif (it is the last line of each strophe in the duet, the middle section of the last romance in the Letter Scene). But the leitmotif is itself a bearer of the generic resonance. Beginning on the sixth degree of the minor scale, it initiates a descent to the tonic, thus describing the interval that more than any other defines the idiom of the bïtovoy romans, the Russian domestic or household romance of the early nineteenth century. Russian scholars have gone so far as to coin the term sekstovïy (“sixthy”) and its derivative sekstovosf (“sixthiness”) to denote that defining quality.²⁴ A pair of melodies by Alexander Varlamov, the leading composer of romances current at the time of Yevgeniy Onegin’s action, can serve as paradigm (example 3.1). The role of Tatyana, saturated with sixths encompassing degrees , or (more characteristically) , is, with that of Lensky, surely the “sixthiest” in all of opera (example 3.2).

In the last part of example 3.2 melodic sixths are nested within a harmonic idiom that shows a semiotically marked “sixthiness” of its own: the constant use of the minor submediant (the “flat sixth” in the major) as alternate harmonic root or tone center. This alternation can take the form of an immediate local progression, as shown, or it can be projected in the form of a subsidiary key governing large spans within the tonal structure. The orchestral prelude or introduction to act 1 sets the precedent: its development section is all within the key of the submediant, which resolves to the dominant by way of retransition. In the Letter Scene, the whole vocal coda (“Konchayu! strashno pere-chest’,” or “Finished! I dare not reread”) is cast within the key of the starred chord in example 3.2f, spelled enharmonically as A major.

EXAMPLE 3.1

a. Varlamov, Krasnïy sarafan (1832), words by Nïkolai Tsïganov

b. Varlamov, Na zare tï yeyo ne budi (1842), words by Afanasiy Fet

EXAMPLE 3.2. “Sixthiness” in Chaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin

a. Tatyana’s leitmotif (opening of introduction)

b. Act 1, opening duet (the first sung phrase in the opera)

(Have you ever heard . . .)

c. Letter scene, beginning of first romance

(Even if it means I perish . . .)

d. Letter scene, second romance, beginning of second strophe

(Why, oh why did you visit us?)

e. Letter scene, beginning of third romance

(No, there is no one else on earth to whom I’d give my heart!)

f. Letter scene, introduction to fourth romance

EXAMPLE 3.3. Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin

a. Act 1, no. 12 (Onegin’s aria)

(Dreams and years do not return, my soul I cannot renew! I love you like a brother. . .)

The melodic-harmonic idiom is only one of many genre resonances that tie Tatyana’s Letter Scene to the opening duet and thence to the whole world of the domestic romance. The harp-heavy orchestration of the first two sections is another. But the harp does more than evoke the sounds of domestic music-making. The inspired chords (non arpeggiato!) that punctuate the woodwind phrases in the actual letter-writing ritornello (introducing the second romance as listed above) take their place within a marvelously detailed sound-portrait of the lovesick girl, in which Chaikovsky shows himself an adept practitioner of Mozart’s methods of “body portraiture,” as outlined in the famous letter from Mozart to his father about Die Entführung aus dem Serail.²⁵ As in the case of Mozart’s Belmonte or Osmin, we “see” and “feel” Tatyana—her movements, her breathing, her heartbeat—in her music. This iconicity shows off music’s advantages especially well: what the novelist or poet must describe, the composer (unlike the dramatist, who must depend on the director and the cast) can actually present.

b. Act 3, no. 22 (finale) Onegin

(O, take pity, take pity on me! I was so wrong! I’ve been so punished!)

As to irony, did Pushkin ever make more trenchant comment than Chaikovsky, when he mocks Onegin’s passionate confession to Tatyana in act 3 with a fleeting reference to the music by which he had rejected her in act 1 (example 3.3)? It is not simply a matter of showing that the boot is on the other foot: that much had already been accomplished by setting Onegin’s arioso at the end of act 3, scene 1 (example 3.4) to the melody of the first romance in the Letter Scene (equally ironic in that Onegin, not having “heard” that music on its earlier appearance, cannot be “quoting” it now; the reference is entirely a narrator’s aside). The allusion to the rejection music shows him fickle and erratic; it takes the place of the lengthy passage in Pushkin’s novel in which Tatyana visits the absent Onegin’s library and discovers, by peeking at the annotations in his books, the shallowness of his soul.

EXAMPLE 3.4. Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, act 3, no. 21 (cf. example 3.2c)

(Alas! There is no doubt I'm in love)

The concluding confrontation between Onegin and Tatyana has been described as “a duet in the grand style,”²⁶ but even here the method of construction remains that of stringing romances (a technique Chaikovsky evidently picked up from his teacher, Anton Rubinstein: compare the third act of the latter’s Demon). Tatyana’s chief melody apes the one her husband, Prince Gremin, had sung in the preceding scene, thus telegraphing her answer to Onegin. Only twice, fleetingly, do the two voices mingle. It is hardly a duet at all. Like Tatyana’s total silence in response to rejection (act 1, scene 3, and, except for her participation in ensembles, in act 2, scene 1 as well) the scene flies in the face of operatic convention, underscoring by omission (yet another ironic narrator’s aside!) the futility of the dramatic situation. The very fact that Yevgeniy Onegin contains no love duets already testifies to its singular affinity with Pushkin’s novel, air conditioner and all.

Not that there are no divergences between Chaikovsky’s treatment of the story or its characters and Pushkin’s: Lensky in particular, whose sixthy act 2 aria (quoted in chapter 11) is a very serious moment, reflects a later, more sentimental age—the age of Turgenev, so to speak, rather than Pushkin’s. But even here, the use of the modest romance form is more than just evocative; it sets distinct limits on Lensky’s emotional scale. Like all the characters in the opera, he remains a denizen of a realistic novel (one of the very earliest to be given operatic treatment), not a historical spectacle or a well-made play.

¹ A striking example of such lumping came unexpectedly in an excellent paper, read at a recent musicological convention, introducing the theoretical thought of Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915). The paper emphasized Taneyev’s signal contribution, one that has been tacitly appropriated by “mainstream” theorists everywhere (and will be much used in this book in the chapters on Scriabin and Stravinsky): namely, that of “introduc[ing] the use of cardinal numbers for intervals in order to effect systematic transformations of material, tonally derived formal hierarchies, and an explanation for the role of counterpoint in large forms.” At the same time it was observed, irrelevantly as it might seem, that Taneyev’s compositions are “without conspicuously nationalistic elements” (Gordon D. McQuere, “The Development of Music Theory in Russia: Sergei Taneev,” AMSICMSISEMISMT Abstracts [Vancouver, 1985], p. 39). When asked why this observation was called for, the speaker replied that it answered “a natural question” about a Russian composer.

² La Musique en Russie (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), pp. 132, 119.

³ Alfred Bruneau, Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1903), pp. 27-28.

⁴ David Brown, Tchaikovsky, vol. 4: The Final Years: 1885-1893 (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 10.

⁵ Ibid., vol. 1: The Early Years: 1840-1874 (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 108-9; italics added.

⁶ Ibid., vol. 4, p. 423.

⁷ Ibid., p. 425.

⁸ Ibid., p. 424

⁹ Hence the author’s renewed insistence, having identified subtle Retiesque thematic interconnections in Chaikovsky’s symphonic output, that “to what extent Tchaikovsky was aware of creating these relationships while composing his themes is debatable” (Ibid., p. 431).

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 436.

¹¹ Edward Garden, Tchaikovsky (London: Dent, 1973), p. 81. Brown (Tchaikovsky, vol. 2: The Crisis Years: 1874-1878 [New York: Norton, 1983], p. 176) reminds us (and Chaikovsky) that Balakirev had used the tune “more correctly” in his Overture on Three Russian Themes; compare example 8.4 in chapter 8.

¹² Brown, Tchaikovsky, vol. 1, p. 150.

¹³ Ibid., p. 147.

¹⁴ Letter to the Times of London on behalf of Diaghilev’s Sleeping Beauty production; quoted in Brown, Tchaikovsky, vol. 2, p. 217.

¹⁵ Giacomo Antonini, unpublished memoir quoted by Brown in ibid., p. 218.

¹⁶ “O Chaikovskom,” foreword to P. I. Chaikovsky, Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, ed. V. A. Zhdanov and N. T. Zhegin, vol. 1 (Moscow: Academia, 1934), p. xvi.

¹⁷ See in particular his monograph, Yevgeniy Onegin: Liricheskiy stsenï P. I. Chaikovskogo (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1944).

¹⁸ See Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Voprosï Leninizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1931), p. 137. With regard to the tainting of folklore under the Bolshevik regime, compare a widely publicized statement attributed to Shostakovich in the newspaper Sovetskoye iskusstvo (20 November 1938) on the subject of his Sixth Symphony, then announced as the “Lenin” symphony: “I have set myself a task fraught with great responsibility, to express through the medium of sound the immortal image of Lenin as a great son of the Russian people and a great leader and teacher of the masses. I have received numerous letters from all corners of the Soviet Union with regard to my future Symphony. The most important advice contained in these letters was to make ample use of musical folklore” (quoted from Nicolas Slonimsky, “Dmitri Dmitrievitch Shostakovich,” Musical Quarterly 28 [1942]: 431).

¹⁹ See especially Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

²⁰ Letter of 15/27 November 1878; quoted from Gerald Abraham, ed., The Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 149.

²¹ Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 35.

²² Hugh McLean, “The Tone(s) of ‘Eugene Onegin,’“ California Slavic Studies 6 (1971): 15.

²³ V. N. Pogozhev, “Vospominaniya o P. I. Chaikovskom,” in Igor Glebov (i.e., Boris Asafyev), ed., P. I. Chaikovsky: Vospominaniya i pis’ma (Leningrad: Filarmoniya, 1924), p. 77 (emphasis in the original).

²⁴ See Mikhail Semyonovich Druskin, Voprosï muzïkal’noy dramaturgii operï (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1952), p. 131ff.

²⁵ 26 September 1781; Mozart’s Letters, trans. Emily Anderson, ed. Eric Blom (Harmonds-worth: Penguin Books, 1956), pp. 181-82.

²⁶ Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 301.