CHAPTER 7
WHAT LINKS the very disparate chapters that follow is the constant, implicit theme that has been the explicit subject of these introductory essays: that of defining Russia musically, along with its converse, defining music Russianly.
National self-definition through music is of course right in the foreground of the trio of essays in part 2, collected under the rubric “Self and Other.” I hope, however, that they will serve to complicate rather than simplify the subject or issue of Russian musical “nationalism,” and that the complications will clarify. The field is rife with teasers: ironies and paradoxes that are soft-pedaled if not suppressed in conventional, reductive accounts. One of these involves the relationship between patriotism and nationalism. Sometimes, as in the case of Glinka and his first opera, described in chapter 2, the two can be coincident. At other times, as in the case of Rubinstein vs. Balakirev, described in chapter 8, they can be altogether opposed. In that chapter, moreover, a third alternative that is national without being either patriotic or nationalistic is also identified. The powerful irony explored in the chapter is the way in which the internalized other became so much more necessary a component of the actively nationalistic tendency than it had been of the merely “national.”
The other in that case was Germany; the chapter shows Russia as an East turning West. The next chapter, a study of “orientalism,” shows Russia as a West turning East. In both chapters there is ultimate confusion as to what is self and what is other, since Russia, poised between the unambiguously Western and the unambiguously Eastern, viewing both, and viewed by both, as other, could never locate or define its self unambiguously with respect to either.1 Therefore, both chapters emerge as antiessentialist cautionary tales. What is “authentic” and what is “representative,” in a fashion paralleling the patriotic and the nationalistic, do not necessarily converge. What is “Russian”—hence, too, what is “Western” and what is “Eastern”—can be more reliably gauged on the basis of reception than on the basis of provenance or original intent.
Chapter 10, on musical Russia vs. another “West,” namely Italian opera, seems less fraught with ambiguity, at least on the surface. The other here seems a clear and present threat to self-interest, and the story seems unambiguously one of resistance rather than appropriation. But that is only if one identifies the Russian self only with Russia’s musicians. From the standpoint of the Russian state, which of course defined Russian patriotism, things looked rather different, and the story is indeed (and more explicitly than ever) one of appropriation—and of the outright political exploitation of art, one of the overriding, reciprocally defining themes in the history of music as an art in Russia. And yet appropriation and exploitation are never complete; slippage and leakage of meaning—hence contests over meaning and the actual the-matization of meaning—are collectively another perennial theme of that history. Russia is one country where there has never been the luxury of unmedi-ated response. There can be no evading hermeneutics when treating art within those heavily patrolled frontiers.
After this initial trio of chapters in which nations are viewed as collective entities confronting other collectivities, the focus of the book seems to narrow, homing, in the time-honored tradition of bourgeois historiography, on individuals. In each case, however, the individual is paired with a general concept that is treated as a specifically Russian manifestation. With Chaikovsky, the “human” theme is related to the special construction the composer put upon the term in the context of Russian absolutist politics. What is often forgotten by historians of art is that by the late nineteenth century “political absolutism” and “Russia” were virtually synonymous terms. Chaikovsky’s status as a sort of court musician was an integral part of his identity as (one sort of) Russian musician. The aristocratic, hence (as I maintain) basically preromantic nature of Chaikovsky’s art defines that art as Russian; and that art, reciprocally, defines the society and the culture within which it was produced, and which it ardently served, as Russian.
Absolutism and autocracy are visions of an all-encompassing political hierarchy: singleness (or as the Russians say, vseyedinstvo) on the human plane. Transfer that singleness to the superhuman plane, the transcendent plane to which all that is human is other, and it assumes the aspect of the unknowable Plenitude of Gnostic philosophy, the pleroma Scriabin sought to disclose through an art that would by its apocalyptic revelations break the bonds of the phenomenal world and return the inner self to its native realm of light.
This urge to transcend all pluralities was a maximalization of a longstanding, highly characteristic strain of antirationalistic Russian thought going back almost a century to the Russian Schellingians, whose outstanding representative was Prince Odoyevsky—the same Odoyevsky whom we have already encountered as an enthusiastic advocate of Glinka’s achievement and whom we shall encounter again as the principal “philosophical” opponent to the Italian opera. Odoyevsky’s principle of tsel’nost’ (“wholeness”) lies behind the Slavophiles’ sobornosf (“commonality” or integral union), which mutates finally into the radical vseyedinstvo of the Russian symbolists, many of whom (as reported in chapter 12) thought of Scriabin not only as one of their own but as the best, most potent, and most “essentially Russian” of them all.
As a radical monist Scriabin paid no attention whatever to nations or nationalism. As a theosophist, hostile to all temporal authority, he was no patriot. But only in Russia did such thinking achieve the grandiosity his work exemplifies—indeed, caps. As the culminating representative of Russian philosophical monism in its terminal occultist phase, Scriabin’s art, no less than Chaikovsky’s, is certifiably the product of a Russian viewpoint and a Russian moment. In its extremism, it contributed resoundingly to Russian cultural self-definition in its time.
Though rarely characterized in national terms,2 Scriabin’s achievement as described and technically explicated here is in agreement with generally accepted accounts of his intentions. Indeed, the explication aims precisely to affirm the link, often treated by analysts and critics as a source of embarrassment, between the composer’s intentions and his achievement.
In the case of the young Stravinsky who was Scriabin’s contemporary, the artistic product was manifestly, indeed programmatically national. A show of national character, predicated on its reception as exoticism, was the calculated basis of its international appeal. On the surface it was the old Russian ploy of parading Self as Other. (The ironic implications of this masquerade are pursued in chapter 10). And yet in this case the technical explications, particularly of Svadebka in the second section of chapter 13, have been aimed at problematizing the easy relationship between impulse and accomplishment that is commonly assumed. Instead of an heureuse continuité extending a valued past, such as Stravinsky celebrated (as “tradition”) in Poetics of music,3 his “Swiss period” folklorism is treated here as an unforeseen and unfor-seeable response to the crisis in Russian self-definition that followed upon the postrevolutionary deracination of the upper-class intelligentsia. The continuity emphasized here is not that between Stravinsky’s late folkloristic music and earlier Russian “nationalisms” but that between the late folkloristic music and the “neoclassical” phase that followed.
The chapters on Shostakovich deal, inescapably, with the problem of art under maladaptive totalitarian conditions. From this standpoint the treatment of Shostakovich may be viewed as complementing that of Chaikovsky, which describes a notably successful adaptation to political conditions that were arguably comparable in stringency if not as spectacularly violent in repression. In both cases it is a specifically Russian oppression that is described, and a particularly Russian response to it. For this reason, I believe that the discussion of Shostakovich offered herein may imply an answer to the tough, enduring question of why the Soviet despotism seemed to stimulate musical richness while other twentieth-century tyrannies, notably the Nazi regime, were musically barren.
It is not just that the Thousand-Year Reich lasted a mere dozen years, while the Soviet state hung on for more than seventy. (But of course there is a modicum of explanation even in that: had the Soviet state lasted only until 1929, it could have claimed no credit at all for Prokofiev; and as of that year only a single significant work by Shostakovich, his First Symphony, had been performed.) It is also that, altogether unlike the composers of Hitler’s Germany, the most artistic composers of Stalin’s Russia, following a calling that went back long before Stalin (one that Stalin and his cultural minions attempted, but in vain, to coopt to their exclusive purposes), actively engaged with the life around them in a way that only popular culture did by then in the democracies and dictatorships to the west.
The subject requires further research, to be sure, but it seems sufficiently evident that it was precisely the greater “autonomy” of German art—long its glory and its claim to preeminence—that rendered it sterile, merely escapist, under conditions of twentieth-century totalitarianism.4 Under orders not to be stylistically adventurous but not required to march in step, German music marched off into oblivion. Under much more stringent orders to conform, and actively required to make civic avowals, Russian music (and that of Shostakovich above all, precisely because he was not only the most gifted but also the most bullied) acquired huge public moment and moral authority, and became the basis for a furiously contentious exegetical tradition that shows no sign of letup even after the Soviet collapse. Again, as always, the musical response to Soviet tyranny was a defining moment both for music and for Russia.
And again, as always, it is precisely what is special and different about the Russian experience that makes it so instructive, so illuminating about events and conditions elsewhere and everywhere. As the first section of chapter 14 will contend at length and attempt to illustrate, the controversies surrounding Shostakovich’s legacy are an ideal crucible for considering and working on general problems of musical hermeneutics. No other music—none since Beethoven, anyway—so compels recognition of the essential interpretive dilemma, but also the wonderful interpretive opportunity, that musical artifacts present at their most culturally fraught: namely, in Charles Rosen’s well-found words, the dilemma “that some kind of metaphorical description is called for, and even necessary, but . . . none will be satisfactory or definitive.”5
The Stravinsky case is an ideal crucible for testing another sort of general hypothesis, long associated with ethnomusicology (and, in the realm of high culture, mainly with Theodor W. Adorno) but now widely—and, often, much too loosely—applied to art-musical texts, namely that modes of musical organization microscopically inscribe modes of social organization. Believing as I do, first, that this is a hypothesis, not a foundational truth to be merely asserted or assumed; second, that the burden of testing it rests with those who see the need for it; and third, that those with the best equipment for apprehending the inherent logic and meaning of musical texts are apt to be least likely to see the need for it, I have chosen for this one argument, or at any rate for a major part of it, the medium of close musical analysis replete with standard technical jargon. I realize that this approach may excessively try the patience of some readers to whom the book is otherwise eagerly addressed, and I hope that the argument is sufficiently corroborated by other, more generally accessible aspects of the discussion. Because the subject matter is ticklish, involving a depressingly familiar nexus of “great product and grim prejudice” (in Thomas Hodge’s vivid phrase),6 and saddling a greatly admired figure with a burden of responsibility that is by no means universally welcomed by his devotees, I thought that I myself had better be particularly responsible, and avoid any possible air of hit-and-run. The result is a regrettably heavy chapter, perhaps, but at least I can promise that the cards are all on the table.
The chapters on Chaikovsky and Scriabin also endeavor to reflect a Russian light on the wider world. The redefinition of “eighteenth-century” aesthetics so as to subsume Chaikovsky, and the concomitant rejection of the term “classical” to denote a period style or a preromantic aesthetic practice, are tested against Mozart, partly with the help of Wye J. Allanbrook’s excellent study, cited in chapter 11. Similarly, hypotheses about the expressive (or representational) mechanisms of Scriabin’s “tonal” and “atonal” practices are tested against Wagner and Schoenberg. If the book succeeds in upholding one of its central theses, that regarding the codependence and inevitable blurring of self-definition and “other-construction,” some insight into the selfhood of its “others” may hopefully emerge.
1 As a recent example of this dilemma consider the coverage, by the Soviet magazine Muzïkal’naya zhizn’, in 1986, of the piano prodigy Yevgeniy Kissin’s “Western” debut—in Tokyo.
2 Indeed, it is still a musicographical commonplace to portray Scriabin, gratuitously, as a freak cosmopolite in the ghetto: “Curiously, [!] Skryabin was not himself nationalist in orientation” (Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music [New York: Norton, 1991], p. 55); “In contrast to Stravinsky, Scriabin’s musical language was not rooted in Russian national folk sources but rather in various art-music traditions” (Elliott Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music (En-glewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991), p. 100; “Skryabin was in many ways atypical of Russian composers and he had no significant followers” (David Fanning, “Russia: East Meets West,” in Music and Society: The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991], p. 198). To be sure, there is also the odd “vindication” restoring him to first-class ghetto status: “The opening melody of [Scriabin’s] Study Op. 42 No. 2, based on the minor triad, with its limited range and nota cambiata approach to the 5th of the chord, is exactly in the style of a great number of Russian folk songs,” etc. (Peter Deane Roberts, Modernism in Russian Piano Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], vol. 1, p. 17).
3 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Dutton, 1947), p. 74.
4 See Colloquium Klassizität, Klassizismus, Klassik in der Musik 1920-1950, ed. Wolfgang Osthoff and Reinhard Wiesend (Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1988); also Wolfgang Osthoff, “Symphonien beim Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Strawinsky—Frommel—Schostakowitsch.” Acta Musicologica 59 (1987): 62-104.
5 “Music à la Mode,” New York Review of Books, 23 June 1994, pp. 59-60.
6 “The Icon and the Hacks,” New Republic, 8 August 1994, p. 41.