Emily Frey

Tolstoy’s meetings with Russian composers tended to be debacles, for reasons that are easy enough to imagine. The author, after all, was not given to tempering his remarks on topics likely to vex his interlocutors – and for contemporary composers such as Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, Tolstoy’s views on art, its purposes, and its ethical responsibilities were decidedly among those vexing topics. Indeed, Tolstoy imagined that music above all the arts posed a special moral-aesthetic danger, as Caryl Emerson, Stephen Halliwell, and others have explained. But whatever their misgivings about Tolstoy the man, composers’ regard for Tolstoy the artist was much less equivocal. Tchaikovsky saw in Tolstoy an eminently “musical” writer whose gifts of simplicity, social observation, and psychological sensitivity were highly sympathetic to his own. Mussorgsky, meanwhile, imbued his operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina with a vision of history that largely harmonized with the historical philosophy Tolstoy expounded in War and Peace. This chapter explores the connections between Tolstoy’s fiction and contemporaneous Russian music. I focus, in particular, on opera: an art form Tolstoy loathed, but which – as composed by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and other Russians of the era – nonetheless abounded in Tolstoyan resonances.

Rachmaninoff's student opera Aleko earned a glittering reception at its premiere in 1893, when the work was hailed for its harmonic novelties. Later commentators, however, have been struck more often by the ways in which Aleko looks backward rather than forward – borrowing, sometimes explicitly, from Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Borodin. This chapter considers Aleko in relation to that musical past, exploring the ways in which Rachmaninoff's youthful opera deals with the methods and conventions of operatic realism, which reigned in Russia from the 1860s through the 1880s. The relationship between Aleko and Russian realism is not entirely uncritical: while the opera clearly references and synthesizes realist models, it also undermines them in ways that would resonate throughout Rachmaninoff's subsequent career as a vocal composer. Then, complicating the idea of Rachmaninoff as an artist out of touch with his times, this chapter examines the ways in which Rachmaninoff's attempts to move beyond realism mapped on to the efforts of two Muscovite performers with whom he had close personal and creative ties: the singer Fyodor Chaliapin and the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky.

"Stravinsky in Context offers an alternative to chronological biography. Thirty-five short, specially commissioned essays explore the eventful lifetapestry from which Stravinsky's compositions emerged. The opening chapters draw on new research into the composer's upbringing in St Petersburg. Stravinsky's early, often traumatic family experience is examined in depth, particularly in the context of his brother Roman's death and religious sensibilities within the family. Further essays consider the composer's many years in exile at the centre of dynamic and constantly-evolving cultural environments, Stravinsky forever refining his idiom and redefining his aesthetics against a backdrop of world events and personal tragedy. The closing chapters review new material regarding Stravinsky's complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, whilst also anticipating his legacy from the varied perspectives of publishing, research and even, in the iconic example of The Rite of Spring, space exploration. The book includes previously unpublished images of the composer and his family"-- Provided by publisher.

Many works of Russian literary criticism – among them, Vissarion Belinsky’s ‘Survey of Russian Literature in 1847’, Nikolai Dobroliubov’s ‘What Is Oblomovitis?’ and ‘A Ray of Light in a Dark Kingdom’, and Dmitri Pisarev’s ‘Bazarov’ – have become classics in their own right, their fame rivalling that of the fictional works they critique. The prestige of literary criticism in imperial Russia owes something to the exigencies of tsarist censorship, which forbade (more or less strictly, depending on who was wearing the crown) the publication of anti-establishment social and political views. The discussion of fiction thus provided an outlet for the left-leaning intelligentsia to consider issues that could not otherwise be debated openly. Critique the society represented in a work of realist literature, after all, and you implicitly critique the society you inhabit in real life. The influence of criticism on Russian history has been enormous; it is little exaggeration to say that the intellectual origins of the Russian revolution were forged in mid-nineteenth century literary criticism.

During his lifetime, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a composer whose work had great influence not only in his native Russia but also internationally. While he remains well-known in Russia--where many of his fifteen operas and various orchestral pieces are still in the standard repertoire--very little of his work is performed in the West today beyond Scheherezade and arrangements of The Flight of the Bumblebee. In Western writings, he appears mainly in the context of the Mighty Handful, a group of five Russian composers to which he belonged at the outset of his career. Rimsky-Korsakov and His World finally gives the composer center stage and due attention. In this collection, Rimsky-Korsakov's major operas, The Snow Maiden, Mozart and Salieri, and The Golden Cockerel, receive multifaceted exploration and are carefully contextualized within the wider Russian culture of the era. The discussion of these operas is accompanied and enriched by the composer's letters to Nadezhda Zabela, the distinguished soprano for whom he wrote several leading roles. Other essays look at more general aspects of Rimsky-Korsakov's work and examine his far-reaching legacy as a professor of composition and orchestration, including his impact on his most famous pupil Igor Stravinsky.

This article considers Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov in light of the outbreak of political violence in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. Attempting to make sense of Dmitry Karakozov's ideologically motivated attack on Alexander II in 1866, Russians sought parallels in literature—where authors such as Dostoevsky and Turgenev had begun to explore the psychology of ideological commitment—and in history, the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) serving as a particularly salient point of reference. Boris Godunov, on which Musorgsky began work in 1868, brought these two strands together: set during the Time of Troubles, the opera features the upstart Pretender Dmitry, a historical figure in whom some writers found an ancestor of the modern political terrorist. But Musorgsky's treatment of the Pretender character diverges sharply in his two versions of Boris Godunov, suggesting shifting ideas about the role of this figure both in the opera and in history. Musorgsky's first attempt at the character produced a Pretender every inch the undeterrable “new man” of Russian literature; evincing little subjectivity beyond his obsession with his cause, the Pretender of 1869 escapes out a tavern window in act 2 and exists thereafter only as a musico-dramatic idea. In Musorgsky's 1872 revision of the opera, however, the Pretender pops up again in Poland, where both his self-determination and his dogged recitative style are easily bowled over by Marina Mnishek's triple-metered tunefulness. Like Ratmir in Ruslan and Liudmila's enchanted garden, this Pretender forgets his cause—but participates in the opera's most ravishing music. Drawing on a wide swath of literary and historical writings, this article explores Musorgsky's participation in an urgent contemporary discussion about the personal ramifications of absolute commitment to an idea and the limits of individual agency.

In the opera that bears his name, Evgeny Onegin often seems remarkably inconsequential, a "superfluous man" among Russian society and nearly such in his own tale. Critics from Hermann Laroche to Catherine Clement have lamented not only the triviality of Evgeny's character but the flavorlessness of his music -- a deficiency cast into relief by the compelling and pervasive musical presence of Tatiana, the too-eventual object of Evgeny's affections. This imbalance, a departure from Pushkin (whose Tatiana is ever sketchily drawn, and indeed almost mute), has often been attributed to Chaikovsky's well-publicized emotional identification with his heroine. Onegin's blankness thus becomes the product of a composerly flaw: Chaikovsky's inability to portray convincingly in music a character dissimilar to his own. But the Evgeny Onegin Chaikovsky inherited was not only Pushkin's. It was a cultural palimpsest, a text written on and written over by virtually every major intellectual figure in nineteenth-century Russia. By the time Chaikovsky got his hands on them, Pushkin's heroes were entangled in some of the century's most urgent debates: about the ethics of action versus reflection, the slippage between public and private identities. This article traces the constructions of Evgeny and Tatiana in a series of nineteenth- century readings of Evgeny Onegin, examining the ways in which the opera responds to and transforms key questions from the reception history of the novel. Among the texts considered are works by Herzen, Belinsky, and Dostoevsky, whose (in)famous "Pushkin Speech" was the opera's nearexact contemporary. From these readings, and the myriad images of Evgeny and Tatiana they present, emerge insights into a broader discourse about the nature of subjectivity in Europe's only autocracy.