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.