Defining Russia Musically
Historical and Hermeneutical Essays
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- $67.99
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- $67.99
Publisher Description
The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always [been] tinged or tainted . . . with an air of alterity—sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period.
Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters—Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman—Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his dense and closely-argued collection of essays, UC-Berkeley music professor Taruskin shows why he is the leading American expert in Russian musicological matters. In the first section of the book, Taruskin looks at those particularly Russian factors (state, folk tunes, a conservative tendency) that influenced figures like Lvov, Glinka, the Mighty Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui). But he also addresses the imported influences, like the craze in Russia for Italian opera. The four final chapters that originated in his 1993 Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton, analyze Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Taruskin knows his subject very well, but that doesn't mean he always likes it: he is especially devastating about Stravinsky's "fascism and anti-Semitism," quoting a number of offensive passages from the composer's letters, where he scorns "Jew-Kraut stage designs," which were expurgated by Stravinsky's image-conscious editor Robert Craft in the official published correspondence. Taruskin is also good on the "animal sex" themes in Shostakovich's operas, and there are amusing details about Italian and French singers in 19th-century Russia, especially an unhappily married soprano, Adelina Patti, and mezzo Pauline Viardot, who was banned from Russia for having "excessively electrified the youth." Tchaikovsky's unique, complex status is well discerned also, as well as Glinka's pioneering orientalism. The many acrid attacks on fellow musicologists (particularly British ones) should have been cut as it's the kind of infighting that induces dire boredom in readers who are not themselves tenured professors in musicology. Still, this is a major and challenging contribution to the field, with much valuable information.
