Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture. By Boris Gasparov. pp. xxii + 268. Russian Literature and Throught. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, £30. ISBN 0-300-10650-5.)
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<article-title><italic>Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture</italic>. By Boris Gasparov. pp. xxii + 268. Russian Literature and Throught. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, £30. ISBN 0-300-10650-5.)</article-title></title-group>
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<body><p>Between 1863 and 1890, Russian literature and music appear to evolve along very disparate lines. A side-by-side chronology of major works sees Chernyshevsky’s polemical <italic>What Is to Be Done</italic>, Tolstoy’s <italic>War and Peace</italic>, and Dostoevsky’s <italic>Crime and Punishment</italic> belonging to the same decade (the 1860s) as Dargomyzhsky’s <italic>The Stone Guest</italic>, Borodin’s <italic>Prince Igor</italic> (both operas left incomplete at the composers’ deaths), and Tchaikovsky’s <italic>Romeo and Juliet</italic>. This pattern continues into the 1870s and 1880s, with Dostoevsky’s disturbing novel <italic>The Brothers Karamazov</italic> sitting incongruously alongside Rimsky-Korsakov’s sparkling early fairy-tale operas, Tchaikovsky’s <italic>Eugene Onegin</italic>, and Musorgsky’s <italic>Khovanshchina</italic> (also left incomplete). At first glance, this looks like a clear case of a lack of social engagement on the part of Russian composers, with perhaps Musorgsky’s <italic>Boris Godunov</italic> (premiere 1874) serving as the sole honourable exception. And it is at this point that Boris Gasparov invites the reader to think again: to look more closely at those operas that are so often consumed uncritically and to see that they, too, are as typical of their epoch as the weighty historical novels whose philosophical message is rather harder to miss.</p>
<p>There can be few who would not welcome Gasparov’s stated aim: to analyse ‘the relation between the voice of Russian music and its message, in a broader historical and aesthetic sense’ and to ‘view music as a formative cultural force’ (p. xxi). This has been the thrust of some fine scholarship on Russian music over the last fifteen years, as Gasparov acknowledges, crediting Richard Taruskin (<italic>Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue</italic> (Princeton, 1993); <italic>Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions</italic> (Oxford, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, 1996); <italic>Defining Russia Musically</italic> (Princeton, 1997)), Caryl Emerson (<italic>The Life of Musorgsky</italic> (Cambridge, 1999)), Laurel Fay (<italic>Shostakovich: A Life</italic> (New York, 2000)), and Rosamund Bartlett (<italic>Wagner in Russia</italic> (Cambridge, 1995)). However, buried in those innocently laudable phrases lurks a major pitfall: the assumption that there is such a thing as the ‘voice of Russian music’ for us to extract and analyse in the first place. As with most culturally based assumptions, it contains a grain of truth; but Gasparov’s claim that this voice is unfailingly recognizable in Russian music from Glinka to Gubaidulina is stretching a point. To a non-Russian, for example, the Soviet national anthem (discussed in the Epilogue) does not sound unmistakably Russian at all; like much Soviet ‘pomp’ of the 1930s and 1940s, it sounds the same as other self-celebratory national music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether from England, France, Italy, or Germany.</p>
<p>These claims would matter less if they were not accompanied by a number of generalizations on the nature of the West’s reception of Russian music that are not only easily refutable but also add nothing to Gasparov’s wider arguments. His assertion that Western audiences tend to listen <italic>more</italic> uncritically to the ‘cozily expressive’ Russian ‘voice’ than they do to, say, Mahler, Sibelius, Strauss, or Schubert (or indeed almost any popular composer) cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, even for the simple reason that most of us now listen to almost all music uncritically anyway. Though Gasparov is right to note that the history of Western music and aesthetics has tended to overlook Russian composers, or at least to ghettoize them, their exclusion is by no means unique. Nor is it true that Western critics are more obsessed with the biography of Russian artists than with those of any other nation (p. xv): Shostakovich may be the current favourite, but it is not so long ago that we were similarly fascinated by Beethoven and Mozart. And when Gasparov maintains that it is only Russian composers whose biography and sexuality have been brought to bear on discussions of their music, the reader does begin to wonder if he is aware of the musicological literature on Schubert from the 1980s on. In most cases, the biographical appeal is not national but romantic, inextricably tied to the cult of the suffering artist. Ironically, it is precisely in exaggerating the West’s intellectually lazy attitude specifically to Russia that Gasparov himself risks perpetuating the very fetishization of Russian music that he seems otherwise to deplore. It is true that Shostakovich has suffered from romanticized interpretations with relation to the 1930s and 1940s in a way that Puccini, Schoenberg, and Bartók have not (p. xvi). But Shostakovich stands aside from his Soviet contemporaries in this respect too: very few have inflicted similar treatment on Prokofiev, and even fewer have tried it with Myaskovsky, Khachaturian, or Kabalevsky—all composers who are, or at least have been, popular in the West to varying degrees.</p>
<p>Those elements Gasparov identifies as uniquely ‘Russian’, be they tonal/modal, metrical, structural, or aesthetic (e.g. attitude to folk culture, authority, the masses) are laid out in the first and last chapters, where they are credited with the establishment of alternative modernisms, initially to the hyper-chromaticism of Wagner (Debussy, Ravel) and later to the hyper-rationality of the Second Viennese School (Stravinsky), or, in the case of the last chapter, with establishment of a ‘French-Russian alliance’ (p. 198) against the domineering presence of Austro-German music. This is all familiar territory. Then, positing a startling trajectory leading more or less directly from Rimsky-Korsakov to postmodernism, Gasparov argues that ‘Russians’ inability or unwillingness to catch up with the nineteenth-century train of progress made them honorary travelers—if not engineers—on the postmodern means of transportation’ (p. 22). This sounds far too glib to be true; and yet there is enough obvious truth in it to invite further consideration. On the one hand, it cannot possibly be accurate to credit Russian composers alone with the gigantic and multifarious shifts in cultural values that challenged the once dominant faith in the ideal of technical progress upheld in various quarters throughout the twentieth century (Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Babbitt). On the other, it is true that those ‘fragmentary’ or contradictory aspects of Russian culture that were already present in the nineteenth century (Gasparov cites Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as prime examples of authorial inconsistency) appear far more normal to a late twentieth-century or a twenty-first-century Western reader or listener than they did a century ago. Though Gasparov’s claims are sweeping, his underlying point is a valuable one: it was not just Russian literature and philosophy, but Russian music too, that played a key role in shaping the progress of twentieth-century Western culture.</p>
<p>Forming the centrepiece of this study are the four chapters on Russian operas, each serving to illuminate a different aspect of Gasparov’s thesis: that all four operas demonstrate as tangible a connection with their epoch as the literary works that inspired them. This case is made very clearly in the chapters on <italic>Eugene Onegin</italic> and <italic>The Queen of Spades</italic>, and rather less so in that on <italic>Khovanshchina</italic>, for the obvious reason that this opera was constructed from historical documents rather than from literature. In the study both of Glinka’s <italic>Ruslan and Lyudmila</italic> and <italic>Eugene Onegin</italic>, Gasparov examines how their composers moved away from the emotionally distant tone of Pushkin’s original poems, each for slightly different reasons. In <italic>Ruslan and Lyudmila</italic>, for example, Glinka stepped back from the earlier nationalist effusions of <italic>A Life for the Tsar</italic> in a manner that reflected a shift from the ‘public’ sphere of Russian culture at the height of imperial power during the 1830s to the more ‘private’ ideal of the 1840s. Though Glinka retained Pushkin’s celebratory embrace of Russian multi-ethnicity (‘imperial cosmopolitanism’) in <italic>Ruslan</italic>’s various exotic dances, he toned down Pushkin’s mocking portrayal of the Blackamoor’s realm to make it both less anti-authoritarian and less overtly sexually suggestive. But Gasparov’s most crucial argument here is that Glinka created this public/private fissure through musical means, casting the exotic idioms as public and cosmopolitan (represented by the enchanted realm that has to be escaped) and the familiar phrases of the Russian <italic>romans</italic> as emblems of a deeper ‘reality’: the private, domestic world of contentment for which both couples in the opera are striving. Hence, Glinka’s <italic>Ruslan</italic> is quantifiably different from Pushkin’s—symbolically ‘stepping down from the stage of the Imperial Theatre into a private living room’ (p. 55).</p>
<p>Of all Gasparov’s case studies, <italic>Ruslan</italic> is the one that most convincingly demonstrates ‘music as a formative cultural force’, or at least as a participatory one. His bolder claim—that <italic>Ruslan</italic> actually ‘signalled the advent of the 1840s’ and its major artists (Turgenev, Dostoevsky) in being ‘introspective . . . withdrawn into a private space’ (loc. cit.) has far-reaching implications. As Gasparov observes, that shift from public to private, reflecting as it did a reaction against imperial power, conformism, and authority, in one way or another shaped the culture of all Russian art in the second half of the nineteenth century. It may well be wishful thinking to see <italic>Ruslan</italic> as a precursor of this simply because it embraces the familiar intonations of the Russian art song and celebrates so familiar a theme as the power of true love over adversity. But though it is quite possible that similar examples could be found in Austrian, German, or Italian operas of the same period, Gasparov’s hypothesis is an appealing one, if only because it provides a fascinating framework within which to investigate the opera further.</p>
<p>For me the highlights of this book are the chapters on <italic>Onegin</italic> and <italic>Khovanshchina</italic>. Both are elegantly and persuasively argued, with such effortless mastery of social, cultural, and political history as well as of literature, that most readers, especially those with mainly musical—as opposed to literary—expertise, will learn something new. Gasparov is not the first to offer a defence of Tchaikovsky’s <italic>Onegin</italic> in response to attacks from lovers of Pushkin’s novel–poem; but he does offer a new angle—that of parallels in Tchaikovsky’s own life at the time he conceived <italic>Onegin</italic>. The basis of his argument is that the ‘realism’ evident in the opera, together with the quite drastically altered presentation of Pushkin’s dramatis personae, acts to present a new version of the novel, altered to suit the warmer, more socially ‘responsible’ climate of the 1870s. Onegin himself—a mildly absurd victim of social mores in Pushkin’s novel—becomes a near-villain in the opera, and Tatiana a true romantic heroine. Gasparov sees Tchaikovsky’s own powerful sense of social responsibility as inspiring this transformation, as demonstrated in his exaggerated sense of duty towards Antonina Milyukova, the infatuated woman he married, with (for her, at least) tragic consequences. And Gasparov’s musical arguments convincingly back up his claim that connections between the characters and their motifs forge a layer of deeper, psychological ‘realism’ beneath the surface realist touches (the shepherd’s piping, the dances, the ladies’ chit-chat), and that this duality of the real and the ‘more real’ is typical of the Russian novel of the 1860s and 1870s.</p>
<p>When dealing with the transformation of novel into opera, Gasparov is at his most persuasive. Coping with Musorgsky’s shuffling of historical events in <italic>Khovanshchina</italic> is a very different task, and in Gasparov’s painstaking reconstructive work one cannot help sensing a very tidy—and occasionally frustrated—mind at work. The unfortunate fact remains that the ‘real’ events of <italic>Khovanshchina</italic> tell us little or nothing about Musorgsky’s extraordinary libretto, which emphasizes characterization and plot over factual history. Clearly, no writer can do more than begin to scratch the surface of a work of this scale in a short chapter, and Gasparov doesn’t claim to do so. But what he does do is present some intriguing hypotheses, above all that <italic>Khovanshchina</italic> is constructed from a tightly woven web of motivic connections that, as with <italic>Onegin</italic>, provide clues about the characters’ motivations and feelings. The highly ambiguous character of Marfa is subjected to some severe but well-argued psychoanalysis whereby Gasparov suggests that the sequence of events that ends with the Old Believers’ immolation was engineered by her from the start. Less convincingly argued is the scene of Khovansky’s murder, where the Persian girls who escort him, arms raised, to meet the assassin’s blow are accused of complicity in his murder (p. 117). Alternatively, Gasparov suggests, Khovansky subconsciously accepts his fate and submits to it. The third and most obvious possibility, which he does not mention, is that Musorgsky showed a particularly bleak sense of dramatic irony in this scene, with a troubled Khovansky turning for consolation to the ‘constant’ element of folksong, which then accompanies him to his death. His murderer’s mocking echo of the girls’ ‘Glory to the white swan’ underlines the horror of this scene, even though Khovansky himself has inspired no affection. His helplessness does look absurd; but this, surely, is what creates the irony. Nevertheless, since ambiguity is a crucial element of much dramatic irony, and since Gasparov can both suggest alternative readings of this scene and back up his arguments musically, his ideas offer an expansion of the range of interpretative possibilities that can only be welcomed (even if they can also be challenged).</p>
<p>In his chapter on <italic>The Queen of Spades</italic> Gasparov returns to one of his central claims: the crucial role nineteenth-century Russian music has played in shaping twentieth-century modernism. Here he focuses on Tchaikovsky’s conscious playing with genre and style, with a fascinating account of stylistic rupture and anachronism in the context of a penetrating investigation into the psychology of Hermann, Lisa, and even the Countess. While here not every music example is convincing (the ascending semitonal figure that accompanies the Countess’s ghost in Act III, scene vii comes not from Prilepa’s song but from the chorus of guests in Act II), Gasparov’s description of Hermann as a nineteenth-century hero wandering through an eighteenth-century world like the Prince in <italic>The Sleeping Beauty</italic> is a powerful image, feeding into his wider thesis that <italic>The Queen of Spades</italic> is a symbolist opera. In this reading, Hermann himself is an alienated tragic hero, and all the events that push the protagonists towards their respective tragic fates are precipitated by their own slippage from reality. Whether this opera is more closely linked with the genre-play of Stravinsky and Prokofiev (among others) than other nineteenth-centry operas that use genre for dramatic effect is open to debate. After all, it could as well be argued that this element is equally present in <italic>Onegin</italic>, not to mention <italic>Boris Godunov</italic> and even <italic>Khovanshchina</italic>, or, for that matter, in Wagner.</p>
<p>As will be apparent by now, there is as much to delight in as to argue with in Gasparov’s book, and this holds for his chapter on Shostakovich. His stance on Solomon Volkov’s discredited memoirs <italic>Testimony</italic> is curious, though: accepting its fraudulent presentation, Gasparov also disapproves of its ‘banishment’ from scholarship (p. 254 n. 9), since it can be accepted as ‘Volkov’s account of his conversations with Shostakovich’. The point is that, by never coming clean over <italic>Testimony</italic>, Volkov has made it impossible for us to use it. The possibility remains that, apart from the plagiarized passages, <italic>Testimony</italic> was entirely Volkov’s creation. We may suspect otherwise; but we cannot know for sure. And so its ‘banishment’ is no ‘polemical excess’ but necessary scholarly caution.</p>
<p>Otherwise, however, Gasparov offers an original and stimulating reading of Shostakovich’s middle-period symphonies. I could not agree more with his insistence that it is more fruitful to discuss these works as an engagement with the cultural epoch of High Stalinism than constantly to seek ways of divorcing them from it, and Gasparov’s comparisons with socialist realist novels of the period are fascinating. But I cannot agree with his argument that, like a hero in a socialist-realist novel, the symphonic subject of the first movements of the fourth and fifth symphonies is emotionally retarded, able to experience only one emotion at a time. This hypothesis may strike a casual listener as accurate, but it doesn’t survive scrutiny of the scores. There is, in fact, an unusual amount of thematic interaction and traditional symphonic ‘dialogue’ in both works. As a result, they actually stand out from contemporary Soviet symphonies that lack this quality, and for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with socialist realism, since the convention (which may be termed ‘monothematic development’) pre-dates it. In essence, Gasparov’s argument seems to be that works of this period were, in Bakhtin’s parlance, ‘epic’ rather than ‘novel’—philosophically monological rather than dialogical. But what was radical about Shostakovich as a symphonist was surely his extraordinary fusion of nineteenth-century symphonic structures and narratives with a style of Soviet heroics that appears ‘epic’ but is in fact subtly ‘novelistic’. The ‘spiritual fabric of the Old World’ that Gasparov sees as damaged by socialist realism’s psychological infantilism thus actually found refuge, not further destruction, in Shostakovich’s music. Gasparov implies that the root of this philosophical damage lies in what he sees as the music’s veering reactively from one emotional state to another, leaving false heroics unquestioned and the role of the subject reduced to that of a passive victim.</p>
<p>A closer look at the Stalin-period symphonies, however, belies this impression and leads to the opposite conclusion. Their fragmented surface overlays a closely knit ‘interior’ in which the subject, though elusive, continues to participate. Anyone familiar with Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky in <italic>Philosophie der neuen Musik</italic> (Gesammelte Schriften, xii (Frankfurt am Main, 1975)) will notice uncanny resemblances here: Gasparov’s ‘dehumanized’ reading of Shostakovich has much in common with Adorno’s of Stravinsky. This is not to say that his thesis is not original, but merely to observe that his reading of Shostakovich is symptomatic of an established tradition of humanitarian critique in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century that has already encompassed Shostakovich (chiefly in Taruskin’s <italic>Defining Russia Musically</italic>). But when dealing with abstract instrumental music (rather than with opera, film, theatre, or ballet), immense caution is needed, since the risk of moulding the music to fit the theory is considerably heightened. In its embrace of psychological and social imperatives, though, this sort of critique surely remains one of the most fruitful ways of engaging with music in its wider cultural context.</p>
<p>The mark of any truly successful study of this kind is the extent to which readers may find as much to argue with as to learn from. In this respect, Boris Gasparov’s book is immensely rewarding. It takes risks, overstates some of its key positions, and invites debate. But it is also beautifully written, deeply erudite, often original, and above all, thought-provoking.</p></body>
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