Notes

Notes 59.1 (2002) 74-77

Book Review

A History of Russian Music:
From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar

A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. By Francis Maes. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. [xiv, 427 p. ISBN 0-520-21815-9. $45.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Over the past two decades or so, the field of Russian music studies has undergone a sea change; research by foremost musicologists, most of them American, led by Richard Taruskin, has resulted in nothing short of a major revision of the history of Russian music. Many notions previously held to be unassailable have been reconsidered and consequently altered. This obviously began even before the breakup of the [End Page 74] former Soviet Union and it is still ongoing. As a result, what has been needed is a general work that encapsulates and incorporates these revisions into a "new" history of Russian music for a wider audience. Francis Maes has provided us with that work. In fulfilling this goal, Maes has fashioned a book that is engagingly written (and translated), logically organized, and elegantly presented. Within its fourteen chapters, spread out over 374 pages, Maes charmingly and persuasively explains and documents the 140 years or so of this revisionist history, beginning with Mikhail Glinka and his Life for the Tsar in 1836 and ending with the death of Dmitry Shostakovich in 1975. Based on the reappraisal of primary documents, the music, and the milieux (cultural, historical, and social) in which the composers lived and worked, this revision affects in some respect most major composers in this study—namely, Glinka, Mily Balakirev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr Borodin, Modest Musorgsky, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Alexsandr Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky (through Les Noces), Sergey Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. Three lesser-known composers, Aleksandr Dargomizhsky, Aleksandr Serov, and Anton Rubinstein, through their music, activities, and influence, also figure significantly in this history. Although Maes discusses or briefly mentions numerous other composers and their works in relation to trends or developments of their time, his focus remains on those named. Further, Maes does not include any of the post-Shostakovich (or even, for that matter, post-Stalin) generations of composers.

Of what does this "revised" history consist? Above all, Maes ties the development of Russian music to the history of ideas: "Musical innovation for the most part originates in ideas" (p. 209). Political and philosophical views and their impact on society and culture thus provide the backdrop against which the drama of Russian music history unfolds. This emphasis on ideas is particularly significant from the late nineteenth century (the beginning of the Silver Age) through the main years of the Soviet era. Furthermore, although at times Maes concentrates on the leading composers in conjunction with his ideological emphases —devoting chapters to Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich—he is careful throughout the text to focus on their music as the core of his study. Yet the drama too is riveting—from the personal rivalries among composers in St. Petersburg in the 1860s to the intense personal battles Shostakovich waged against the Soviet authorities for artistic freedom of expression from the 1930s on. But, in terms of this revision, even the understanding of the ideas themselves, exactly which concepts have helped to shape this history and which notions best represent it, has been reconsidered.

Take, for example, the idea of Russian music. What are those characteristics that define a given body of music as uniquely or quintessentially Russian? This question is important, as it represents the tenor and focus of the whole book. The old notions, promoted primarily by the chief propagandist for The Five, Vladimir Stasov, and largely expropriated by the Soviets for their own ends, have proven unreliable as a true representation of Russian music. The association of a Russian national character with folk music and the resulting progressive view that Russian composers were indeed champions of the Russian peasant still hold sway in much of Western musicology. Maes, however, convincingly demonstrates that this view has been...