cover image Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays

Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays

Richard Taruskin. Princeton University Press, $80 (606pp) ISBN 978-0-691-01156-1

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. (May)