Russianness Flashcards
Russianness
Taruskin 1996
Central argument that, despite his later attempts to disavow his Russian heritage, Stravinsky’s combination of Russian folk tendencies with abstract methods to purge his music of Western influences in the 1910s/20s became aspects of his style that remained with him for life.
• Argues that his later disavowal was motivated by an “inferiority complex” deriving, in part, from the conflict within his nationalist orientation caused by the Reds’ victory in the Russian Civil War and Stravinsky’s definitive turn towards the West. Also motivated by a desire to distance himself from an artistic milieu focused on programme music
o Resulted in changing attitude towards German music, from condemning it outright in the 1910s to stating in Dialogues and a Diary (1963) that the Russian and French musical traditions in which he had participated were minor and lamenting his only tangential relationship to the “German stem”
o The upshot is that the many autobiographical documents Stravinsky produced after the Second World War should be treated as primary sources only on the mind of that Stravinsky, a significantly different person from the composer of the Russian works who we shouldn’t treat as an authority on them
• Taruskin borrows a series of concepts from Russian to characterise Stravinsky’s less overtly-Russian works in consistent terms
o Dróbnost’: ‘splinteredness’; the quality of being formally disunified, a sum-of-parts
o Nepodvízhnost: immobility, stasis; the quality of being non-teleological, non-developmental
o Uproshchéniye: simplification in a positive sense; a quality reached in the Swiss years as a result of the above two aesthetic features
o Oproshchéniye: simplification in a negative sense, as primitivism
• During the Second World War Stravinsky’s nationalism was re-awoken, inspiring him to compose music for the ultimately abandoned socialist-realist film The North Star, material from which would then find its way into the Scherzo à la russe (1943-44) and Sonata for Two Pianos (1944)
o Taruskin argues that here Stravinsky Russian folk traditions as an outsider, employing it opportunistically or as a buried inside joke; denaturing of the national “colour” of the material to suit an “academicism” he had previously heavily criticised
Russianness: Stravinsky’s 1962 volte-face
Rosamund Bartlett
Provides cultural/social context on Stravinsky’s St Petersburg. Nice summary of Taruskin.
• Stravinsky’s 1962 volte-face
o At 80 years old, after increasing hostility towards Russia reciprocated by Soviet Union
o ‘Emotional and apparently involuntary reaction…to being back on Russian soil’ (4)
• Disavowed his Russian musical heritage using ‘complex tapestry of lies and denials’ due to sense of cultural inferiority
o Walsh/Taruskin have revealed carefully concealed Russian identity
Russianness: broad cultural context
Rosamund Bartlett
Born 1882, at time of cultural sea-change
o Earlier era ended 1881 (with Alexander II assassination)
Great Reforms
—– Energy/optimism
—– Westernization
Populism
Realist novels (Tolstoy/Dostoevsky)
Nationalist artists (‘Wanderers’) and composers rebelled against Western/classical orientation of institutions
o Post-1881 conservatism under Alexander III
Former radicals joined establishment
More repressive/conservative government
—– Despondency
Russification policies promoted native culture
—– Banned Italian opera, fuelling 1880s success of Russian opera
—– Stravinsky grew up steeped in Russian music
Fostered nostalgic/conservative aesthetic
• Mid-1890s: birth of Russian modernism/avant-garde
o Promoted aestheticism (subjectivity/beauty) in opposition to relentless artistic utilitarianism/ideology
o Cultivation of amorality/occult
o Neo-nationalist, but promulgated novelty/originality (unlike Slavophile Alexander III)
‘native folklore came to be seen more as a stylistic resource with which to regenerate art and infuse it with a vigour and energy that was commonly felt to have been lost’
o World of Art group
Aimed to promote Russian culture
—– Initial focus on art
Opposed by Rimsky
Led by Diaghilev
1898: first international exhibition; The World of Art journal (first major platform for symbolists)
1901: Evenings of Contemporary Music started to rival Chamber Music Society
1906-on: Diaghilev exported Russia’s cultural legacy
- —- Recognised native style was essential for Russia to make distinct contribution to world culture
- —- Created Ballets Russes
Late 1909: first commissioned Stravinsky (Firebird)
1913: Rite was ‘apotheosis of the neo-nationalist style’ of World of Art
• St Petersburg
o Well-connected (fast train connections to Paris/Vienna/Berlin)
Russianness: Stavinsky’s context
Rosamund Bartlett
• Fyodor’s influence
o Access to extensive library of books/scores
o Attendance of Mariinsky theatre performances in its golden years (1890s-early 1900s)
—– Tchaikovsky /Glinka /Borodin /Musorgsky
/Rimsky-Korsakov
—– ‘my impressions [of concerts in the Mariinsky] were immediate and indelible’ (Stravinsky 1962)
• Musical training
o 1891 (aged 9): first piano lessons
o During university (studying law):
- —- Studied music theory privately
- —- Befriended Rimsky-Korsakov’s son, and met his father that summer
o 1902: Fyodor died of cancer; Rimsky became father figure and Stravinsky welcomed into Rimsky’s circle
o 1907/8: Stravinsky’s op.6 showed signs of later folk-inspired style
- —- Set Gorodetsky: among first modernist poetry inspired thematically/stylistically by Slavic mythology/folklore
- —- Rimsky attacked op.6
o Until 1908 (Rimsky’s death): Stravinsky happy in sterile environment
o End of 1909: Firebird commission
Russianness: cultivation of Russian style
Rosamund Bartlett
Taruskin shows Stravinsky only considered Russian folklore as source material after being acquainted with World of Art circle
• Firebird:
o Scenario fused Russian fairy tales involving mythical firebirds
Was finalised by the time Stravinsky was commissioned
o Score was assimilation of ‘contemporary Russian idioms’ (Taruskin)
Perceived as Russian-influenced in France and French-influenced in Russia
o Composed in Russia
o Inspired Stravinsky’s neonationalist orientation
• Petrushka (prem. 1911)
o Transitional work
Led to abrupt and irrevocable break with Rimsky school (condemned by his son)
Full of diverse folksongs
—– Ethnographers collected them in unprecedentedly rigorous/authentic manner
First time Stravinsky deliberately adopted folkloric style to create something new/distinctive
o Stravinsky had more say in scenario than Firebird
• Rite of Spring 1913
o Ethnographically accurate scenes of pagan Russia
o High bassoon opening melody imitates dudki (reed pipes), invoking pastoral, but proceeding to Sacrificial Dance
o Folksongs researched in published collections and absorbed into Stravinsky’s compositional processes
o Stravinsky later denied presence of folk material in score
—– Attempt to ally himself to European avant-garde
- Stravinsky’s great innovation: ‘combine Russian elements from his musical upbringing with the essential stylistic features of a native folklore, in order to approach nationalism from a modernist standpoint’
- Nepodvizhnost’ in War and Peace: comprised of discrete short chapters in which central ideas are repeated
- Druskin (1983) connects reverse perspective in Russian icon-painting with Stravinsky’s non-linear development
- Druskin connects ‘bright, solemn, spacious’ proportions of St Petersburg’s neoclassical architecture with Stravinsky’s neoclassical style
- Eurasianism
o Sense of fundamental ‘difference’: neither part of Europe or Asia
o Bemoaned Russia’s Westernization, but believed Russia had mission to rescue degraded/corrupt West because of its ‘healthy barbarism’
o Russian Orthodoxy key
- —- Stravinsky reconverted
- —- Diaghilev letter 1926: felt ‘mental and spiritual need’ to fast
- —- Walsh argues there was a strong linguistic reason behind this: Russian prayer was the strongest link with his lost pre-revolutionary St Petersburg
Russianness: 5 theses
Taruskin 1996
Examines Stravinsky’s work up to 1922 from Russian perspective, using wider cultural context to aid interpretation. Argues for a Russo-centric reevaluation of Stravinsky’s achievement.
Taruskin’s new image of Stravinsky summarised in 5 [chronological] theses
- His artistic maturity and modernist technique was achieved by ‘deliberately playing traditions of Russian folk music against those of the provincial, denationalized Russian art music in which he had been reared’
- His knowledge of folklore and his attitudes to its creative utilization derives from artists of ‘World of Art’ circle, not musical training
- ‘he deliberately retained that which was most characteristically and exclusively Russian in his musical training and combined it with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore in a conscious effort to excrete from his style all that was “European”’
- The resulting stylistic synthesis formed his lifelong compositional style, irrespective of professed stylistic/aesthetic allegiances
- For the above reasons, ‘Stravinsky was the most completely Russian composer of art music that there ever was’
Russianness: Stravinsky’s life and musical development ‘teems with riddles’
Taruskin 1996
o Stravinsky’s vast autobiographical legacy is deeply conflicting and untrustworthy
o Taruskin seeks to ameliorate lack of crucial information about formative development and apparent gap between anonymity and Firebird
Russianness: late Stravinsky was deeply ambivalent about Russia
Taruskin 1996
o Deeply ashamed of his origins (Conversations)
Trubetskoy (1920) claimed enlightened cosmopolitanism of the West was ‘panromanogermanic chauvinism’, and that Russians infected by it (Stravinsky) became hostile towards Russia
Craft: Stravinsky complained he was handicapped in youth by lack of intellectually stimulating environment
30s: proclaimed himself French citizen
Conversations contains several wilful historical distortions that distance Stravinsky from his surroundings
—– In Conversations (50s), Stravinsky tacitly distances himself from his Russian surroundings and formative influences (Glazunov), which he had acknowledged
o Proclaimed his Russianness (autumn 1962)
‘I have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself (slog) is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature’
Russianness: folklore in Stravinsky’s music
Taruskin 1996
o Productive influence of folklore in ‘Russian’ period unprecedented in Russian composers
o Stravinsky was converted to folklore by Diaghilev’s circle, contrasting with Russia’s musical milieu of ‘denationalization’ and scorn for folklore
o Post-Rite: Stravinsky’s preoccupation with folklore was unprecedented
Russianness: ‘Eurasianism’
Taruskin 1996
o Argues Stravinsky’s style and practice was as a ‘Eurasian’
o Definition: quasi-Slavophile émigré movement initiated by Trubetskoy’s Europe and Humanity (1920)
Product of post-revolutionary emigration
Stravinsky’s lifelong friend Souvtchinsky was prime supporter
o Stravinsky’s unmatched exploration of real Russian folk-life happened just when that life was becoming an irretrievably lost legend
—– The Eurasianists clung to this legend
o ‘Even as he cultivated the façade of a sophisticated cosmopolitan, then, Stravinsky was profoundly un- and even anti-Western in his musical thinking’
o Russian aspects remained as ‘permanent stylistic resources’
Russianness: context of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism
Taruskin 1996
o Consolidation of Soviet power after Russian civil war meant dream of possessing Russia evaporated
o Stravinsky, along with Diaghilev enterprise, turned resolutely towards the West
—– This mirrored past Westernized Russian music of 19thC, hence Stravinsky switching allegiances from Rimsky to Tchaikovsky
o Mavra represents the start of a new Russian Italianism: ‘accommodation between the irreducibly Eurasian elements of his style and the harmonic traditions and musical conventions of Italian opera’
Modelled (partially parodically) on Westernized romances/operas of early 19thC Russia
Hence the switch of allegiances in neoclassic years from Rimsky to Tchaikovsky
o Stravinsky’s late-life creative crisis and turn to serialism brought on by inferiority complex towards West
Russianness: Stravinsky’s formative period
Taruskin 1996
Context of Russian music: through four generations, the New Russian School decayed into a ‘de-nationalised’ and ‘academic’ style due to conservatoire training
o Stravinsky was proud member of 4th gen
o 1904: Stravinsky’s apprenticeship to Rimsky characterised by admiration, loyalty and a sense of heirship
o Was social and artistic aristocrat, as son of Fyodor and as adopted by Rimsky after Fyodor’s deathha
Russianness: Conclusion
Taruskin 1996
- Stravinsky’s eclecticism means he is often touted as presciently postmodern, but Taruskin argues ‘His essential characteristics – his drobnost’ his nepodvizhnost’, above all his uproshcheniye – inform his mature work from first to last with rare authenticity and constancy’
- Argues Stravinsky’s basic manner of self-expression was Russian, thus Russian words are essential
- The force of Stravinsky’s example ‘bequeathed a russiky slog [Russian manner] to 20thC concert music
• Argues Stravinsky is not related to 20thC musical world by an angle, but ‘was the very stem.’
—– (Stravinsky publicly lamented he related ‘only from an angle to the German stem’)
