In the 1990s Russians experienced the heady feeling that came with absorbing, at great speed, large parts of their literary tradition that had been suppressed, and with having free access to western literary movements. A Russian form of postmodernism, fascinated with a pastiche of citations, arose, along with various forms of radical experimentalism. During this period, readers and writers sought to understand the past, both literary and historical, and to comprehend the chaotic, threatening, and very different present.
7
MUSIC
The story of music in modern Russia is in certain recurrent aspects unique in the history of western music. These aspects can be summarized as: the geographical position of Russia, which means that the country's music is a product of both western and eastern root cultures and material; the absence of sophisticated home-grown music prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century, to be later sapped by the 1917 Revolution and a continuing pattern of emigration; the fact that the politics of the twentieth century swept away the upper middle classes and the aristocracy, and with them the pursuit of music as an amateur activity by composers of outstanding technical ability; the almost complete absence in Russia of the breaking down of traditional compositional methods and sounds that took place elsewhere during the twentieth century; the effects of the active state control of culture; the indirect political power ot popular music culture; the phenomenon of a Russian artist's creativity and musical personality being weakened when the artist leaves Russia as an emigre; an innate Russian conservatism and links with tradition that predisposed twentieth-century music to continue to incorporate many characteristics of nineteenth-century music; the effect of Orthodox Church music; the unconscious rapport between composers and the people of Russia, and the composers' natural ability to speak to the heart of the masses; and Russian mysticism.
The Nineteenth Century
To understand music in modern Russia, one has first to start with the nineteenth century. There was little sophisticated secular music on a western model, especially home grown, prior to the blossoming of musical nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the extraordinary outburst of creativity at the turn of the century. Although in the eighteenth century the imperial court and some aristocratic houses imported Italian opera troupes and foreign maestri di cappella ("choirmasters"), the first Russian composer to gain international renown was Mikhail Glinka, a leisured aristocrat who mastered his craft in Milan and Berlin. His patriotic A JJfe for the Tsar (1836) and his Pushkin-inspired Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) are the oldest Russian operas that remain in the standard repertoire.
I.ike Glinka, many of Russia's early composers came from the upper middle classes or the aristocracy and were essentially self-taught musical amateurs. Modest Mussorgsky (18381881), for example, worked in the civil service; Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887), son of a Georgian prince, was as famous in his day for his work as a chemist as for his music; and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) began his career in the navy. However, by the second half of the nineteenth
ALEKSANDR BORODIN (1833-87) Russian composer
From 1862 Borodin took lessons from Mily Balakirev; fired by nationalist sentiment, the two men became the core of the group of Russian composers known as The Five. A professor of chemistry for much of his life, he left a small compositional output, which includes the orchestral suite In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), two string quartets, and three symphonies, the second of which has remained highly popular. His opera Prince Igor — which contains the often-heard "Polovtsian Dances" - was left unfinished after 18 years of intermittent work.
century an active and institutionalized musical life was in place, thanks mainly to the efforts of the composer and piano virtuoso Anton Rubinstein, who, with royal patronage, founded in St Petersburg Russia's first regular professional orchestra (in 1859)and conservatory of music (in 1862). Both became models that were quickly imitated in other urban centres.
One of the first graduates of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93), steered an unlikely path between Russian nationalist tendencies and the cosmopolitan stance encouraged by his conservatory training. He was both a Russian nationalist and a westernizer of polished technical skill. Through his style and artistic creed he establishes an immediate rapport with the audience. In the words of the twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky, "Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race," thus demonstrating the ability of Russian composers to identify with the spirit of the peoples of Russia.
PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93) Russian composer
Sensitive and interested in music from his early childhood, Tchaikovsky turned to serious composition at the age of 14. In 1862 he began studying at the new St Petersburg Conservatory; from 1866 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory. His Piano Concerto No. I (1875) was premiered in Boston and became immensely popular. He wrote his first ballet, Swan Lake (first performed 1877), on commission from the Bolshoi Ballet. In 1877 he received a commission from the wealthy Nadezhda von Meek (1831-94), who became his patron and long-time correspondent. The opera Yevgeny Onegin (1878) soon followed.
Though homosexual, Tchaikovsky married briefly; after three disastrous months of marriage, he attempted suicide. His composition was overshadowed by his personal crisis for years. His second ballet, Sleeping Beauty (1889), was followed by the opera The Queen of Spades (1890) and the great ballet The Nutcracker (1892). The Pathйtнque Symphony (1893) premiered four days before his death from cholera; claims that he was forced to commit suicide by noblemen outraged by his sexual liaisons are unfounded. He revolutionized the ballet genre by transforming it from a grand decorative gesture into a staged musical drama. His music has always had great popular appeal because of its tuneful, poignant melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration.
Mussorgsky - like the writer Aleksandr Pushkin - learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. Significantly, in 1866 Mussorgsky achieved artistic maturity with a series of remarkable songs about ordinary people such as "Darling Savishna", "Hopak", and "The Seminarist", which, along with his later songs, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight, and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. Another work dating from this time is the symphonic poem Night on a Bare Mountain (1867). In 1868 Mussorgsky reached the height of his conceptual powers in composition with the first song of his incomparable cycle The Nursery and a setting of the first few scenes of Nikolay Gogol's The Marriage. In 1869 he began his great work, the opera Boris Godunov, which was based on the drama of Pushkin.