Ab Imperio

431 Ab Imperio, 2/2007 Amy NELSON Boris Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). xxii+268 pp. Musical exs., Notes, Index. ISBN: 0-300-10650-5. This erudite study uses three themes to draw together an elegant panorama of Russian culture from the early nineteenth century to the Stalinist era. Boris Gasparov’s primary concern is the significance of the distinctive sound of “Russian music,” whose direct emotional appeal is universally acclaimed even as its meaning in different historical contexts is often discounted or overlooked. The implications of this paradox, underscored by music ’s prominence in a “national cultural consciousness” (P. vii) that puts “messianic expectations” on writers (P. xx), defines the book’s second theme, namely, the interaction between word and music (presented in its most extreme binary formulation as the tension between the domain of logos or reason and that of the emotional and psychological), in the context of broader intellectual trends, psychological shifts, and political tides. Gasparov’s final theme is music and meaning. Rather than merely lamenting the literary bias that informs so many approaches to Russian culture, Gasparov exploits the dependence of Russian music on literature as a heuristic tool to reveal the unique cultural forces exerted by the “five operas and a symphony” in the book’s title. In examining four masterworks of the nineteenthcentury Russian operatic tradition, together with Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot, and Shostakovich’s R-Forum Русская музыка, модернизм и власть Russian Music, Modernism, and Power 432 Рецензии/Reviews symphonies written between 1936 and Stalin’s death, Gasparov reveals much about the relationship between the voice of Russian music and its message. The sophistication with which this book charts the shifting contours of “Russianness” in music both over time and in the broader European context should make it of particular interest to the readers of this journal. In both methodology and substance , this is a book of ironies and paradoxes. In an effort to turn the literary bias of Russian culture on its head, Gasparov uses his extraordinary fluency in “word and music” to address the marginalization of music. The first chapter provides a sophisticated, but clear description of the characteristics of the Russian chorale and explains how these musical qualities contributed to broader aesthetic and ethical trends in the nineteenth-century. Rooted both in the music of the church and in folk melos, the harmonic hallmarks of the chorale became synonymous with the “sound” of Russian music by the late nineteenth century. In contrast to its West European relative , the Russian chorale was distinguished by its structural simplicity, the reduction of harmonic tensions, a reliance on triads in inverted positions, and the liberal use of 7th chords (except for the conventional dominant 7th ). Echoing native critics who fault Russian operatic composers for their desecration of literary classics, detractors of the Russian musical style have often framed its philosophical and aesthetic implications in terms of an overarching rubric of “backwardness,” condemning the Russian chorale as formally archaic and underdeveloped , flawed by its vague tonality, its lack of formal cadences, and its refusal to expand in an orderly way via chromatic secondary dominants . Yet these same conventions facilitated the development of the artificial scales and exotic sonorities that convey the aural stamp of fairytale “Russianness” in music ranging from Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila to Scriabin’s Prometheus. Without diminishing the centrality of Richard Wagner to the crisis of classical harmony and conventional musical form, Gasparov presents the Russian tradition as an alternate path to musical modernism. While Wagner used the “Tristan chord” to postpone the final resolution of dissonance demanded by classical harmony indefinitely, thus extending musical forms by means of an increasingly complex internal logic, the loosening of harmonic function in the Russian chorale enabled composers from Musorgsky to Debussy to Stravinsky and Shostakovich to pursue tangential paths – dissolving dissonance, extending episodic development and layering tonalities – with equally radical results. 433 Ab Imperio, 2/2007 In this first chapter, and throughout the book, Gasparov necessarily relies on the vocabulary of music theory to describe and analyze his subject matter. Readers without a basic familiarity with this nomenclature will no doubt be lost, a...