“Un Cadeau Très Macabre”

Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex is considered as an epitome of neoclassicism. Its dramaturgy is analyzed alongside its musical style.

Diaghilev without Stravinsky? Stravinsky without Diaghilev?

A counterfactual fantasy designed to illustrate the necessity of each to the other’s success, and to emphasize the improbability of their alliance. A study in historical contingency.

Two Serendipities

The relationship between Soviet power and the musical life of the nation is usually viewed in terms of the domination of the latter by their former. This paper considers the other side of the coin: how Soviet power could act as an enabler to those whose predilections and personalities made for a propitious adaptation to the regime and its affordances.

Stravinsky’s Poetics and Russian Music

Recent discoveries concerning the origin and authorship of Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures of 1939-40 prompt reassessment of their content. The fifth leçon, on Russian music, is interpreted in the light of the Eurasian ideology that can now be shown to inform it.

Written for Elephants

Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is contextualized within the virtuoso repertory and within its composer’s output. The legend of its opening theme’s derivation from an Orthodox chant is debunked.

Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov

The two authorial versions of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov reflect contrasting historiographical and ideological traditions that were being debated in the 1860s and 1870s, when the opera was being written. The difference is epitomized by the St. at St. Basil’s shrine in the original version, which depicts the crowd (i.e., the Russian people) according to the tradition of Nikolai Karamzin, the autocracy’s official historiographer, as submissive and dependent; and the so-called Kromy Forest scene which replaced it in the revised version, which depicts the crowd as actively rebellious and as a powerful agent, according to the then recent revisionary writings of Nikolai Kostomarov. What then of the widespread custom, dating from the Moscow Bolshoy Theater revival of the opera for Mujsorgsky’s centenary in 1939, of including the two scenes in a conflated version of the opera that the composer never imagined? Despite its manifest incoherence from an historiographical standpoint, it has become popular owing to its aesthetic and dramatic qualities. It thus crystallizes a key problem in academic reception studies, which have generally followed a modernist bias that upholds authors over audiences.

Introduction

It is my deep conviction that the good and the beautiful are one for all peoples. They are one in two senses: truth and beauty are eternal companions, one and the same both in their mutual relationship and for all peoples. —DMITRY SERGEYEVICH LIKHACHYOV (1906–99)...

Resisting The Rite

A comprehensive examination of various phases of resistance to Stravinsky’s great ballet of 1913. The first half of the essay focusses on the audience’s resistance at the famous first night. The usually overlooked role of press coverage in bringing about that legendary fiasco is given due emphasis. The second half focusses on resistance over the century of the work’s existence, particularly on the composer’s own decisive role in resisting the original meaning of the work, and the changing performance practice that has accompanied the increasingly abstract view of The Rite as a composition.

Just How Russian Was Stravinsky?

Stravinsky’s career took him from Russia to Switzerland to France to the United States. He exemplified and explicitly asserted cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, post-Soviet Russia has reclaimed him and in the West as well he is more likely than he used to be to be classified with other Russian composers. This article assesses the claim.

Not Modern and Loving It

Sergey Rachmaninoff’s resistance to modernist styles and trends has told heavily on his status as a historical figure. Various attempts at reassessing his position in the historical narrative are themselves assessed, particularly Charles Fisk’s attempt to reclaim him as a modernist.