The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his
career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new
and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents
one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together
with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian
national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from
the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the
powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood.
Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always
[been] tinged or tainted . . . with an air of alterity--sensed,
exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both
from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this
assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the
cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas,
symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the
1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet
period.
Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary
romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have
variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He
then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to
an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast
to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the
formative years of its national consciousness. The final section focuses
on four individual composers, each characterized both as a
self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in
perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating
chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman,
Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman--Taruskin
offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on
Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and
on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally
counterrevolutionary move.
