"By the Black Sea the beardless, swarthy Cossack with resined moustaches sings an ancient song as he loads his pistol; and over there, at the other end of Russia, out among the ice floes, the Russian entrepreneur drawsls a song as he harpoons the whale. Do we not have the makings of an opera of our own?"
(NIKOLAJ GOGOL, quoted in R. Taruskin "Musorgsky")
In my student days it was fashionable to look down on the very popular composers like Tchaikovsky, Bizet or Grieg. In America, I then discovered a musicology that did take these people seriously, that questioned everything I thought I knew about Russian music, that threw out all kinds of ingrained concepts, and that actually had the seeds within it to arrive at a totally new understanding about the history of that Russian music. This led me to the idea of publishing a short general book about Tchaikovsky and I approached a number of publishers with this plan. I was given a chance at Sun Publishers in Nijmegen. They thought that because of my specialization in Eastern Europe I should write the history of Russian music. That was shortly after the fall of the wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was the time when all those great productions of Russian works under the direction of Valery Gergiev were heard very often, especially in the Netherlands, and later they also ended up in Brussels through the Flanders Festival. At that time there was a very great interest in Russian music in the concert world and so a publisher had the courage to do something about that subject.
I immediately seized this enormous opportunity to finally publish something and I started to work on the subject in depth. After my doctorate I spent an enormously enriching year as a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with the father of this movement, the American musicologist Richard Taruskin. Taruskin fascinates me not only as a great pioneer of that new study of Russian music but also by his approach to musicology in general and by his thinking about music and about musical life. Taruskin has really become my role model as a result, both scientifically and in my practical work with the Festival of Flanders. He is someone who throws all the clichés overboard and revisits things with an open mind. After all, the image of Russian music that we have grown up with is far too one-sided and in many cases completely incorrect, and this is not just about second-rate composers but about very great personalities such as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky.
Living for the Tsar
Thus, the image we have of Mikhail Glinka as the "father of Russian music" and the "first national Russian composer" is an image that we must nuance. After all, that image is based on a few moments from A Life for the Tsar and a number of other works in which he does incorporate Russian folk music but in the totality of his oeuvre it is almost negligible. Glinka was an aristocratic dilettante who could afford to travel all over Europe and who identified strongly with European culture. At one point he says in his letters, "I am really tired of Russian music as I am of Russian winters." After all, he wants to engage in more serious matters and do a study of Mozart and Gluck. That was actually his world and that is also the world he elaborated in his two operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila. He was a true European spirit and the greatness of Glinka is that he was the first Russian composer to be noticed by European greats. Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt found his music interesting. Berlioz, by the way, performed his music in Paris.
Glinka was the first composer to enjoy prestige in the European perspective. So the image of the composer building his style on folk music is very one-sided, and such one-sidedness also lives on in the interpretation of the nationalism that speaks from a work like A Life for the Tsar. As a high aristocrat, Glinka was in the highest court circles, and the plan to produce that opera originated in the circles around Tsar Nicholas I. The work was therefore a very direct expression of the Tsar's very specific, reactionary ideology. In order to keep Russia out of the great stream of democratic change, he had created the dogma of Official Nationality which can be summarized by three slogans: orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality. It was the Russian answer to the ideals of the French Revolution but in a reactionary context. As a succinct articulation of that Official Nationality, the closing chorus of A Life for the Tsar can apply: "Praised be our Russian Tsar, our ruler, given to us by God! May your imperial family be immortal! May the Russian people know prosperity through it!". In short, religion and autocratic authority together make up the core of Russian nationality.
In the standard image that used to exist, one automatically equated nationalism and a sense of folklore with democratizing ideas. Such emancipating, liberalizing nationalism was effectively professed in certain circles in Russian culture. But in other circles it was not. Nationalism, especially in the court circles surrounding the Tsar, had a very different, a more affirmative content, notably preserving Russia as it was, maintaining the class society. It is precisely this nationalism that is going to have the most influence on the music creating the very paradoxical situation that Russian composers from Glinka onwards and the generation after that will have to fight against the fashion of Italian opera. Nicholas I, in order to make foreign guests and diplomats comfortable, had installed a very good Italian opera in St. Petersburg. After all, a major European city without an Italian opera was unthinkable.
All the high circles and foreign diplomats gathered there, but on the highest balcony there were also the anarchist students, the politically aware intelligentsia who listened to works sung in Italian by Rossini and Bellini. All those calls for freedom as in Guillaume Tell and I Puritani were sung just like that and this garnered stormy applause, especially on the highest balcony. The essence of this fashion for Italian opera was that it brought together these two circles, the reactionary official circles and the freedom lovers, around the same kind of production. And that was because Italian opera was not subjected to the same standards of censorship as the Russian genre which has been very strongly controlled from the beginning. Such censorship continued to define the history of the Russian genre until the Revolution. It is only the figure of Rimsky-Korsakov, and this is paradoxical because we do not expect it from him, who showed a certain liberal attitude and who at times went against it. All the other composers actually very clearly remained in the official line.
Mussorgsky
Boris Godunov is also invariably seen as a very dissident work. But in the evolution of Mussorgsky, that was really only a phase. Certain revolutionary views that he would preach there he subsequently stepped back from, and in his later work it is not present at all. His next opera Khovanshchina, is still seen in the conventional image as a folk opera, as an opera of the opposition between those in power and the common people but actually that is difficult to maintain.
Khovanshchina is essentially an aristocratic tragedy. Mussorgsky was the last of a generation of aristocratic dilettantes who looked down on professional musicians. Mussorgsky belonged to a family that owned large estates and had influence thanks to serfdom. When serfdom was abolished under Alexander II and the family consequently impoverished, Mussorgsky had to earn his living but it was clear that he was not going to do so in music. After all, that didn't suit someone of his standing and he then goes into bureaucracy. As a result, he has always been romanticized as a "poète maudit," as a man who faces antagonism with his music but actually that was not what he was looking for. He was an aristocratic dilettante and was proud of it. There are some passages in Boris Godunov that have a slightly revolutionary content, which he later cut and people have always thought that he did it under duress but he did it out of his own conviction.
Tchaikovsky
The derogatory view that circulates about Peter Tchaikovsky touches me because the Tchaikovsky I came to know through my reading was a fascinating, versatile and engaging man. That new image of Tchaikovsky has been primarily the work of a great biographer, Alexander Poznansky. Poznansky was of Russian origin, later emigrated to America and worked for 10 years on his biography that challenges many of the prejudices and clichés surrounding Tchaikovsky. Poznansky takes a sober look, works with real sources and the resulting image is not at all that neurotic, tormented image that is so often presented and that would have ended in suicide. Tchaikovsky did die of a cholera infection. His death was a regrettable accident and not at all the suicide that people have wanted to see in it. It is a great pity for the profession of musicology that this gossip of Alexandra Orlova got into the scientific literature without being verified. While this has now been rectified, it still persists stubbornly. People still continue to love to believe this bizarre suicide fantasy because the music of the 6th Symphony, composed shortly before his death, is so tense and so tragic.
However, Tchaikovsky wrote that very work during the happiest period of his life, when he was at the height of his fame, when he was brimming with plans for the future and surrounded by a bevy of friends whom he loved dearly. It is indicative of Tchaikovsky's professionalism and compositional genius that at such a moment he can write a work of general human capacity in which many will find an expression of sorrow, of consolation. People then projected that onto his own biography, and that's where things went completely wrong.
Tchaikovsky experienced only one moment of crisis in his life, namely at the time when, as a homosexual, he thought he had to marry in order to be socially acceptable and was under the illusion that this would further his career. That turned out to be a huge failure and it is in the context of that crisis period that the 4th Symphony can be situated. Importantly, that crisis also had a positive influence. It was only then that he finally realized who he was and so then you have those letters where he confesses that it's totally nonsensical to live in a way that you're not. For the rest of his life, he was very balanced. He possessed a work force, a work discipline and a work ethic that few composers of the nineteenth century possessed. This professional seriousness along with the ease in composition that he developed at the end of his career meant that he was able to write an opera like Queen of Spades in a record time of 44 days.
The relationship with Nadezhda von Meck is one of the most fascinating relationships between a man and a woman in the nineteenth century. Nadezhda was the widow of a wealthy railroad entrepreneur, a high aristocrat who, from a kind of "noblesse oblige" feeling, used to engage in personal patronage. She did this not only with Tchaikovsky but also with other artists such as the young Claude Debussy. She did so in complete secrecy. Nothing was known about that in the music world. It was just an understanding between herself and Tchaikovsky and we really have to understand that in the context of that aristocratic, paternalistic culture of nineteenth-century Russia where a high aristocrat takes someone into his protection. That reveals a whole culture because Tchaikovsky did that in turn with other younger musicians. Von Meck and Tchaikovsky always treated each other as equals, and then you have all these letters and all this literature about that which shows that Nadezhda, as a businesswoman with a decidedly pragmatic mind, needed music to express her romantic feelings. She adored the man who wrote the music that could so enrapture her. Tchaikovsky himself was much more down-to-earth in his relationship to her. Rumor has it that he wanted to plunder her financially. This is certainly untrue because there was enormous appreciation and friendship on both sides. That this came to an end at a certain point has led to speculation that Nadezhda would have discovered that Tchaikovsky was homosexual and therefore no longer worthy of living off her generosity. There is no evidence at all for this. Rather, it is likely that she had to give up her eccentric art sponsorship due to pressure from her family and her financial situation.
Yevgeny Onegin is greatly appreciated by opera audiences today but in music criticism and music historiography this has not been so obvious for a long time. Pushkin's 'novel in verse', with all its intricacies, subtleties and ironies, is such a masterpiece of poetry and storytelling that an adaptation as opera can at first sight only be banal. This is the sentiment that can still be found about this work in many literatures. Another cliché is that it is an autobiographical opera and that it is related to his own marriage adventure. This too can be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, with Yevgeny Onegin, Tchaikovsky has written an opera that does manage to translate into music some of the subtleties found in Pushkin's work. This is quite a tour de force and a tremendous exercise in realism in opera. After all, it deals with very minimal situations, situations of every day, in this case the infatuation of an adolescent girl with an unattainable man from St. Petersburg. That is the only story element. It ends badly but with Pushkin the story matters little. What matters is the way the story is told. It is this incredibly brilliant, multifaceted way in which he tells this simple story that makes his novel the masterpiece of Russian literature. And Tchaikovsky actually does something similar with his music. It is not really the story that matters in his opera, but rather the enormous atmosphere and character sketches that he delivers. He evokes a whole world with minimal situations. I think that's really great and I feel that no other opera composer has been able to emulate him except Verdi in La Traviata.
Shostakovich
Shostakovich has become one of the most played composers of the 20th century over the past decade. The final breakthrough of his work into international concert life owes much to the publication by Solomon Volkov of his alleged "memoirs," entitled Testimony.
In that book Shostakovich is portrayed as a lifelong embittered dissident, who in his music secretly denounced the Soviet system. An entire controversy has developed around that text. After all, a philological screening by Laurel Fay showed that the text is not what it claims to be: it is not a record of conversations between the composer and Volkov himself. This is especially evident in the large number of texts Volkov has recuperated from other sources, and adapted without citation. Is this enough to cast doubt on the authenticity of Testimony? That is something everyone must decide for themselves.
My position is the following: Volkov presented us with a manipulated text, linking existing quotes from Shostakovich with unverifiable statements. As a result, I find it difficult to assume that his portrait of the composer is complete and does justice to the full richness of his personality. The text is especially representative of the climate of reckoning with the Soviet regime since the late 1970s. If the statements were authentic, they would only give a picture of an embittered man at the end of his life, who in his memory is also no longer concerned about the correctness of the facts.
The whole discussion is now out of date thanks to the publication of the new biography by Laurel Fay. She showed that there is much more interesting source material on Shostakovich than Testimony. The composer's life and career are exceptionally well documented. In Laurel Fay's biography, a more multifaceted picture emerges: a man who is willing to believe in the Soviet system, who even possessed a certain fanaticism in his youth, but who repeatedly clashed with unpredictable reality. Above all, we get to know an inexhaustible creative genius, who in all the suffocating circumstances still found ways to practice his art. Shostakovich's artistry shines through all the more. Nevertheless, he deserves our greatest appreciation for continuing to function as a creative genius under inhuman conditions.
Stravinsky
It took me a long time to learn to appreciate Stravinsky's music but now he is truly among my favorite composers. That too is the work of Richard Taruskin who has helped me very much in that. Taruskin has written, what he calls, a "biography of Stravinsky's Russian works." That deals with works like Petrushka, Le Sacre du printemps and Les Noces. He calls this a biography of those works because for all those great compositions he has unraveled all the sources, all the elements, all the currents in that Russian culture of the fin de siècle to show where they all come from now. For example, the Sacre created a furore in Paris at a certain point, but the Sacre was prepared via currents in literature, in the visual arts, in music and in dance, and ultimately, within Stravinsky's composition, this became a kind of conglomerate with the result that we know. It is very fascinating to get to know all of that cultural baggage that Stravinsky brought with him from Russia and that finds its way into all of those wonderful works. Stravinsky openly sided with the social elite and cultivated his aristocratic status. At the outbreak of World War I, he lost his homeland because of the Russian Revolution. That his political sympathies later became totalitarian and fascist - he called Mussolini the hope of the world - must be understood from the traumatic experience of being cut off from the Russia in which he grew up and which formed him as a composer. He then started to try very fanatically to become the leader of Western music. He began to base his neoclassicism on all the images of the historical traditions of Western European music. One of the great results of that is The Rake's Progress and I think that is also one of the most beautiful operas in the repertoire because in it he finally renounces his fanaticism. In his work between the two world wars you really have to deal with that fanatical Stravinsky who wants to prove that he is the most unbending modern composer, whereas in The Rake's Progress his lyrical nature, his melodic gift is fully expressed again and he makes the music sing in a way that he never allowed in his other oeuvre.
Authenticity
His study of Russian music is not the only thing for which Richard Taruskin is known. He is also known for his frontal attack on the tradition of so-called authentic performance practice. He goes quite far in this but the core of his argument is that what orchestras have performed on old instruments is very important and very valuable but not for the reasons the music industry proclaims. After all, it cannot be about restoring the music as it would have sounded in the days of Bach or Mozart. After all, there are no valid, scientific arguments for that. Nobody knows that better than the musicians themselves. If you talk to Sigiswald Kuijken or Jos van Immerseel, they will also have to admit that what they do is an interpretation. It's that interpretation that counts, because it's interesting. By doing so, Taruskin has incurred the wrath of the entire musical community, but in fact he has been proven right, because the musicians themselves no longer dare to take such hard-line stances. Just recently I heard Philippe Herreweghe say that he also didn't know how to do the St. Matthew Passion anymore but that he thought he did 10 years ago. He is well aware that what he is doing today is an interpretation, a vision of a work that has to do with our sense of style, with how we experience music today and that it has nothing to do with a restoration of anything.
This is also a general principle that I adhere to in my work with the Flanders Festival. Music lives through performances and these performances can go in different directions. I am a great advocate of pluralism in approach. A particular repertoire can and should be played in different ways and be viewed from different traditions. There is no such thing as a definitive, unassailable performance of a musical work.