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Spectator (uk): Why do we pounce on Wagner's anti-Semitism, and ignore that of the Russian composers?
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Frank Forman
Jan 31, 2017, 7:39:45 PM1/31/17
to
Why do we pounce on Wagner's anti-Semitism, and ignore that of the Russian
composers?
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/musorgsky-and-his-circle-by-stephen-walsh-review/
Stephen Walsh's Mussorgsky and His Circle takes a look at the passionate,
patriotic musicians of 19th century Russia
Philip Hensher
9 November 2013
Musorgsky and His Circle
by Stephen Walsh
Faber, pp.469, ВЈ30
Before 'nationalism' became a dirty word, it was the inspiration for
all sorts of idealistic and reform-minded people. This was never more
true than in the history of music. Clearly, subsequent events have
discredited some of those 19th-century ideals. It is striking,
however, that we have become uncomfortable with Wagner's German
nationalism while continuing to regard Smetana's Czech nationalism as
an admirable, even inspiring quality. At times one feels that some
musical nationalists are given too easy a ride--as if what happened
in the opera house couldn't conceivably affect anything outside it.
A notable instance is the case of the remarkable group of composers
which gathered in 1850s Russia around Mily Balakirev and were forever
afterwards referred to as 'the Five', or 'the Mighty Handful'. Though
there had been some interest in Russian folk music previously (Glinka
had already written a couple of heroic operas, A Life for the Tsar
and Ruslan and Ludmila), Balakirev's circle was the first to create a
sort of music specifically and exclusively Russian.
Of this group of five, CГ©sar Cui has the least to be said for him,
being a composer of four-square salon music of no great polish. But
the other four are fascinating. Balakirev himself was chronically
unable to write anything down, so his influence was largely confined
to a few marvellous songs, solo piano pieces and performances on the
piano of forthcoming orchestral works. Then there was Alexander
Borodin, a chemistry professor with a demanding, insomniac wife. His
was a beautiful natural talent though he was unable ever to finish
anything. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov astonished his audience by
appearing at his first symphony in full uniform--he was a naval
officer--and his belief in discipline and accuracy ultimately
separated him from the rest of the group. Soon he had taken on a
professorship of composition and was writing deadly dull fugues. That
sort of thing was poison to the last and greatest of the group,
Modest Musorgsky, whose work, both driven and inhibited by drink, a
lack of training and sheer overwhelming inspiration, would be
'corrected' and not heard as intended for decades to come.
Together they produced a ramshackle, incomplete set of musical
offerings. Most of them loathed the idea of academic study and relied
a great deal on passionate inspiration. When Balakirev's tone poem
Tamara was finally written down and performed, it proved the
masterpiece everyone was waiting for. Musorgsky left any number of
operas in a provisional state; Borodin's sublime Prince Igor exists
as a sort of pack of arias and ensembles which subsequent editors
have tried to make orderly sense of. Only Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov
were disciplined, but with a whiff of dullness about them (compare
the tedium of Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Sheherezade with the
electrifying Tamara, which it comprehensively fillets for material).
What was driving these men? The idea of what Russia might become was
in everyone's mind and underlies most of their great novels of the
time. In the case of the Five, a strong oriental tendency runs
through much of their work. It is present in Sheherezade, obviously,
but also in Balakirev's famously demanding piano piece 'Islamey' and
in Borodin's Polovtsian dances. Much of this was connected to
Russia's ambitions in central Asia and the Great Game, some
orientalist pieces being specifically written for a planned concert
in 1870 to celebrate Alexander II's silver jubilee and to commemorate
various triumphs of the reign. The writer Vladimir Stasov had long
been arguing that Russia was essentially oriental, and that its
destiny lay in unannexed regions of Asia.
But apart from imperialism, there was also a discernibly strong vein
of anti-Semitism in the group, often focussed on the international
virtuoso Anton Rubinstein. Glinka complained that 'the yid
Rubinstein' had talked about A Life for the Tsar in Germany, and
references to 'Yankel', Gogol's Jewish moneylender, were flung about
when Rubinstein was appointed head of the new Russian conservatory.
The Five allowed this sort of thing to creep into their music, with
renderings of 'Hebrew Songs' that are sometimes picturesque,
sometimes even sympathetic, but often genuinely poisonous. It is a
mystery to me how sensitive some critics can be to any anti-Semitic
sounds in the first act of Wagner's Siegfried while ignoring the vile
diatribe contained in the 'Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle' movement
in Musorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition.
Stephen Walsh wrote a splendid life of Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov's
pupil, and in this superb study of the Five and their milieu he
manages delicately to suggest some of the consequences of the
attitudes that were hardening around them. Ideas of artistic
correctness--of what was considered acceptable or not--
led in
the end to the cowering apparatchiks who nearly sent Shostakovich to
the Gulag.
The problem lay fundamentally in the suffocating institutions at the
centre of Tsarist--and, later, Soviet--life.
A conservatory-trained composer would always be orthodox but dull
(Rimsky-Korsakov, currently rather fashionable, comes in for quite a
kicking here). But outside that training, there was no discipline,
and we have the danger of the chaotic creative processes of
Musorgsky, Balakirev and Borodin. Tchaikovsky said of Borodin that
his technique was so weak that 'he can't compose a single line
without somebody's help', and that Musorgsky 'botches any old how,
blindly trusting in the infallibility of his genius'.
The answer was Tchaikovsky's own disciplined but impassioned work;
and perhaps the future of Russian music would always lie in people
like Tchaikovsky, Skryabin and Stravinsky, who married the discipline
of conservatory working practices with the chaos and fury of
Musorgsky's spirit. On their own, neither of these qualities would be
quite enough.
Walsh's book covers a great deal of ground, unearthing some real
rarities from the loose milieu and a lot of faintly nutty polemics.
Considering their fame, there is not a huge bibliography about the
Five, but Walsh takes on a lot of it--and denies for example, the
well-established belief that Musorgsky was homosexual (still, you
reflect, that such unhappiness had to come from somewhere).
The book labours, however, under an apparent condition of publishers
about studies of music these days; they must not contain music
examples. Walsh has sneaked one through, but a few more would have
made his argument easier to follow. It is absurd to replace a
well-chosen music example with writing like this:
The chord is an augmented sixth (German form) which is like a
dominant seventh with a different resolution or exit .... Read as
a sixth chord, it resolves back to D major, with the pedal D
acting not as the leading note of E-flat but as a D-major anchor.
If you can't read music, this sort of verbal description is not going
to mean anything to you; and in fact Walsh apologises for not using
'bearable language'. But even if you can read music, it's still
impenetrable. There is a reason why musical notation was invented,
and it's because verbal accounts are hard to follow and ambiguous.
What resolution? Which D?
This is a pity, because with the rise of e-books, the whole thing is
unnecessary; rather than such verbal description, or a potentially
unreadable piece of music notation, the reader could click on a
sentence and hear the example. But no publisher seems keen to take
that obvious and easy step at a time when untutored enthusiasm for
music is at its height.
composers?
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/musorgsky-and-his-circle-by-stephen-walsh-review/
Stephen Walsh's Mussorgsky and His Circle takes a look at the passionate,
patriotic musicians of 19th century Russia
Philip Hensher
9 November 2013
Musorgsky and His Circle
by Stephen Walsh
Faber, pp.469, ВЈ30
Before 'nationalism' became a dirty word, it was the inspiration for
all sorts of idealistic and reform-minded people. This was never more
true than in the history of music. Clearly, subsequent events have
discredited some of those 19th-century ideals. It is striking,
however, that we have become uncomfortable with Wagner's German
nationalism while continuing to regard Smetana's Czech nationalism as
an admirable, even inspiring quality. At times one feels that some
musical nationalists are given too easy a ride--as if what happened
in the opera house couldn't conceivably affect anything outside it.
A notable instance is the case of the remarkable group of composers
which gathered in 1850s Russia around Mily Balakirev and were forever
afterwards referred to as 'the Five', or 'the Mighty Handful'. Though
there had been some interest in Russian folk music previously (Glinka
had already written a couple of heroic operas, A Life for the Tsar
and Ruslan and Ludmila), Balakirev's circle was the first to create a
sort of music specifically and exclusively Russian.
Of this group of five, CГ©sar Cui has the least to be said for him,
being a composer of four-square salon music of no great polish. But
the other four are fascinating. Balakirev himself was chronically
unable to write anything down, so his influence was largely confined
to a few marvellous songs, solo piano pieces and performances on the
piano of forthcoming orchestral works. Then there was Alexander
Borodin, a chemistry professor with a demanding, insomniac wife. His
was a beautiful natural talent though he was unable ever to finish
anything. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov astonished his audience by
appearing at his first symphony in full uniform--he was a naval
officer--and his belief in discipline and accuracy ultimately
separated him from the rest of the group. Soon he had taken on a
professorship of composition and was writing deadly dull fugues. That
sort of thing was poison to the last and greatest of the group,
Modest Musorgsky, whose work, both driven and inhibited by drink, a
lack of training and sheer overwhelming inspiration, would be
'corrected' and not heard as intended for decades to come.
Together they produced a ramshackle, incomplete set of musical
offerings. Most of them loathed the idea of academic study and relied
a great deal on passionate inspiration. When Balakirev's tone poem
Tamara was finally written down and performed, it proved the
masterpiece everyone was waiting for. Musorgsky left any number of
operas in a provisional state; Borodin's sublime Prince Igor exists
as a sort of pack of arias and ensembles which subsequent editors
have tried to make orderly sense of. Only Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov
were disciplined, but with a whiff of dullness about them (compare
the tedium of Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Sheherezade with the
electrifying Tamara, which it comprehensively fillets for material).
What was driving these men? The idea of what Russia might become was
in everyone's mind and underlies most of their great novels of the
time. In the case of the Five, a strong oriental tendency runs
through much of their work. It is present in Sheherezade, obviously,
but also in Balakirev's famously demanding piano piece 'Islamey' and
in Borodin's Polovtsian dances. Much of this was connected to
Russia's ambitions in central Asia and the Great Game, some
orientalist pieces being specifically written for a planned concert
in 1870 to celebrate Alexander II's silver jubilee and to commemorate
various triumphs of the reign. The writer Vladimir Stasov had long
been arguing that Russia was essentially oriental, and that its
destiny lay in unannexed regions of Asia.
But apart from imperialism, there was also a discernibly strong vein
of anti-Semitism in the group, often focussed on the international
virtuoso Anton Rubinstein. Glinka complained that 'the yid
Rubinstein' had talked about A Life for the Tsar in Germany, and
references to 'Yankel', Gogol's Jewish moneylender, were flung about
when Rubinstein was appointed head of the new Russian conservatory.
The Five allowed this sort of thing to creep into their music, with
renderings of 'Hebrew Songs' that are sometimes picturesque,
sometimes even sympathetic, but often genuinely poisonous. It is a
mystery to me how sensitive some critics can be to any anti-Semitic
sounds in the first act of Wagner's Siegfried while ignoring the vile
diatribe contained in the 'Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle' movement
in Musorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition.
Stephen Walsh wrote a splendid life of Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov's
pupil, and in this superb study of the Five and their milieu he
manages delicately to suggest some of the consequences of the
attitudes that were hardening around them. Ideas of artistic
correctness--of what was considered acceptable or not--
led in
the end to the cowering apparatchiks who nearly sent Shostakovich to
the Gulag.
The problem lay fundamentally in the suffocating institutions at the
centre of Tsarist--and, later, Soviet--life.
A conservatory-trained composer would always be orthodox but dull
(Rimsky-Korsakov, currently rather fashionable, comes in for quite a
kicking here). But outside that training, there was no discipline,
and we have the danger of the chaotic creative processes of
Musorgsky, Balakirev and Borodin. Tchaikovsky said of Borodin that
his technique was so weak that 'he can't compose a single line
without somebody's help', and that Musorgsky 'botches any old how,
blindly trusting in the infallibility of his genius'.
The answer was Tchaikovsky's own disciplined but impassioned work;
and perhaps the future of Russian music would always lie in people
like Tchaikovsky, Skryabin and Stravinsky, who married the discipline
of conservatory working practices with the chaos and fury of
Musorgsky's spirit. On their own, neither of these qualities would be
quite enough.
Walsh's book covers a great deal of ground, unearthing some real
rarities from the loose milieu and a lot of faintly nutty polemics.
Considering their fame, there is not a huge bibliography about the
Five, but Walsh takes on a lot of it--and denies for example, the
well-established belief that Musorgsky was homosexual (still, you
reflect, that such unhappiness had to come from somewhere).
The book labours, however, under an apparent condition of publishers
about studies of music these days; they must not contain music
examples. Walsh has sneaked one through, but a few more would have
made his argument easier to follow. It is absurd to replace a
well-chosen music example with writing like this:
The chord is an augmented sixth (German form) which is like a
dominant seventh with a different resolution or exit .... Read as
a sixth chord, it resolves back to D major, with the pedal D
acting not as the leading note of E-flat but as a D-major anchor.
If you can't read music, this sort of verbal description is not going
to mean anything to you; and in fact Walsh apologises for not using
'bearable language'. But even if you can read music, it's still
impenetrable. There is a reason why musical notation was invented,
and it's because verbal accounts are hard to follow and ambiguous.
What resolution? Which D?
This is a pity, because with the rise of e-books, the whole thing is
unnecessary; rather than such verbal description, or a potentially
unreadable piece of music notation, the reader could click on a
sentence and hear the example. But no publisher seems keen to take
that obvious and easy step at a time when untutored enthusiasm for
music is at its height.
Fota
Feb 9, 2017, 1:55:56 PM2/9/17
to
>> It is a mystery to me how sensitive some critics can be to any anti-Semitic
>> sounds in the first act of Wagner's Siegfried while ignoring the vile
>> diatribe contained in the 'Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle' movement
>> in Musorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition.
What's anti-semitic about the Mussorgsky?
>> sounds in the first act of Wagner's Siegfried while ignoring the vile
>> diatribe contained in the 'Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle' movement
>> in Musorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition.
Roderick Stewart
Feb 9, 2017, 3:31:22 PM2/9/17
to
somebody's ethnic origin or religious background is regarded as an
insult, regardless of whether or not you actually are insulting them.
It might be fun to put together a concert or radio show of pieces with
the potential to offend the easily offended. It might include Satie's
"Gymnopaedies", which although a made up word would translate to
"Naked young boys", and Ravel's piano concerto for the left hand,
specially written for an amputee, then there's Ketelby's "In a Persian
Market" wherein the chorus sings "Baksheesh Baksheesh, Allah...", and
of Course Elgar's Enigma Variations, one of which makes fun of
somebody with a speech impediment. Somebody's bound to be offended by
at least one of those, and I'm sure there must be many more.
Rod.
OW
Feb 9, 2017, 6:54:03 PM2/9/17
to
On Tuesday, January 31, 2017 at 6:39:45 PM UTC-6, Frank Forman wrote:
> Why do we pounce on Wagner's anti-Semitism, and ignore that of the Russian
> composers?
As far as I know, no Russian composers were played at Nazi death camps.
> Why do we pounce on Wagner's anti-Semitism, and ignore that of the Russian
> composers?
John W Kennedy
Feb 9, 2017, 8:48:24 PM2/9/17
to
that’s hardly surprising.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"
richard...@gmail.com
Feb 10, 2017, 4:09:58 PM2/10/17
to
However, the original remark was 'Goldenburg and Schmuyle' inherently anti-Semitic. The painting might be (I've not seen it, but imagine a caricature), which might make the written program similar, but music per se cannot be anti-anything (except perhaps pleasure, lately). It's as abstract as abstract can be.
OW
Feb 10, 2017, 5:08:22 PM2/10/17
to
http://korschmin.com/pictures-at-an-exhibition/
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