Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture
Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture
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Overview
In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s.
Gasparov discusses Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300133165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Series: | Russian Literature and Thought Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Boris Gasporov is professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at Columbia University.
Read an Excerpt
Five Operas and a Symphony
WORD AND MUSIC IN RUSSIAN CULTUREBy BORIS GASPAROV
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2005 Boris GasparovAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10650-3
Chapter One
Sound and Discourse: On Russian National Musical Style
An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depth it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it reveals itself and astounds us. -Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
The Russian folk melody "Glory" became popular in the nineteenth century, not least because of Beethoven's use of it in one of the Rasoumoffsky quartets; it appears in op. 59, no. 2 in the middle part of the scherzo, marked in the score as "thème russe" (example 1.1a). The theme was subsequently used by Rimsky-Korsakov as the leitmotif of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in The Maiden of Pskov and The Tsar's Bride and, most famously, by Musorgsky in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov. In Beethoven's and Musorgsky's works the theme appears as a chorale as well as in acontrapuntal elaboration. Let us compare the chorale harmonization given to the theme by Musorgsky (example 1.1b).
Beethoven and Musorgsky expand on the three principal functions of European harmony-tonic, dominant, and subdominant, based, respectively, on steps I, V, and IV of the seven-note scale-by using chords build on peripheral steps. Beethoven uses a VI triad and Musorgsky uses II, III, and VI triads. Although any of these peripheral chords can appear in a Bach-style chorale, their sheer weight, particularly in the case of Musorgsky, exceeds the norms of harmonic style of European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Beethoven reduces this peculiarity by using chromatic gestures that form secondary dominants to peripheral chords. The tension created by a secondary dominant resolves into a peripheral triad in the same way in which the principal dominant is resolved into the tonic; for instance, the chromaticized chord (with b-sharp) of the VII functions as dominant for the VI. When the scope of harmonies within the tonality expands, it happens by the affirmation of the fundamental dominant-tonic antinomy. Expanding tonality from within by applying its fundamental principle to more and more extenuated subsidiaries was the road of development taken by European composers throughout the nineteenth century. The level of expansion of tonality reached in this way by Wagner was such that it permitted him to maintain harmonic suspense virtually throughout an entire act of an opera by introducing another secondary dominant each time the resolution into the tonic is expected, before reaching the ultimate resolution.
Musorgsky's treatment of the theme is strategically different. He introduces peripheral chords bluntly, without preparation. They function as self-sufficient, independent members of the tonality whose appearance, like the appearances of the tonic and the dominant, is not beset by any special conditions. Establishing all peripheral chords on an equal footing with the principal functions results in decentralization of the tonality. Harmonic hierarchy is transformed into a harmonic family. A chord built on any step of the scale can appear after and be resolved into-or simply followed by-every other member of the family; each can freely assume a derivative form such as a sixth chord or a seventh chord.
The effect is that of a somewhat amorphous looseness. The coherence of musical form underwritten by the fundamental principle of the dominant-tonic relationship gives way to an improvisatory vagueness of direction in which the musical phrase coalesces. It undermines the "teleological" treatment of tonality according to which its development, no matter how far-reaching, is strategically directed toward resolution in the final cadence. The appearance of the tonic becomes anticlimactic-it is just one chord among the many that can follow and be followed by any of the family members; it can assume the shape of a seventh chord, sometimes even in the final position, as easily as a chord built on another step. The standard V-I cadence that signposts all conjunctions between segments of the musical form in Western music becomes no more than a transient episode, almost an accident. In the minor mode, the importance of the dominant-tonic sequence is further undermined by the prevalent use of the natural dominant instead of the harmonic one, thus removing the leading tone, which has the strongest gravitational pull toward the tonic.
The weakening of the tonic's reigning position, together with the fact that the scales of a major and its relative minor tonality (for example, C major and A minor) become identical owing to the use of the natural VII in the minor, produces a characteristic feature of Russian harmonic style: the so-called alternating tonality (tonal'naia peremennost'). Music can inconspicuously shift from the major to the minor and vice versa, without any modulating device that would make such a shift definitive. In fact, one can hardly say in which tonality one finds oneself at any given point. There is no proper cadence, no difference in the scale and the repertory of the chords between the two relative tonalities, so one can tell major from minor only by the relative weight, at a certain point, of chords that can be interpreted as the dominant and the tonic of either of the alternatives-a precarious balance indeed. Sometimes the tonal alternation involves more than two tonalities. A good example is the famous song "About the Tatar Captivity" (Pro tatarskii polon), which Rimsky-Korsakov harmonized in his collection of Russian folk tunes (following Balakirev's initiative) and later used as the leitmotif of the Tatar invasion in The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. Its theme perpetually wanders between G major, E minor, C major, and D minor; it can be tipped into any one of these by slight changes in harmonization (example 1.2).
Although Russian music predominantly uses the seven-note scale, the principle of alternating tonality links it with Far Eastern music based on pentatonic scales. A pentatonic melody also fluctuates effortlessly between what sounds to the European ear like major and minor.
The first impression given by the Russian chorale in comparison with the German one is that of serene simplicity. The flexibility of conjunctions between chords and the absence, or at least the great reduction, of harmonic tensions and functional hierarchy come at the expense of excluding the chromaticisms and thus limiting the repertory of chords to those built on the diatonic steps. In this sense, the Russian chorale recalls the pre-tonal (modal) harmony of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries except for the extensive appearance of triads in inverted positions (six-three or six-four chords) and the free use of seventh chords based on all steps except the dominant seventh, which is avoided. This analogy inspired early champions of the reintroduction of the traditional Russian style into church singing in the second quarter of the nineteenth century after the thorough Europeanization it had undergone in the previous hundred years. In the 1830s Nikolai Potulov and others began composing church music in what they perceived as the Russian equivalent of Palestrina's style, which consisted exclusively of the triads of all steps of the diatonic scale, freely combined with each other (example 1.3).
Potulov's challenge to the Westernized stylistic canon established by Dmitry Bortniansky was greeted with enthusiasm by such a sensitive musical connoisseur as Prince Vladimir Odoevsky. Glinka's only attempt to write church music based on a traditional chant, "Let My Prayer Arise," also made use of this exquisite if limited musical language. The free distribution of the basic chords, however, constituted only one aspect of what at that time began to be conceptualized as the Russian harmonic style. The freedom with which the chords could join each other, the lack of definitive expectations for what was to follow, made it possible for chords to go astray, reaching areas outside the initial diatonic scale. Adjoining chords could glide from one scale to another with the same lack of restrictions that characterized their combinations within one scale. This could be achieved the more naturally in that all traditional modal scales were treated as interchangeable; at any moment, what began in the alternating Ionian-Aeolian mode could slip into Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Phrygian, or some mixture thereof. Such freedom allowed striking harmonic conjunctions to be presented point-blank, without any preparation employing secondary dominants. This is what happens in the development of Musorgsky's "Glory." After its initial serenely diatonic exposition, a segment of the chant appears in a modified form that features a conjunction of A minor and D major; repeated leaps between the tonalities whose tonics are separated by the interval of a tritone proceed with a remarkable nonchalance, without losing the effect of diatonic transparency (example 1.4).
In the introduction to Khovanshchina, Musorgsky takes an exquisitely simple theme through variations that feature, successively, the tonalities of E major / C-sharp minor, D major, F-sharp / C-sharp minor, F-sharp major, and G-sharp major-all joined to each other with few or no means of transition.
Another development prompted by volatile conjunctions and conflations of different tonalities consisted in creating exotic artificial scales. Glinka's introduction of the whole-tone scale as early as the late 1830s (Blackamoor's march in Ruslan and Ludmila), Rimsky-Korsakov's fondness for the octatonic "tone-semitone" scale (sometimes identified by his name), Musorgsky's use of a hyper-Phrygian scale with a lowered IV (later favored by Shostakovich), and Scriabin's "Promethean chord" and the new scale system it implied, followed by extensive experiments in scale-building by Nikolai Roslavets in the late 1910s, can be cited as the most conspicuous signposts along this road. A broadly acknowledged product of this development was the domain of exotic sonorities signifying the supernatural and the sublime-the characteristic sound of fairytale Russianness.
The freedom of harmonic conjunctions exceeded not only the boundaries of a single scale but the very concept of the chord as usually understood. Freely evolving voices often give rise to nonchordal combinations that appear alongside standard triads and seventh chords. Although in conventional harmony such combinations are allowed as transient states between two full chords, composers such as Musorgsky do not hesitate to use them as independent units alongside normal chords. The phenomenon of freely evolving voices proceeding together in a loosely coordinated manner is known as heterophony-something in between simple monophonic melody and polyphony. It is widely known among East Asian musical cultures (another instance of the Russian-East Asian connection, whose consequences are explored in Chapter 7). Unlike suspensions in normative harmony, which are expected to be resolved into the regular chord that has been suspended, heterophonic non-chordal combinations are free to come and go: they can be followed by the standard resolution, by another nonchordal combination, or by an unrelated chord. The crucial factor seems to be the smoothness of the movement of the voices, not the conventionality of the resulting harmonies. This smoothness, however, does not observe the rules of good voice-leading of standard harmony-it easily admits, for instance, parallel fifths or chromatic cross-relations between different voices in adjoining chords; these were the features of Musorgsky's writing that Rimsky-Korsakov strove to correct, perceiving them as the errors of someone lacking formal training.
Musorgsky was the most radical of the nineteenth-century composers in his use of these techniques. Let us consider, for example, a passage from the duet between Feodor and the nanny in act 2 of Boris Godunov in which diverse six-four chords, seemingly representing vestiges of G and C major, follow one another freely (example 1.5a) and a brief phrase that comes somewhat later in the same scene that, if analyzed under the auspices of standard harmony, looks, at least in the beginning, like a patchwork of disparate tonalities and nonchordal combinations eventually coming to a cadence in E-flat major (example 1.5b).
Musorgsky was not exceptional in this regard, however. Chaikovsky once chastised an inexperienced composer for his excessive concern for the integrity of each chord: "[in your score, there are] always chords, chords, and chords, and besides, mostly the so-called accords plaques [chords in root position]. No unisons, no two-voiced counterpoints appear, even as an exception." Coming from a composer who was often blamed for being insufficiently "Russian" and whom one cannot suspect of any sympathy for Musorgsky's style, this statement testifies to the universality of this trend.
Wagner's "Tristan" chord, whose hypertension resolves into a lesser tension rather than into a consonance, a device that could postpone the final resolution almost indefinitely, was viewed by the modernist aesthetic and ideology as the foremost symbol of the "crisis" of classical harmony, a musical counterpart of the Nietzschean crisis of traditional values. The Russian chorale, however, with its potential for dissolving tonal and chordal integrities, could be seen as an alternative path into modernity. It undermined the conventional musical order not by increasing tensions but by dissolving them. The strategies of expanding and eventually exploding the tonality-by making the inner logic of harmonic conjunctions increasingly complicated until the whole underlying order became thoroughly transformed or, by contrast, by loosening this logic to the point of total irrelevancy-ran on parallel courses in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both the Musorgskian tangential relation to classical harmony and the Wagnerian technique of exploding it from within had far-reaching potential that allowed them to be adopted by different strains of the musical avant-garde. If the principle of the Tristan chord led to the expressionist style of Richard Strauss and the early Schoenberg and, ultimately, to the development of atonal music, then the inheritance of the Russian chorale can be seen in the loosening of harmonic functions by Debussy, in the extending of tonal harmonies by Shostakovich, and perhaps most radically in the tonal bricolage of Stravinsky's bitonality. Shostakovich in particular was able to employ the most radical harmonic conjunctions while retaining a clear continuity with nineteenth-century musical language. The chorus of convicts in the final scene of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk accommodates daring harmonic effects into a musical discourse bearing unmistakable marks of kinship with Musorgsky. In particular, one is reminded of another scene involving departure to Siberia: that of Prince Golitsyn in Khovanshchina (act 4, scene 2), in which the melody, persisting on the tones of two minor triads, and ostinatos in the bass sound like a diatonic prototype of Shostakovich's music (example 1.6).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Operas and a Symphony by BORIS GASPAROV Copyright © 2005 by Boris Gasparov. Excerpted by permission.
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