Ehnaton’s Reviews > On Russian Music > Status Update

But with time, even Musorgsky began to acquire some proficiency

The myth of Russian autochthonism was something Chaikovsky grew to detest

It has even been argued that tolerance for homosexual relations was greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe during the nineteenth century—at least when, as usually happened, the active partner socially outranked the passive one—because Russia was a feudal society until 1861, and “gentlemanly games” were a traditional droit du seigneur.

No one can afford to mount opera on such a
scale in an age of high-priced labor, deficit finance, and unequal competition from Hollywood. But in the nineteenth century, grand opera was the main medium of upscale mass entertainment, the C. B. DeMille (all right, the George Lucas) productions of the day
To put it in terms of Monteverdi’s slogan, music had become the uncontested mistress

What had happened in the meantime to make this oldest aim of opera seem new again? For one thing, the operatic audience had changed. What
had originally been an aristocratic elite was now a mass public that demanded to be not only moved but astonished by thrilling virtuoso singing.

When the Italian style was adapted to Orthodox conditions it had to become a cappella, but it retained the textures of the vocal-instrumental medium

In Russian usage musika, meant secular instrumental music—a pleonasm for the Eastern Orthodox, who have never allowed the use of instruments in church. (The reason for the ban is the last line of the Psalter, which says, “Let everything that has breath praise the
Lord.” In Greek and the Slavic languages the same word—pneuma in the former, dukh in the latter—means both “breath” and “soul.”)

lted musician the Russian empire had ever produced rather than imported. If Bortnyansky was a Ukrainian composer, Irving Berlin was a Siberian one

This, then, was the beginning of the Russian national school in music. It was born in the context of a state ideology in which narodnost’—nationality—was understood in patriotic and dynastic terms linked with the defense of serfdom

Nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, in fact, and not just the musical variety, was itself a foreign import