It was Mily Balakirev who collected ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’ in Nizhny Novgorod in 1860; he was one of several Russian composers who went on collecting trips down that river, and further south to the Caucasus. They were impelled by the Slavophile romanticism that was then the fashion among Russian intellectuals, but with the exception of Musorgsky they all treated what they found as raw material for conventional salon music.

The folklorist on whose discoveries Stravinsky drew for the wedding songs in Les noces was the real thing. Pyotr Vasilyevich Kireyevsky (1808–1856) was Russia’s leading collector in the 1830s and 40s, and both Pushkin and Gogol sent him song texts they had come across. He faithfully reproduced what his informants sent, keeping local dialects and regional variants intact, and including descriptions of performance. The result, says historian Richard Taruskin, was ‘a panorama of wedding customs throughout the length and breadth of Russia that may appear indiscriminate and redundant, but that in fact provides an unprecedentedly rich assemblage of the artefacts of Russian bït, life-as-lived’. Kireyevsky began to publish his songs in the 1840s, then after an unexplained change of mind stopped completely; a selection of his songs was published in 1911, and that was Stravinsky’s source. Thousands more Kireyevsky songs still await publication today.

Spurred by an awareness that industrialisation and urbanisation were ringing the death knell for folk music, song collectors proliferated during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, most of them operating without the luxury of recording equipment. The Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–1870) published 2200 texts and 811 melodies of Bohemian folk song; Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) did the same for Moravian music.

Topping the league for sheer productivity was Vasil Stoin (1880–1938), a Bulgarian violinist-musicologist who with his assistants gathered – without recording technology – many thousands of folk songs from every part of Bulgaria between 1926 and 1937. His method was go out into the fields and vineyards, catch the music on the wing, and whistle what he had noted down, letting the singers verify its accuracy. His classifications, by metre, rhythm, scale, and function, were as scientific as those of Bartók, who drew on his work for his own purposes.