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Christian themes in Russian opera: A millennial essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Richard Taruskin
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Extract

The millennium to which my title refers is that of the Christianisation of Russia, which took place in 988, and which was recently celebrated the world over, not least in newly broad-minded Russia herself. And yet the designation is somewhat imprecise: the millennium was really that of a sovereign's baptism. After considering and rejecting Judaism and Islam (so the legend goes), the Great Prince Vladimir of Kiev embraced the Christian faith and established it as a state religion – the statiest state religion that ever was (or is: the situation has been updated under the Soviets, but not fundamentally changed). The distinction is necessary if the subject of these remarks is to have any meaning at all, and it will also help explain why there is relatively little to say about it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 83 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 This essay was prepared for and read at an international symposium entitled ‘The Millennium of Christianity in Rus': The Impact of Christianity on the History of the Eastern Slavs’', held at the Library of Congress on 26 May 1988.

2 For citations of relevant law and contemporary opinion, see Oldani, Robert William Jr, ‘New Perspectives on Musorgsky's “Boris Godunov”’, Ph.D. diss. (Michigan, 1978), 200–1.Google Scholar

3 Report to Nikolai I on Pushkin's Boris Godunov, cited in Oldani, 204.Google Scholar

4 See Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich, My Musical Life, trans. Joffe, Judah A. (London, 1974), 125–6.Google Scholar By the time Rimsky got around to writing a sequel, The Tsar's Bride (based, like Pskovitianka, on a historical drama by the poet Lev Mey), Nikolai II was sitting on the Russian throne, the censorship had congealed, and Ivan had to revert to a mute role. From then on it would be fable and fantasy for Rimsky, as for most other Russian composers of the ‘Silver Age’.

5 Chaikovsky, Pyotr Illyich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska, V (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1959), 372.Google Scholar

6 The most recent thematic discussion of the Khovanshchina libretto, and the most cogent, is Emerson's, Caryl ‘Musorgsky's Libretti on Historical Themes: From the Two Borises to Khovanshchina’, in Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 235–67.Google Scholar

7 Letter to Musorgsky from Vienna, 15–27 August 1873, in Leyda, Jay and Bertensson, Sergei, The Musorgsky Reader (New York, 1947), 245.Google Scholar

8 For an outline of the statist viewpoint, see Taruskin, Richard, ‘“The Present in the Past”: Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, ca. 1870’, in Brown, Malcolm H., ed., Russian and Soviet Music.’ Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor, 1984), 77–146 (esp. 91–6).Google Scholar

9 See the standard account by Riasanovsky, Nicholas, Nicholas l and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), esp. 73ff.Google Scholar

10 See his ‘Opyty tekhnicheskoi kritiki nad muzykoiu M. I. Glinki: Rol' odnogo motiva v tseloi opere Zhizn' za tsaria’(‘Essay in Technical Criticism on the Music of M. I. Glinka: The Role of a Single Motive Throughout the Opera A Life for the Tsar’), in Serov, A. N., Izbrannye stat'i, II (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1957), 35–43.Google Scholar

11 See Vernadsky, George, Kievan Russia (New Haven, 1948), 57.Google Scholar

12 See Sochineniia M. N. Zagoskina, VI (St Petersburg and Moscow: M. O. Vol'f, 1901), 256–66, 302–6.Google Scholar

13 Nabokov, Vladimir, notes to his translation of The Song of Igor's Campaign (New York, 1960), 74.Google Scholar

14 ‘O politicheskikh zadachakh universiteta vostochnikh narodov’ (‘On the Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East’, Speech at a meeting of the students of the Communist University for the Toilers of the East, 18 May 1925), in Stalin, Iosif, Voprosy Leninizma (Moscow: Partizdat TsK VKP(b), 1931), 137.Google Scholar

15 It would be a mistake to assume that this line is exclusively a manifestation of the Stalin period. Its more recent representatives include October (1964) by Muradeli, VanoGoogle Scholar and The Brothers Ulyanov (1967) by Meitus, Iulii (thanks to Caryl Emerson for tidings of the latter).Google Scholar