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‘Entoiling the falconet’: Russian musical orientalism in context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Richard Taruskin
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Extract

This essay originated as a contribution to a symposium organised by the Dallas Opera and Southern Methodist University around the Opera's production of Boro-din's Prince Igor in November 1990. Since many Soviet guests had been invited, the poster and programme book were printed in English and Russian side by side. I found that the word ‘orientalism’ in my title had become tema vostoka – ‘the Eastern theme’ – in translation, even though orientalizm, or more commonly, orientalistika, are perfectly good Russian words (well, Russian words, anyway). It was a sensible precaution. ‘The Eastern theme’ is neutral: from a paper with that phrase in the title one expects inventories, taxonomies, identification of sources, stylistic analysis. ‘Orientalism’ is charged. From a paper with that word in the title one expects semiotics, ideological critique, polemic, perhaps indictment. The translator was quite right to err on the side of innocuousness, rather than saddle me with a viewpoint I might not wish or manage to live up to.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , November 1992 , pp. 253 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 The genre had a quaint eighteenth-century forerunner in Fevey (1786)Google Scholar, a Singspiel by Vasiliy Pashkevich to a libretto by Catherine the Great, which sports a chorus of ‘Kalmyk’ (Mongolian) kumiss-drinkers.

2 ‘Dvadtsat' pyat’ let russkogo iskusstvo: Nasha muzïka’ (six instalments; Vestnik Yevropī; 1882–3), rpt. in Stasov, V. V., Izbranniye sochineniya (Moscow, 1952), II, 522–68Google Scholar; the discussion of the four points is on pp. 525–9. For a translation, see Weiss, Piero and Taruskin, Richard, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York, 1984), 390–4.Google Scholar

3 The Song oflgor's Campaign, trans. Nabokov, Vladimir (New York, 1960), 70.Google Scholar

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5 Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich, Memoirs, trans. Mudge, Richard B. (Norman, Ok., 1963), 47.Google Scholar

6 Side 3, bands 5 (‘Machkai’, duduks instrumental) and 6 (Shirak Folk Dance with Tara).

7 Laroche, Hermann (German Larosh), ‘“Der Thurm zu Babel” Rubinshteyna’, in Larosh, Muzīkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i (St Petersburg, 1894), 117.Google Scholar

8 ‘Might seem’, since on deeper reflection it might also seem a manifestation of a characteristic ambivalance that Russian composers (unlike French or German ones) felt towards ‘the Eastern theme’. Russia was a contiguous empire in which Europeans, living side by side with ‘orientais’, identified ( and intermarried) with them far more than in the case of the other colonial powers; and, as we have already learned from Stasov, oriental coloration was one of the ways by which the composers of the ‘New Russian School’ strove to distinguish themselves from those of Western Europe. It was simultaneously and ambiguously a self-constructing and an other- constructing trait. This irony will find an echo at the end of the present article.

9 See Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1964), II, 186Google Scholar, where Nabokov speaks of the word's ‘emphasis on otiose euphoria and associations with softness, luxuriousness [and] tenderness’. As an alternative he proposes ‘dulcitude’.

10 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York, 1978), 196.Google Scholar

11 Brown, David, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974), 223.Google Scholar

12 Eugene Onegin, II, 186.Google Scholar

13 Compare her remarks on Don José's ‘Flower Song’ from Carmen, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), 59ff.Google Scholar

14 Kompaneysky, N. I., ‘K novïm beregam: Modest Petrovich Musorgskiy’ (originally published in the Russkaya muzïkal'naya gazeta in 1906)Google Scholar, in Gordeyeva, E. M., ed., M. P. Musorgskiy v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1989), 126.Google Scholar