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Slavonic Music and the Western World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
The subject of the present paper suggested itself to me while I was working on two very different subjects: Czech and Polish church-music in the sixteenth century, and the solo art-song in the Slavonic countries generally. It has nothing to do with the Iron Curtain and its effect on the world of music today. There is a much older curtain between Slavonic music and the Western world, which I should like to pull aside a little: a curtain woven by the group of languages spoken and written by the Slav peoples. It is true that a certain number of vocal works—mostly Russian operas of the period 1870–1910—have thrust their way through by sheer force of genius and we have learned to enjoy Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Tchaikovsky, in more or less unsatisfactory English or French translations, or even in Russian. (Sometimes, at Covent Garden, in three languages simultaneously. But operatic audiences are accustomed to enjoying opera in languages they don't really understand.) But not more than three Czech operas have made any real impact on Western Europe and not a single Polish one; even Russian opera is known only by a handful of works. In the field of solo song the position is much worse. We know Mussorgsky was a great song-composer but we know that mainly because of intensive propaganda rather than from direct experience; it can hardly be otherwise so long as Western singers fight shy of Russian; we should still know Hugo Wolf by hearsay rather than by hearing if we had to rely on translations. Russian is at least as musical a language as German, and as subtle, and the best Russian song-composers—not only Mussorgsky—write vocal lines that reflect and intensify the sense of the words, that are moulded to a certain arrangement of vowels and consonants, like good song-composers in any other language. All this, the great corpus of Russian song, remains almost unknown—or known by its least fine and subtle examples. And not only Russian song; Poland has produced at least two remarkable song-writers, Moniuszko in the last century and Szymanowski in the present one, of whom Szymanowski is known only in German translations and Moniuszko not at all, for his songs have never been translated into English and the wretched French selection is a hundred years old.
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References
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