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Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture.

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Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture. By Boris Gasparov. (Russian Literature and Thought.) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. [xxii, 268 p. ISBN 0-300-10650-5. $45.] Index, bibliographical reference, music examples.

Boris Gasparov begins his book with the assertion that Russian music is "subservient" to literature (p. xxi). Music acts to express and affirm literature's "intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings" (p. xvii). In light of this posited hierarchy, it may come as a surprise that Gasparov wants "to view music as a formative cultural force, to show cultural trends and patterns in the characteristic features of the music" (p. xxi). In this book he attempts to explore the relationship between Russian music and its message. To this end, he offers a reading of six musical works, covering a hundred-year period beginning in the late 1830s, revealing how each work reflects the cultural and social trends of its time.

What gives Russian music its unique identity? In chapter 1, "Sound and Discourse: On Russian National Musical Style," Gasparov sets up and explores the dichotomy between European (read: German) and Russian musical traditions, the former personified by Wagner, the latter by Musorgsky. Russian musical language, according to him, seems to have a single meta-source, "the Russian chorale," though this genre remains undefined. Gasparov argues that the parallel European and Russian lines of development offer "alternative path[s] into modernity." The Wagnerian line leads to "the expressionist style" and, eventually, atonality; the "Russian chorale" line, shedding its garbs of national uniqueness and assuming universality, culminates in "the loosening of harmonic functions by Debussy ... the extending of tonal harmonies by Shostakovich, and ... Stravinsky's bitonality" (pp. 7-8). As these quotations attest, the author's view of the development of music and its history is rather simplistic and conventional.

In chapter 2, Gasparov traces Glinka's transformation between the premiere of A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Ludmila (1842). The triumph of the composer's first opera and the prospects that followed eventually gave way to disappointment with his career, problems in personal life, and discontent with creative plans, leading him to abandon high aristocratic...

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