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This concluding chapter examines Rimsky-Korsakov in the context of Russian politics, philosophy, and aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing some persuasive parallels between the development of Russian music and Russian painting. Lyricism and poetic beauty defined great music for Rimsky-Korsakov. Music—and all art—was, in the end, about beauty. By the mid-1890s, beauty as Rimsky-Korsakov understood it seemed out of fashion. He hoped that future generations would rediscover classicist aesthetics, but he feared the historic inevitability of a progressive “degeneration” in the arts. Nevertheless, his project was to strengthen the role of music in Russia and assert its value as art. This required finding the right accommodation with the Russian state and the monarchy. Ultimately, it led Rimsky on a career that paralleled and intersected with developments in Russian painting and with the work of Russia's leading visual artists.

This chapter looks at St. Petersburg Conservatory and Soviet musicology. The St. Petersburg Conservatory bears Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's name not only on account of the composer's contribution to the Russian classical music canon, but because he is perceived as a progenitor of the institutionalized study of music in Russia—both practical and theoretical. It is true that Rimsky-Korsakov played a leading role in shaping the first syllabi of music-theoretical courses at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. However, the lineage that connects these courses to the present-day curricula is by no means as direct as it is sometimes painted. The chapter then argues that under Rimsky-Korsakov, music theory was seen as the handmaiden to composition, which hindered the institutionalization of historical musicology.

This chapter highlights general understanding and interpretation of Russia's emergence as a producer of art music, and the cultural evaluation of the music. It is extremely mendacious and tendentious historiography that emanates from the U.S.S.R. Russian music, above all, in terms of its Russianness, has ingrained many prejudices and lazy habits of thought. It is often taken for granted that everything which happened in Russian music has a direct relationship, positive or negative, to the national question, which is often very reductively construed in terms of “sources in folk song and church chant.” This in turn can, and often does, become a normative criterion: an overtly quotational national character is taken as a mark of value or authenticity; and its absence, conversely, as a mark of valuelessness.

This chapter examines the contribution of composer Joel Engel to Russian Jewish music at the turn of the century. It explains that Engel pioneered the scholarly study of Jewish music and the idea of Jewish national art music, and that his twin search for an art and science of Jewish music fused the German science of Judaism and Russian musical ethnography. The chapter also discusses Engel's discovery that the actual voices of the Jewish people threatened to collapse his whole folkloric model of Russian Jewish music.

A reconsideration of the habit of classifying Russian music according to a crude binary (nationalist/non-nationalist) that is more the product of its foreign reception than its domestic significance. The contributions of two of its most active early publicists, Vladimir Stasov at home (and atypical) and Rosa Newmarch abroad (and typical), are given a detailed assessment, particularly as regards their treatment of Tchaikovsky.

This chapter provides an introduction to Russian music, and descriptions of composers ranging from Bortnyansky in the eighteenth century to Tarnopolsky in the twenty-first, as well as all of the famous names in between. Some of these pieces, such as the ones on Chaikovsky's alleged suicide and on the interpretation of Shostakovich's legacy, have won fame in their own right as decisive contributions to some of the most significant debates in contemporary musicology. The chapter also presents the main issues and a justification of Taruskin's approach, seen both in the light of his intellectual development and in that of the changing intellectual environment, which has been particularly marked by the end of the cold war in Europe.

Moving from subjective to intersubjective temporality, this chapter examines how music may reflect a culture’s historical understanding of time. It has long been a truism of music criticism that nineteenth-century Russian symphonic music somehow lacks a genuine sense of development in comparison with a ‘normative’ German model. This chapter puts forward an alternative way of approaching Russian instrumental music, from the perspective of a different conception of musical and historical time. By interrogating this idea of temporality both musically and culturally, it suggests a potential distinction between a specifically Western Enlightenment model of time and historical progress, and a static, repetitive, even timeless conception that may apply to many pieces of the nineteenth-century Russian repertoire. Yet ultimately this binary opposition is seen to be overly simplistic, the chapter arguing for a richer understanding of music’s relation with time within both Russian and Austro-German traditions.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the influence of literary and historical texts on musical composition in Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume examines the problem arising from the relation between the voice of Russian music and its message and the consequences of the ideological and textual dependence of Russian music on historical and literary consciousness. It analyzes several relevant works. These include Mikhail Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmila, Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov, Pyotr Ilyich's Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Defining the music of Prokofiev in terms of the Russian tradition, or what “Russianism” means in relation to the composer, is complex. The young Prokofiev rebelled against his musical background; he spent nearly twenty years abroad, then returned to a changed Russia, where he was to remain something of an outsider. Yet Russia as a country and as a concept was fundamental to his creativity—both the St. Petersburg nationalism of the Kuchka and the wider Romanticism of Chaikovsky. They informed his wide palette of styles, as did the composers and writers of the Silver Age. With these and with elements of both folk song and the Russian Romance, Prokofiev had a lifelong dialogue, helping to define his unique national identity.

This chapter focuses on the discussions on Russian classical music and operas presented at the music festival titled “The Russian Contemporary Music Festival,” organized by the Iowa City institution at the University of Iowa in Iowa, U.S., in 2000. The festival featured Russian composers and musicologists, with three full-length concerts and several conference sessions on the developments related to music in post-Soviet Russia. It was a showcase of unknown Russian composers aged 29 to 70, whose music was performed there: Vladislav Agafonnikov, Yuri Butsko, Irina Dubkova, Andrei Golovin, Faradzh Karayev, Leonid Karev, Mikhail Kollontay, Nikolai Korndorf, Roman Ledenyov, Vladimir Nikolayev, Olga Rayeva, Dmitri Ryabtsev, Albina Stefanou, Vladimir Tarnopolski, Aleksandr Vustin, and Sergei Zagny. The chapter compares the music and operas presented by these composers at the music festival to highlight the trends in music in post-Soviet Russia.

This chapter presents the contribution of Mikhail Glinka in the Russian music culture, and also reviews the work of David Brown, the author of Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study. Glinka is seen as “the boundary between the past and the future of Russian music.” As early as the première of A Life for the Tsar in 1836, his work was hailed as “a wonderful beginning” (Gogol) and as the harbinger of “a new element in art” (Odoyevsky). Clearly, something was there that set Glinka immediately apart from all his musical predecessors and compatriots, and time has only magnified his image as founding father, surrounding his name with a mystique the way Ives's name is surrounded on these shores. But even without going so far as to challenge the time-honored evaluation of Glinka's contribution, one has to speculate, precisely, its basis. The more one knows of Glinka and his works, the more elusive the answer becomes.