Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985
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Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985

Richard Louis Gillies

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Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985

Richard Louis Gillies

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Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985 explores the ways in which the aftershock of an apparent crisis in Soviet identity after the death of Stalin in 1953 can be detected in selected musical- literary works of what has become known as the 'Stagnation' era (1964–1985). Richard Louis Gillies traces the cultural impact of this shift through the intersection between music, poetry, and identity, presenting close readings of three substantial musical-literary works by three of the period's most prominent composers of songs and vocal cycles: • Seven Poems of Aleksandr Blok, Op. 127 (1966– 1967) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
• Russia Cast Adrift (1977) by Georgy Sviridov (1915–1998)
• Stupeni (1981–1982; 1997) by Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937).The study elaborates an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of musicalliterary artworks that does not rely on existing models of musical analysis or on established modes of literary criticism, thereby avoiding privileging one discipline over the other. It will be of particular signifi cance for scholars, students, and performers with an interest in Russian and Soviet music, the intersection between music and poetry, and the history of Russian and East European culture, politics, and identity during the twentieth century.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000483079

1 Howling wolves: song, voice, and identity in the Soviet Union

DOI: 10.4324/9780429274077-1
The history of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1985 is often referred to as the period of ‘Stagnation’, or zastoy in Russian. The term was retrospectively coined by Mikhail Gorbachev to describe what he perceived as the increasing economic, social, and political inertia under Leonid Brezhnev. It is often characterised in contrast to the preceding ‘Thaw’ period (ottepel′) that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, and to the subsequent six years of decline and collapse somewhat idealistically known as ‘Perestroika’ (meaning ‘restructuring’, derived from perestroit′, ‘to rebuild’). Though many studies preserve these familiar labels, some have chosen alternative ways of delineating Soviet cultural history in order to challenge the dominance of central social–political events such as the 1917 revolutions and instead emphasise continuities that transcend such boundaries. In his recently revised Music of the Soviet Era: 1917–1991, Levon Hakobian rejects the familiar periodisation of post-Stalinist Soviet history into ‘Thaw’, ‘Stagnation’, and ‘Perestroika’ in favour of terminology that has more in common with the history of Russian literature, characterising the whole period instead as ‘The year 1953 and after: The “Bronze Age”.’1 This reflects the common use of the terms ‘Golden Age’ to denote the early nineteenth-century flourishing of lyric poetry in Russia, and ‘Silver Age’ to refer to Russian poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting not only a form of cultural or artistic continuity that transcends the dividing point of 1917, but also a sense of finality or conclusion, perhaps even decay, with which Soviet art of this ‘Bronze Age’ might be imbued.2
Hakobian’s terminology is useful as it invites a consideration of a certain parallelism between the aesthetics that defined the three ‘Ages’ of Russian culture. This might be characterised in the broadest terms as a tension between the ‘noumenal’ and the ‘phenomenal’—between an inner, metaphysical or spiritual existence and an outer physical manifestation of reality—that is present throughout Russian poetry, literature, and literary criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It finds expression in the mapping of internal feelings, emotions, and psychology onto the external world that originated with Germanic Romanticism; it lurks behind the mysticism pervading Russian Symbolism that asserted the existence of a deeper reality beyond that which is observed; it underpins the Russian Formalists’ theory of poetic utterance that came to consider art as ‘lifting the veil’ of reality; and, as we shall see in the following chapters, it seeps into the drift towards postmodernist aesthetics during the Bronze Age.
The aesthetic expression of this tension between internal and external, or ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’, can thus be said to have been at its most acute during the cultural phases that mark the traditional generic and temporal boundaries of the ‘Golden’, ‘Silver’, and ‘Bronze’ ages. Without wanting to present too rigid a concept of cultural history, it is possible to consider these phases as aesthetic wave-peaks that oscillate with intervening peaks of realism, slowly fluctuating from Enlightenment to Romantic aesthetics in the early nineteenth century, from realist to Symbolist aesthetics in the late nineteenth century, and from the (socialist-)realist aesthetics of high Stalinism to the Soviet postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Hakobian’s reference to terminology traditionally applied to developments in literature—lyric poetry in particular—also has useful implications for conceptualising the genealogy of song in Russian culture. Song and poetry share a diverse heritage in Russia that extends beyond the cultivation of a native art-music tradition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries right back to the bïlinï (orally transmitted epic ballads and heroic narrative poems) of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Moreover, oral traditions, poetry, and song have for a long time played a significant role in the formation of Russian cultural identity. Taking Nikolai Lvov as his primary exemplar, Richard Taruskin has pointed to the rediscovery, imitation, and appropriation of early oral poetic traditions (at least as far as they existed in the imaginations of their revivers) that began to play a significant if initially limited role in formulating a national Russian identity from the late eighteenth century onwards.3 Implicit in his discussion of Lvov and his musical collaborator Ivan Pratsch is the notion that the early Herderian treatment of folklore and folk songs in Russian culture of the decades between 1770 and 1820 went hand in hand with the formation of a native art-song tradition in Russia. Because Johann Gottfried Herder’s theory of national character types was rooted in ‘folksong’, song (or sung poetry) was naturally the medium through which such national characteristics were best explored, thus linking song and identity construction at a very early stage in the development of modern (that is, post-Petrine) Russian culture. Taruskin hears Pratsch’s transformation of ‘each narodnaya pesnya [folk song] entrusted to him into a diminutive art song’ as
prefiguring the idiom of the so-called domestic romance (bïtovoy romans) of the next [i.e., Pushkin’s] generation, thus actively collaborating with the ‘folk,’ in the spirit of the Enlightenment, to produce a new genre that purposely mediated or transcended the borders between genres (read: social classes).4
The notion of song as the genre best suited for mediating and transcending generic borders is certainly to the point, though it can be expanded beyond Taruskin’s parenthetical emphasis on social-economic parameters. We might also consider the generic borders between poetry and music that, once mediated and transcended, allow these two distinct forms of aesthetic utterance to become active collaborators in producing a powerful artistic means of articulating multiple ideological, social, historical, national, emotional, and psychological parameters. As an augmentation of lyric poetry that could respond to both literary and vernacular cultural heritage, art song was an ideal medium through which to navigate contemporaneous ideas of native culture, national character, and identity. The birth of a native song tradition was thus a crucial feature of Russia’s literary Golden Age—an essential element in the early drive towards constructing a national identity that would both crystallise and exoticise a sense of cultural, social, even moral ‘Russianness’ that was reflected in a series of later developments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was perhaps most evident in the historical realism and slavophilic nationalism of the Moguchaya kuchka, in the self-promoted ‘primitivism’ and ‘orientalism’ of Igor Stravinsky’s ballets written for Sergei Diaghilev (who, above all, knew how to sell the Orient to the Occident), in the Soviet revival of Pushkin during the late 1930s, and in the subsequent revival of nationalist ideology in the post-Stalinist period (more of which in Chapter 3).
As with the origins of the tradition in the Golden Age, art song was also a central feature of Russia’s literary Silver Age, which drew influence from both European and Russian sources5 and brought with it a self-conscious focus on spiritual, mystical, otherworldly, fatalistic, apocalyptic, and psychological themes. Such developments in poetry and literature can be traced in contemporaneous musical-literary works, particularly those by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Serge Rachmaninoff who both made singular contributions to the field of Russian art song during this period, composing a combined total of almost 200 songs and duets between 1860 and 1916 and developing the genre into one capable of sustaining complex psychological and emotional content.6 Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893 precluded him from engaging extensively with what was perhaps the defining aesthetic movement of fin de siècle Russian art: Symbolism.7 Nevertheless, his exploration of the song genre perhaps best encapsulates the musical dimensions of the Silver Age. Through his songs, Tchaikovsky was able to explore the artifice of identity while experimenting with creating and projecting multiple different identities. In his examination of Tchaikovsky’s songs, Philip Ross Bullock has considered the ways in which the genre might be used as a vehicle for plumbing the psychological and performative depths of artistic, sexual, and gender identity, suggesting that the ‘heightened self-consciousness [of Tchaikovsky’s songs] renders them less subjective instances of Romantic confession than complex exercises in the projection of lyric personae’.8 Bullock’s observation is pertinent, as it recognises a distinction between stylisation and embodiment akin to the distinction between physical phenomena and metaphysical noumena that was a fundamental aspect of not only Silver-Age and Symbolist aesthetics but also of the aesthetics of Hakobian’s ‘Bronze Age’.
Thus, in terms of post-Petrine Russian cultural history, not only had poetry and song undergone an interlaced evolution since at least the late eighteenth century, but this evolution itself was always inextricably bound to the formation, expression, and performance of identity, whether that was a collective ‘nationalist’, ‘Russian’, ‘Slavic’, or later ‘Soviet’ identity, an autonomous personal identity, or a complex combination of potentially conflicting identities or personae. Moreover, despite the social–political breach of 1917, the wide-ranging heterogeneity of art song as a genre rendered it capable of establishing a cultural continuity between Soviet and pre-revolutionary (and non-Russian) cultures by facilitating a dialogue between multiple epochs and traditions. Throughout the Soviet era it was often to song that composers turned in response to moments of crisis in both collective and personal identity, employing an amalgamation of competing Soviet and pre-Soviet ideals to express some form of identity at a time when the political system was overtly aware of its own history.9 Indeed, many composers of Hakobian’s ‘Bronze Age’ appear to articulate their own epoch’s gradual estrangement from Marxist–Leninist ideology through a dialogue with the combined aesthetics of the Golden and Silver Ages, amalgamating themes of spiritualism, mysticism, Orthodoxy, nationalism, ontology, eschatology, apocalypse, and dreams through their settings of a diverse range of poets from Pushkin, Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, and Marina Tsvetaeva to John Keats, Rabbie Burns, Federico García Lorca, and Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Both the notion of a transcendent continuity with the culture, society, politics, literature, and artworks of other epochs, and the eschatological postmodernist concern with finality, lateness, quotation, and the ending of things that characterise ‘Bronze-Age’ aesthetics are central to the three vocal cycles analysed in this book. And it is during this ‘Bronze Age’ that the importance of the vocal cycle as a serious intellectual genre began to crystallise in Russian and Soviet culture. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individual songs or collections of romances predominated. Though there is precedent in certain nineteenth-century works (notably Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, and perhaps also some of Tchaikovsky’s later collections), the idea of the vocal cycle as a conceptually unified whole capable of expressing the same weighty content as traditional ‘serious’ genres inherited from the monolith of Austro-German Romanticism (the opera, the symphony, and the string quartet) seems to have emerged in Russia only in the post-Stalinist period. The vocal cycle coalesced song into a genre appropriate for (even best suited to) conveying complex psychological emotional states and identities, in which separate songs became unified by intricate motivic development and dramaturgical continuity.10

Periodising Soviet history

As a point of departure, Figure 1.1 shows, in very broad terms, how one might begin to understand Soviet cultural history as a fluctuation between periods of relative liberalism and pluralism characterised by increased artistic and intellectual freedom (the first post-revolutionary decade and the post-Stalinist period) on the one hand, and the long intervening period of conservatism characterised by censorship, suppression of individuality in favour of the collective, and violently enforced ‘Official’ ideology (high Stalinism) on the other. The horizontal lines that contract and expand from left to right represent the oscillation between cultural, social, and political heterogeneity and state hegemony, along with the theoretical incompatibility of these two states of being. Hegemony is understood to correlate with increased state intervention and influence in cultural, political, and social affairs, while heterogeneity is associated with a loss of state influence leading to the destabilising and eventual collapse of the regime. Figure 1.1 also represents the correlation of the...

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