Francis Maes
A History of Russian Music:
Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, translated by
Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans.
University of California, 427 pages, $45

In the sphere of Western classical music, changes in historical perspective
take hold gradually—if they occur at all. Bach the Supreme Genius, Mozart
the Divine Child, and Beethoven the Curmudgeon Revolutionary are characterizations
which have persisted for eighty years or more. We may offer new interpretations
of music’s major figures, but the portraits, history, and
scholarship surrounding them remain largely the same.

For a long time the popular interpretations of Russian music were similarly static. Even
the music’s history was filled with critical assessments passed off as simple facts: The group
of composers known as the “Mighty Handful” was a force in revolt against the Czarist regime.
The Handful was opposed to the Germanizing influence of Anton Rubinstein and his cohort. Modest
Musorgsky, the Handful’s leading light, wrote historical operas to celebrate the power of
the masses. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, despite his Western influences, was typically Russian,
i.e., semi-barbaric. These claims were repeated so frequently that they came to be treated as
gospel.

Russian musicology was for a long time marked by critical
fixations: amateurism and “Orientalism.” Commentators
pushed the idea that the Handful, mostly self-taught, had spurned
training as a Western conceit. Critics also gave undue attention to
musical “Orientalism,” the tendency to evoke and emphasize an
alien, otherworldly quality in composition. For a time, then, it
seemed the