In 1978 dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen published an essay in Dance Research Journal called “I... more In 1978 dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen published an essay in Dance Research Journal called “In Search of Satanella.” It lamented the loss to the repertoire of a once-popular ballet about demonic love. Cohen asked a series of questions about the ballet’s 1840 genesis, reception, and transformation over time. Finding answers requires taking up bigger issues about the ballet canon, ballet taboos (including angelic dancers doing devilish things), and ballet reconstruction projects. Perceptions of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet rest primarily on its sturdier, hardier creations, much less so the looser assemblages, the bric-a-brac entertainments intended for diverse audiences. To search for Satanilla is to find more than just this one ballet. It is to discover an entire realm of the repertoire.
T L S J U L Y 2 2 2 0 1 6 Art in an artless age Celebrating the anniversary of Prokofiev's birth,... more T L S J U L Y 2 2 2 0 1 6 Art in an artless age Celebrating the anniversary of Prokofiev's birth, and calling for the Soviet scores to be resurrected
In 1978 dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen published an essay in Dance Research Journal called “I... more In 1978 dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen published an essay in Dance Research Journal called “In Search of Satanella.” It lamented the loss to the repertoire of a once-popular ballet about demonic love. Cohen asked a series of questions about the ballet’s 1840 genesis, reception, and transformation over time. Finding answers requires taking up bigger issues about the ballet canon, ballet taboos (including angelic dancers doing devilish things), and ballet reconstruction projects. Perceptions of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet rest primarily on its sturdier, hardier creations, much less so the looser assemblages, the bric-a-brac entertainments intended for diverse audiences. To search for Satanilla is to find more than just this one ballet. It is to discover an entire realm of the repertoire.
T L S J U L Y 2 2 2 0 1 6 Art in an artless age Celebrating the anniversary of Prokofiev's birth,... more T L S J U L Y 2 2 2 0 1 6 Art in an artless age Celebrating the anniversary of Prokofiev's birth, and calling for the Soviet scores to be resurrected
Filmed in shadow and sleet, The Iron Curtain (20th Century Fox, 1948) drama-tizes the true-life d... more Filmed in shadow and sleet, The Iron Curtain (20th Century Fox, 1948) drama-tizes the true-life defection of Igor Gouzenko, a cryptologist working for the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. That he and his wife are the only Russian characters in the fi lm who speak without Russian accents tells us something about their destiny. Gouzenko (as played by Dana Andrews) comes to believe, over the course of 90 minutes, that the Soviet government is a greater menace to world peace than the nuclear-bomb-making imperial fascists of the west. Dead-eyed fellow staff ers at the embassy infl uence his fateful decision, but he also has the future of his wife and infant son to consider. The soundtrack of the fi lm, which features music by four Soviet composers—Dmitrii Shostako-vich fi rst and foremost—attracts the attention of historian Kiril Tomoff in his new book Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War. Tomoff also documents the campaign by VOKS (the All-Union Society of Cultural Ties Abroad), in concert with high-ranking Soviet offi cials, to have The Iron Curtain pulled from American and European theaters. The eff ort failed in the United States but succeeded in France, aft er the music— used without permission—was placed under copyright by the publisher Chant du Monde. Thus marked the beginning, in Tomoff 's telling, of a " copyright strategy " (37) that eventually left " the intellectual property rights of Soviet composers in the hands of a French publisher for perpetuity " (39). An allitera-tive exaggeration, perhaps? My understanding, from my experience with the estate of Sergei Prokofi ev, is that foreign publishers were not granted terms of more than a decade (renewable) by the Soviet copyright bureau VAAP, which came into being in 1973. Aft er the demise of the USSR, terms had to be renegotiated between publishers and estates. Shostakovich did not participate in the international intrigue surrounding the Gouzenko biopic, one of the fi rst and most subtle of the " Red Scare " fi lms produced by Hollywood, although Tomoff notes that a " brief protest " (37) about the purloined score was published in the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiia. It stands to reason that Shostakovich was at least consulted about the copyright infringement suit that bears his name, " Shostakovich v. Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corp., " as opposed to simply reading about it in the newspaper. And clearly the preeminent Soviet composer would have been displeased, even concerned, to discover his music had been used to accompany an anti-Soviet fi lm. I doubt his editor or ghostwriter at Izvestiia had to twist his arm to publish the complaint on his behalf. (The archival fi le that I consulted in Moscow reveals a great eff ort to have the protest translated into diff erent languages and distributed worldwide.)
Marina Ritzarev. Tchaikovsky's Pathétique and Russian Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing... more Marina Ritzarev. Tchaikovsky's Pathétique and Russian Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing , 2014. Bibliography. Index. xiv 169 pp. $104.95 (cloth). In 1892, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky abandoned work on a symphony engaged with the general subject of life to complete another concerned with death, the illustrious Pathétique. That same year, a cholera epidemic spread from south to north along Russia's rivers, reaching St. Peters-burg and eventually taking the life of Russia's greatest composer on November 6, 1893. According to a forensic investigation of the matter published by Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky contracted the disease by drinking untreated water at a restaurant he frequented with friends. The timing made the morbidly fascinating Pathétique seem even more macabre, and musico-logical speculation, fueled by gossip about Tchaikovsky's sex life and the rumored existence of a secret narrative program behind the symphony, ran amok. The symphony was even imagined as a musical suicide note—never mind that Tchaikovsky felt reenergized by its completion and had started a new opera project, never mind the contentment he felt with his homosexual orientation in later years, and never mind that he felt that he still had years to live. In books by David Brown, in an irresponsible listening guide to Pathétique published by Timothy Jackson, and in regrettable program notes distributed in concert halls the world over, the suicide tale has festered. Truthiness took hold. It just felt right to assume that the composer drank the infected water on purpose. Marina Ritzarev has no patience for the rumor-mongering, but she has a theory of her own about the secret program of the symphony, one that she hints at for twenty pages before finally pulling the veil away: " the image that might have served as inspiration for Tchaikovsky's masterpiece was that of Jesus Christ, his life and death, transformed into a general imagery of the Passion " (21). The awkward prose is unfortunately typical of the entire book (and of the editorial standards at Ashgate Publishing), yet the hypothesis has much to offer. Ritzarev also makes clear that it is but a hypothesis, and acknowledges that the intentions of the composer will be forever unknowable, since he did not reveal the source of inspiration for Pathétique in letters or recorded conversations. To support her interpretation, Ritzarev discusses Tchaikovsky's readings of the Bible, his interest in the genres of passion and requiem compositions by Bach and other non-Russian composers, and the prominence of the Christ theme in other Russian arts of his time and place. Tchaikovsky composed liturgical music as part of a general revival of interest in znamennïy (neumed) chant traditions in the later nineteenth century, but the Russian court and the church prohibited " representation of the gospel theme in the theater or on the concert stage, " excluded instruments from religious services, and, through the Imperial Chapel, maintained a " monopoly on the publication of Russian sacred music " (30–31). Thus, Ritzarev proposes , Tchaikovsky sublimated the narrative of Christ's suffering into a four-movement sym
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