Conference Agenda

This panel confronts and problematizes the conspicuous dearth of female identity and agency in both the music of Russian composers and in Russian music historiography. We address this absence through three case-studies: that of the female voice rendered inaudible in song and performing traditions, the privileging of male-centered narratives of musical achievement and status, and the challenge of interpreting female agency and power on the operatic stage. Our approach does not seek to reinscribe or center supposedly “feminine” characteristics or roles either creatively or historically, but rather focuses on how we might unpick the ways in which women have been presented via a male-dominated perspective, and by doing so, come to recognize and challenge our own complicity in these narratives. Lying behind each case-study are networks of assumptions that have become so familiar that attempting to deconstruct them even feels artificial: why shouldn’t Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death be sung by men?; isn’t it true that he wrote his ‘Polish Scene’ just to appease the Imperial Theater’s demand for a female role and weakened Boris Godunov as a result?; isn’t it true that almost all the great Russian composers and pianists have been male?; and isn’t it true that Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was a victim of her own sexual voraciousness?

Yet once we have taken the time to question these familiar narratives, other personalities, professional and social behaviors and values begin to emerge from the shadows. Perhaps these Russian women had more influence and agency than we had realized: they shaped their traditional domestic roles to wield that influence upon the professional musical sphere, working with male artists and composers at high professional levels, only fading from public recognition and memory once replaced by men. And although to this day there is not a single Russian female operatic protagonist devised entirely (from literary source, to opera composition and staging) – by women, when a Russian composer sincerely attempted to liberate his heroine from a century’s worth of convention, his creation stubbornly remained one seen exclusively through the male gaze, and remains so to this day.

Studies of nineteenth-century Russian musical life have tended to foreground the work of men. This is certainly true of Modest Musorgsky, whose life is often seen in the context of the male coterie that made up the moguchaya kuchka (Cui, Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky, with Stasov as their spokesperson). By contrast, his personal and above all creative engagement with a series of Russian women has often been downplayed or overlooked in critical and biographical writing. The revised version of his opera, Boris Godunov, is, for instance, often seen as a compromise with the Imperial Theaters Directorate’s demands, or as an expedient vehicle for Yuliya Platonova (for whom the part of Marina Mniszech was written). And the tour he undertook with the contralto, Darya Leonova, in 1879 is treated as the caprice of a faded diva (that is certainly how Rimsky-Korsakov and a number of Musorgsky’s other friends saw it).

This paper will reconsider Musorgsky’s life and works through the prism of his relationships with a series of female musicians, focusing in particular on his lyric works, and above all, the song cycle, Songs and Dances of Death. Its four songs were originally part of a planned cycle of twelve depictions of death – a feminine noun in Russian (smert’) – and to be published under the title Ona (She). A performing tradition that has centered on Fyodor Shalyapin and his legacy has tended to assume that Musorgsky’s vocal preference in this cycle was for a dramatic, not to say histrionic male voice. However, Musorgsky’s tour with Leonova, as well as his collaboration with a number of other female vocalists, allow us to posit that his imagined vocal type in the cycle was female, or at least inflected by his experience of hearing his songs performed by female vocalists (such as Aleksandra Purgol’d-Molas). Whilst such an approach risks reinscribing traditional notions of women as muses and helpmates, it can potentially open up the field of nineteenth-century Russian music studies to a wider range of sources, decenter a common focus on male composers, and emphasize the importance of collaboration and co-creation.

While every new opera production ushers in a new interpretation of its protagonists, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk offers us such a problematic heroine that even minor details of staging can shift the balance of sympathy towards her. Examining the original Leningrad staging reveals a "timid, frightened"; Katerina, while - perversely - her character in the revised version of the opera (Katerina Izmailova, premiered 1961) seems to have repelled critics in a way that the original Katerina did not. If Shostakovich hoped to render Katerina more respectable by cutting the Act One sex scene with the worker Sergey (as he did for the revision of the opera in the 1950s), he seems to have achieved the opposite effect as far as critics were concerned.

Since the premiere of the much-hyped restored "original"; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk recorded by Rostropovich in 1979, which sounded the death-knell for the revised Katerina Izmailova, the character of Katerina is frequently presented as that of a strong, liberated woman (largely) in control of her destiny. Contemporary tropes of femininity play a key role in shaping both production and reception of this opera, and this is as true now as it was in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Drawing on recent interviews with producers, singers and music directors as well as contemporary sources from the 1930s, this paper ponders whether, in asserting what he thought of as Katerina's feminine agency, we might be in danger of erasing the heroine Shostakovich wanted us to love.

Musicology has recently begun to turn its attention towards Russian female composers of the pre-Revolutionary period. Leokadiya Kashperova, for example, was little more than a footnote as Stravinsky’s piano teacher, but she is increasingly seen as a significant musical figure in her own right. There have been ground-breaking studies (Griffiths, Lomtev) of Russian female composers, and such research will doubtless yield further names and scores, but it will not in itself change the music-historical narrative of a succession of great male artists. I propose to investigate women like Kashperova, not in order to slot one more woman into that succession, but to construct a new historical narrative in which (male) Russian composers were formed as musicians by musically educated mothers and governesses, and by (female) piano teachers. In order to build the case, a background study of 19th-century Russian female pianism is required, but this topic remains almost untouched by scholarship. My primary interest here is the social history behind the rise of female pianists and pedagogues.

Noblewomen in 19^th-century Russia were educated so that they could ensure that their children had a high cultural level. Charitable institutions educated girls from lower social classes (often orphans) to enable them to work as governesses, and piano lessons were a standard part of this education. When music conservatories were established in Russia from the 1860s onwards, women, accordingly, formed the majority of piano students. Although public performance was considered beneath the dignity of Russian noblewomen, it gave middle-class women a chance to rise. By the early 20^th century, specialized music schools were generally run by a female owner/director and employed a largely female staff.

Mapping out this history will help us to reconceptualize the role of women in music. We will be able to see that female musicians became the mainstay, and even the leaders of Russia’s piano-centered musical tradition. Women would spark a child’s first musical interests, women would foster the obsessive hard work needed by prodigies, and women transmitted the secrets of the Russian School of piano technique across the generations.