Conference Agenda

By examining an abundance of Russian-language primary sources, I trace the history of Stravinskian neoclassicism to pre-revolutionary Russia. Stravinsky’s turn to neoclassicism in the 1920s is typically cast as a reaction to the upheavals of the 1910s, signifying the abandonment of his Russian period in the face of Bolshevik revolution. In this paradigm, the exiled Stravinsky embraced the classical Gallic values of his adopted homeland and became the leader of a genuinely new twentieth-century modernity. Richard Taruskin asserts that in 1923 Stravinsky was the first composer to be labelled (unironically) as “neoclassical”—with its modern connotations of “purity,” “sobriety,” and “objectivity,” along with darker associations of fascism and antisemitism. This is incorrect, however, and I show how neoclassicism emerged in Russia before World War I as a reaction to the perceived excesses of Western musical modernism and from a palpable fear of the degeneration of Western society and culture—tropes that would receive their ultimate expression in Stravinsky’s own Poetics of Music (1940).

My archival research demonstrates how the term “neoclassicism” first arose in the Russian critical press as a solution to a conundrum: how to account for the leading position of Nikolay Medtner within Russian music. Medtner’s emphasis on form, counterpoint, and rhythm as parameters of musical creativity seemed remote from the traditional Russian emphasis on colorful sonorities and folk song. Critics began characterizing his music in neoclassical terms from 1906, emphasizing his “sober modernism,” “emotional restraint,” and “contemplative objectivity.” In 1912 Leonid Sabaneyev declared Medtner to be the “sole representative” of neoclassicism in Russia. Soon, however, Vyacheslav Karatygin placed the young Sergey Prokofiev alongside Medtner—a position the former enthusiastically embraced and which guided his future creative activity. Prokofiev even perceived Medtner’s influence on Stravinsky’s Serenade in A, and I highlight the similarities between Stravinsky’s Poetics and Medtner’s own published views on modernism and art. By emphasizing the deep continuities between post-war neoclassicism and its pre-war Russian manifestation, I offer a contribution to the ongoing scholarly project breaking down those national and political barriers which continue to (mis)shape historical narratives and patterns of significance.