Music and Antisemitism

Compared to Marina Frolova-Walker (see my previous post), Richard Taruskin is on the ball. Despite his penchant for extremely long sentences and words that only he seems to know the meaning of, Taruskin sets an example for raising issues of anti-semitism in his musicology, analysis, and history. In his book 'Defining Russia Musically', not only is there an index entry for 'anti-Semitism' - and 'anti-Semitism of,' for various composers - but chances to talk about it are grasped fully. No composer, critic, or musician who exhibited anti-semitic views is left unexposed, and rightly so: to pass over anti-semitism is to discount its validity as a form of racism. This means going after Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky; even Mikhail Glinka, whose personality is seldom revealed in literature. A large section is also devoted to Igor Stravinsky's active support for fascism in Italy and the Third Reich; the extent and explicitness of his hatred for ...

A book with the title 'Russian Music and Nationalism' is always going to be ambitious; a book with that title and only 400-odd pages is always going to leave some things out. Marina Frolova-Walker's book of that name, however, makes a notable emission which I could not leave unmentioned. Of course, Frolova-Walker's exploration of the music of Glinka and the Kuchka is fascinating and extremely well-researched, but there is a plain ignorance of Jews throughout. Not only is there no index entry for 'Jews' - as might be expected given the millions-strong population in Russia during the nineteenth century - or 'Jewish (folk) music' - as might be expected given the strong influence on generations of non-Jewish Russian composers - but there is a clear avoidance of Jewish matters when dealing with Jewish composers. In a rare passage on Anton Rubinstein, a successful performer and composer from Podolia in the Pale of Settlement, Frolova-Walker writes: 'For th...