Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue

It is [a] fully illuminated story that Richard Taruskin, in the path-breaking essays collected here, unfolds around Modest Musorgsky, Russia's greatest national composer.... [Taruskin's] tour de force comes with a frontal attack on all the Soviet-bred truisms that for a century have refashioned Musorgsky from what the evidence suggests he was--an aristocrat with an early clinical interest in true-to-life musical portraiture and a later penchant for drinking partners who were both folklore buffs and political reactionaries democrat.--From the foreword

Incorporating both new and now-classic essays, this book for the first time sets the vocal works of Modest Musorgsky in a fully detailed cultural, political, and historical context. From this perspective Richard Taruskin revises fundamentally the composer's historical and artistic image, in particular debunking the century-old dogmas of Vladimir Stasov, Musorgsky's first biographer. Here the author offers the most complete explanation of the revision of the opera Boris Godunov, compares it to contemporaneous operas by Chaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, advances a revisionary characterization of Khovanshchina as an aristocratic tragedy informed by a pessimistic view of history, discusses Musorgsky's use of folklore, and, focusing on Sorochintsi Fair, brings to a climax his refutation of Musorgsky as a protorevolutionary populist. The epilogue is a survey of revisionary productions of Musorgsky's works at home during the Gorbachev era.

Author: Richard Taruskin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 07/27/1997
Pages: 449
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.10w x 1.14d
ISBN: 9780691016238

About the Author
Richard Taruskin is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Opera and Drama in Russia, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, and a new book with Princeton University Press, Defining Russia Musically (see page 11 of this catalog).