THE IMPACT OF RUSSIAN MUSIC IN ENGLAND 1893-1929 by GARETH JAMES THOMAS A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Music School of Humanities The University of Birmingham March 2005 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis is an investigation into the reception of Russian music in England for the period 1893-1929 and the influence it had on English composers. Part I deals with the critical reception of Russian music in England in the cultural and political context of the period from the year of Tchaikovsky’s last successful visit to London in 1893 to the last season of Diaghilev’s Ballet russes in 1929. The broad theme examines how Russian music presented a challenge to the accepted aesthetic norms of the day and how this, combined with the contextual perceptions of Russia and Russian people, problematized the reception of Russian music, the result of which still informs some of our attitudes towards Russian composers today. Part II examines the influence that Russian music had on British composers of the period, specifically Stanford, Bantock, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Frank Bridge, Bax, Bliss and Walton. A combination of comparative examples and critical discussion of the music is used to illustrates how Russian music influenced these composers and, as a result, demonstrate the key role Russian music played in helping them to find their compositional voice. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere appreciation is expressed to all those who have supported or guided me through the various stages of my research. In writing this thesis my greatest debt is to my supervisor, Stephen Banfield, for his attentive criticism, support and encouragement. On a slightly different level thanks must also go to Paul Rodmell and Greg McKinnon with whom I have had many informal discussions on English and Russian music. Their comments, ideas and suggestions have proved invaluable in illuminating some of the less familiar music covered here. Thanks must also go to my family and friends whose support, both direct and indirect, is perhaps equally important to that given above. I am especially grateful to Pat Brennan for her encouraging me to undertake this PhD, to John Shackleton and Duncan Atkinson for their generous hospitality whilst I was in London on research trips, and to Beth Coll for her help with proofreading. I am also eternally indebted to a large number of dear friends in Cardiff, London and the West Midlands for humouring me along the way in addition to their unstinting and invaluable love and support. CONTENTS Introduction: Reception and Influence – A Theoretical Framework vi Part One – History, Context and Reception Chapter One: Old Ideals versus New Trends – Beginnings to 1899 2 English Perceptions of Russian Culture The Rise of Tchaikovsky The ‘New Russian School’ Glazunov Chapter Two: Fashion and Expectation – 1900 to 1911 26 Racial Perceptions and Behaviourism Tchaikovsky and the ‘Hysterical’ Glazunov and the ‘Characteristic’ Rachmaninov Rosa Newmarch and The Five Chapter Three: On the Brink of the Future – 1911 to 1917 54 Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet Russian Ballet and the Covent Garden Audience Russian Opera and the Drury Lane Audience Stravinsky Scriabin Chapter Four: Ultra-modern Music – 1918 to 1929 87 Scriabin Post-war Audiences Stravinsky Prokofiev The Late-1920s Audience Reputations Post-1930: The End of the Affair Part Two – Influence and Stylistic Assimilation Chapter Five: Aspects of Stylistic Influence 131 Introduction – Receptivity and Influence Stanford Vaughan Williams Chapter Six: Dedicated Followers of Fashion 150 Bantock and the Russian Influence Arnold Bax Chapter Seven: The Lonely Idealists 187 Holst Frank Bridge Chapter Eight: The New Generation 222 Arthur Bliss Walton Conclusion 262 Appendix A ‘Modern Minstrels’ by a Misoneist 268 Appendix B Chronology of events and performances 269 Appendic C Index of Russian musical works cited 279 Bibliography 282 INTRODUCTION RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE – A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. T. S. Eliot1 In England, and specifically London, the fifty years or so from 1880 onwards saw a growing interest in establishing a distinctive professional musical culture. The English musical renaissance, as it became termed, has since become a heavily researched topic not just for musicologists but also for cultural and social historians. The bulk of this writing has naturally focussed on the English composers and their music of the period. More recently other writers have attempted to place the English musical renaissance into its broader socio-political context, which has significantly enriched our appreciation of the phenomenon. Most of the writing of the former group, however, examines English music purely in local terms: English composers and their music in relation to other English composers and musicians; little has been written that investigates at length the English musical renaissance against the vast range of continental European music that was being performed in England at this time and the role it played in directing the renaissance. Studies have been made of individual composers and their reception in England, for example Chopin and Debussy2, but to research extensively the reception of a number of composers from one country and trace their influence in another country is an approach that has very little precedent. This thesis is about the presentation of and response to Russian music in England during the period from Tchaikovsky’s visit to Cambridge and London in 1893 to the death of Diaghilev in 1929, and the reaction to and assimilation of this music by English composers. The Anglo-American empirical tradition of music historiography has largely been a causal and positivistic history of composers’ lives and their works. Only recently has 1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (2nd edn., London: Methuen, 1928), 125. 2 D. Carew, ‘Victorian Attitudes to Chopin’, in J. Samson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (Cambridge: CUP, 1992). Roger Nichols, ‘Debussy in London’, The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). vi significant effort been made to connect it with the aesthetics of composition and performance. The broad concept of ‘reception’ in music is, in itself, nothing new; generalisations about attitudes toward and responses to a composer or repertoire have been made for the last few centuries. Reception theory proper was originally an aspect of literary theory; as a tool for music history its application only really began in earnest in the late 1980s. In presenting his theory of Rezeptionsästhetik (aesthetic of reception or reader-response theory) in 1967, Hans Robert Jauss had essentially evolved a branch of hermeneutics in literary theory to investigate the nature of the reader’s activity in the process of understanding literary texts.3 Other authors, such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, have also contributed to the field, with differing emphases, but all essentially agree on the importance of the audience’s reflexive relationship with a work in interpreting it and finding meaning in it specific to their own position in history. For the purposes of what one might call ‘listener-response theory’ the essence of the theory remains the same. To reconstruct the set of conventions, expectations and beliefs that existed at the time of a work’s creation or performance is an unrealistic goal. These things cannot exist as either stated or recorded propositions; a generation cannot consciously know of the conditions of their existence directly, thus, neither can those generations who come after them; they may only perceive them indirectly, albeit objectively. On hearing a work the audience – whether it be public or domestic, layman or critic – reacts, and one needs to analyse the response within an objectifiable system of expectations, a system termed the ‘horizon of expectation’. The reaction, or work-audience dialogue, relates the question or problem posed by the work to the answer or solution (i.e. interpretation) of an audience supported by their ‘horizon of expectation’, which may be constructed from a number of factors, musical or otherwise. At the initial reception of a work a general aesthetic comparison is made with those works already known. The reception study in this thesis begins when little was known about Russian music in England, thus audiences would have expanded their horizon to include what 3 Hans Robert Jauss (tr. Timothy Bahti), Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: Harvester Press, 1982). vii they knew, if anything, about Russia in general. For this reason English political, social and cultural perspectives of Russia are included and contextualised in this thesis. The work- audience dialogue at the first performance of some Russian music (e.g. Musorgsky) posed unintelligible questions with regard to the prevailing conventions; other composers were less problematic, but inevitably audiences provided answers to both supported by a ‘horizon’ initially largely constructed of non-musical landmarks (about which much was presumed), as of strictly musical ones. Subsequent work-audience dialogues enabled initial answers to be sustained and enriched or, in the light of a revised ‘horizon’ (e.g. after hearing new works, reading articles), precipitate a reappraisal and new answers, or merely further questions that only a later generation could answer. The first part of this thesis is a reception study of Russian music in England beginning in 1893.