UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov the Antiquarian
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov the Antiquarian: The Narrativity of Diegetic Song in the Opera Sadko A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology by Jeffrey T. Riggs 2019 © Copyright by Jeffrey T. Riggs 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov the Antiquarian: The Narrativity of Diegetic Song in the Opera Sadko by Jeffrey T. Riggs Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Mitchell Bryan Morris, Chair Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov subtitled Sadko “an Opera-Bylina,” a gesture which both reveals his compositional approach, and gives the piece a sui generis designation as an operatic and folk-epic hybrid. The composer drew from an extraordinary range of textual and musical material to fashion Sadko, a work that is thoroughly imbued with references to Russian folk culture. His primary source texts were the Russian byliny: folk-epic poetry that had circulated orally for some seven centuries before being collected and transcribed in the nineteenth century. While Rimsky-Korsakov’s preoccupation with folklore represents a thematic continuation of his prior operas, his approach to his source material takes a decidedly antiquarian and philological turn in Sadko. ii Rimsky-Korsakov’s transmutation of the byliny into operatic form involved his development of a set of narrative strategies that approximate the storytelling conventions of the source texts. Rimsky-Korsakov includes multiple narrators in the opera who present Sadko’s tale through different narrative frames, chronotopes, and musical idioms. The arias of each narrator constitute moments of heightened narrativity, in which the events of the plot are condensed, refracted, retold, and foretold through the prism of diegetic song. The diegetic passages, though generally critiqued as moments of stasis in the dramatic action of the opera, are in fact the active fulcra of the narrative, foretelling, even generating, its subsequent events as well as offering retrospective viewpoints on prior events from alternate narrative perspectives. The diegetic songs communicate implicit details about the narrators’ respective positions in the social strata, and their underlying alliances with other characters. Sadko not only tells the story of the eponymous hero, but foregrounds the mechanisms, modalities, and multidimensionality of telling itself. iii The dissertation of Jeffrey T. Riggs is approved. Robert W. Fink Raymond L. Knapp Ronald W. Vroon Mitchell Bryan Morris, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................16 Rimsky-Korsakov as Curator: Questions of Genre and their Narrative Implications Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................54 The Diegetic Microcosm: Narrative Recountings and Foretellings in the “Bylina of Volkh Vseslav’evich” Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................................92 The Solipsistic Hero: Narrative and Discursive Authority in Sadko’s Opening Aria Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................................128 “The Curved Mirror”: The Diegesis of the Skomorokhi and Laughter as Social Critique Conclusion .............................................................................................................................154 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................................165 v JEFFREY T. RIGGS Education University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ph.D. Musicology (expected March 2019) Dissertation: Rimsky-Korsakov the Antiquarian: The Narrativity of Diegetic Song in the Opera Sadko Chair: Mitchell Morris Committee: Robert Fink, Raymond Knapp, Ronald Vroon Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures (June 2018) Dissertation: “A Fullness of Living Forces”: Viacheslav Ivanov’s Poetics of Theurgy Chair: Ronald Vroon Committee: David Blank, Gail Lenhoff New College of Florida (Honors College of Florida) B.A. (with Honors), Russian Language and Literature, 2006 Publication Riggs, Jeffrey. “Greco-Slavonic Liturgies in Viacheslav Ivanov’s ‘Suspiria’ Cycle,” in “On Behalf of All and For All”: The Place of Liturgy in Russian Art and Culture. Edited by Sean Griffin, Jeffrey Riggs, and Ronald Vroon. UCLA Slavic Studies, New Series: Slavica (forthcoming). Invited Conferences “Bogoděistvie and Teurgiia in Viacheslav Ivanov’s ‘Suspiria’ Cycle.” Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for the Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), February, 2018. “Nietzschean Inflections in Dmitrii Merezhkovsky’s novoe religioznoe soznanie.” Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for the Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), January, 2012. “Obscuring the Lyric Self: Viacheslav Ivanov and the Poetic Problem of Individuation.” Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for the Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), January, 2011. “The Musical Divine: Dmitrii Kastal’skii, Early Music, and Russian Metaphysical Symbolism.” Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for the Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), December, 2009. “Native Subtexts: Russian Liturgical Music in Viacheslav Ivanov’s Kormchie zvezdy.” Presented at the University of Helsinki’s “Russianness” Conference, December, 2009. vi “The Center and Periphery of the Symbolist Poetic Text: Viacheslav Ivanov and Valerii Briusov’s ‘Tvorchestvo.’” Presented at the University of California, Berkeley at the California Slavic Colloquium, April, 2009. UCLA Conferences “The Problem of Musical Representation in Aleksandr Skriabin’s Third Symphony, ‘The Divine Poem’ (op. 43).” Presented at UCLA’s conference “Scriabin among the Symbolists: A Centennial Symposium,” March, 2015 (co-organized by me, Ryan Rowen, and Mitchell Morris). “Greco-Slavonic Liturgies in Viacheslav Ivanov’s ‘Suspiria’ Cycle.” Presented at UCLA’s conference “‘On Behalf of All and For All’: The Place of Liturgy in Russian Art and Culture,” October, 2012 (co-organized by me, Sean Griffin, and Ronald Vroon). Research Interests Folkloric sensibilities in nineteenth-century Russian opera Neoplatonic theurgy in Russian Symbolism Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of poetry and music Courses Taught at UCLA as an Instructor of Record The History of Electronic Dance Music 2016 Writing about Music 2015 Old-Time and Bluegrass Performance Ensemble 2014-2015 The Beatles 2014 Courses Taught at UCLA as a Teaching Assistant, Associate, and Fellow Courses in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Great Russian Novels 2017 Introduction to Russian Civilization 2016 Christianities East and West 2014 The Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel in Translation 2010 Beginning Russian Language 2009-2010 Courses in the Department of Musicology The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll 2016 Contemporary Jewish and Israeli Music 2016 Film and Music 2015 Music in Los Angeles 2013 The Blues 2013 Writing about Music 2013 vii Introduction 1. Antiquarian sensibilities In the 1890s, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov returned to the operatic genre after a silence of over ten years since The Snow Maiden (1881). His decision was occasioned by several factors, including his grudging acceptance of Wagner, the upsurge of a new populist nationalism in the 1890s, and the growing public profile of Savva Mamontov’s Private Opera Company, which premiered Rimsky-Korsakov’s flagship opera Sadko in 1897. As an opera composer, Rimsky- Korsakov had produced works such as The Maid of Pskov (1872), which mined the Musorgskian vein of historical Realism, though by Sadko his thematic direction had taken a palpably folkloric and mythological turn. While Musorgsky and Glinka created a template for Russian opera through a return to pre-Petrine, Muscovite Russia – with its dramas of murderous autocrats, Polish impostors to the throne, and ecclesiastical intrigues – and Tchaikovsky took the more Europeanized route of Pushkinian adaptations and ballet in the manner of Parisian grand opéra, Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic antiquarianism in Sadko lacks a clear precedent. The opera reconstructs the remote Russian past, on the one hand, through a rejection of Musorgskian historical Realism, allowing for excursions into the world of myth and folklore, and, on the other hand, through Rimsky-Korsakov’s philological forays into the Russian folk epos and melos. With his musical apprenticeship in the “Mighty Coterie” (Moguchiaia kuchka) and his formative intellectual years occurring in the progressivist 1860s, Rimsky-Korsakov’s interest in folk culture is on the one hand de rigueur for a composer of his generation. Rimsky- Korsakov’s musico-philological enthusiasm for byliny, skazaniia, and folk song occurs against 1 the backdrop of a generation of Russian composers who are preoccupied with narodnost’, or the idea of nationhood based in the folk.1 In Sadko, Rimsky-Korsakov creates a fictive world steeped