Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera. By Rutger Helmers

Tsarist Russia and the Musical World

“…3 This tendency to focus on works by native composers can be traced back to the very beginnings of Russian music historiography in the late nineteenth century (e.g. César Cui, La musique en Russie (Paris: Fischbacher, 1881): [11][12][13][14]19), and is of course still common in conventional music histories (e.g. Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans.…”

“…10 The incorporation and reformulation of existing compositional techniques and aesthetics by Russian composers was arguably driven by a desire to compete on the world's stage. 11 It follows that scholars have sought to discover how well these works actually travelled. Much has necessarily been foundational survey work, such as Elaine Brody's attempts to trace mentions of Russian composers in the pages of Le Guide musical between 1889 and 1914.…”