Lyric and landscape in Rimsky-Korsakov’s songs

Journal article

Accounts of Russian musical realism in the nineteenth century have tended to emphasize music’s connections to literature, whether in the form of operatic adaptations of plays and prose works, or of songs, such as those of Modest Musorgsky, described by the composer as “the reproduction in musical sounds not merely of the mood of feelings, but mainly of the mood of human speech.” Yet literature was not the only source of music’s realist aspirations. Realism in France, for instance, was initially associated with the visual arts and only afterward taken up in literature. A persistent critical emphasis on the supposed primacy of the word within Russian culture has occluded awareness of similar developments in the other Russian arts, where the kind of realisms that were characteristic of visual culture on the one hand, and literature on the other, have generally been treated as parallel trends, rather than as a nexus of profoundly intertwined aesthetic and ideological phenomena.

Authors: Bullock, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Journal: Nineteenth Century Music
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 223-238
• Publication date: 2017-04-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-01-08
• DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.223
• EISSN: 1533-8606
• ISSN: 0148-2076