As an avid listener of Russian music I often noticed the tendency of Russian composers to produce music that tells a story, often a specifically Russian story. This proclivity is evident not only in vocal works such as solo songs or opera, but in the story choice for ballets and programmatic instrumental works.
I sought to understand why Russians were so attracted to storytelling. As Richard Taruskin says in the introduction to his article, “Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music:” “We are simply curious to know and understand the music we love as well as we possibly can, and eager to stimulate interest in it.”
Historically, Russia (and later the Soviet Union) has been dominated by totalitarian regimes and the flow of information into and out of the country has often been strictly controlled. The setting apart of Russian music (and the Russian arts as a whole) has helped create its mystique. But, in the opinion of musicologist Richard Taruskin, it has also marginalized the music. The music of Russian composers has become defined by how well it fulfills a stereotypical set of stylistic traits. As Taruskin says: “Verdi and Wagner are heroic individuals. Russians are a group.”
Russian music has thus been held apart and—to borrow Taruskin’s term—“consigned to the ghetto.” But in actuality the Russian intelligentsia, (of which authors and composers were members), were highly cosmopolitan and saw themselves as part of the European community. Many of the trends we associate with Russian music were not the result of some unique and original expression but rather were important trends across Europe during the nineteenth century. Nationalism, program music, and the interest in orientalism/exoticism, all had their origins in Western Europe. Russians then took these models and made them personal and national forms of expression.
In this paper I argue that the inclination to produce music that tells a story can be attributed to the close development of the Russian literary and musical traditions during the nineteenth century as the small educated class (specifically in St. Petersburg and later Moscow) sought to create arts that were not only equivalent in quality to those produced in Western Europe but reflective of their personal aesthetics, expressive of their growing feelings of nationalism, and acceptable to their totalitarian state.