A research topic may come from unexpected places and sources, as happened with Paul du Quenoy. His encounter with the grandson of Valentin Serov, a legendary Russian realist painter whose father Aleksandr Serov was a critic and composer, resulted in this 380-page biography of Aleksandr Serov. Divided into five chapters, with an introduction and bibliography, the volume traces Serov's life in the context of the mid-nineteenth century Russian music scene between Mikhail Glinka and Aleksandr Dragomyzhskii on the one hand, and the Mighty Five on the other, and between Slavophilism and Westernization. Quenoy draws on a wide range of sources and discourses, such as Russian love-disdain towards Italian opera, the surge of Wagnerism that swept over Russia in later decades, the involvement of major literary figures in fostering Russian opera, and in the imperial politics dominating every facet of culture including musical theater.
It is unclear what Quenoy identifies as “Russian modern.” The title of the “Introduction: The Most Famous Composer You Have Never Heard of,” is likewise provoking yet questionable. Serov was a leading critic in Russian musical history, but his musical works, whether justly or not—public tastes and memories are capricious things—never achieved significant traction on the performing stage. Like many of his generation from noble families, young Serov had two choices—the military or administrative service to the Russian crown. With his passion for music, and the incongruity of inspiration with his job, he found an outlet in composing and writing about music. His first operatic project based on Nikolai Gogol΄’s May Night was never completed. He counterbalanced his lack of confidence as a composer with his scathing criticism. He dismissed the first opera by young Anton Rubinstein, and in letters to Vladimir Stasov derided Esmeralda by Dargomyzhskii. Contradicting himself, he disparaged Italian opera, but together with Stasov included Italian bel canto numbers in a concert the two organized.
Serov-the-critic was sharp, uncompromising, and innovative. He wrote “Music and Virtuosi” as a debate between a singer, a violinist, and a conductor. His original thinking permeated his musical analysis and reviews of concerts and operatic productions. Educated in the Russian-Soviet musical tradition, I have viewed Serov as equal only to critic Vladimir Stasov. Both Stasov and Serov, at times friends and at other times rivals, paved the way for the ideological and musicological foundation of Russian and Soviet thinking about music. Serov's original thinking continuously informs today's writing on Russian music, mine included.
The longest chapter is dedicated to the three operas Serov created in the last eight years of his life: Judith (1863), Rogneda (1865), and The Power of the Fiend (1871). An admirer of famously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, Serov turned in his first opera to Judith, the heroic Jewess of ancient Hebrew lore. Had this opera been written in the first decade of the twentieth century, it could easily be aligned with the operatic Salome and Delilah or with the literary Sulamif by Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin. Could Serov have anticipated this type of femme fatale that would come to fashion in the next decades? “Throwing himself” into this opera, Serov, according to Quenoy, was inspired by the drama Guiditta and by Claude Vernet's painting years earlier. Eroticism, vengeance, and murder tied with the concept of the folk/nation also links Judith with multiple rusalkas remarkably successful on the Russian operatic stage in the first half of the nineteenth-century—Ferdinand Kauer's Das Donauweibchen, Stepan Davydov's Dneprovskaia Rusalka, Aleksei Lvov's Undine, Aleksandr Aliabiev's Rusalka, and Dargomyzhskii's Rusalka.
Serov's second opera, Rogneda, featured a tsarina of old Russia on the cusp between paganism and Orthodoxy, drawing on Varangian/northern European lore and following the success of Alexei Verstovskii's Askold's Grave. Serov's third opera, The Power of the Fiend, based on Aleksandr Ostrovskii's “folk drama,” moves to the domain of Moscow merchants. The plot, combining sex, alcohol, betrayal, and murder, befits Russian critical realism. But while Ostrovskii's play has a forgiving ending—the young husband, infatuated with another woman and planning to kill his wife, comes to his senses—Serov's finale ends with murder. His Shrovetide scene precedes Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov's in Snowmaid and Stravinsky's in Petrushka. Serov's three operas follow the same five-act format and treat female heroines much in the nineteenth-century fashion—Judith survives and achieves her goal through intrepid cunning, tsarina Rogneda, spared at the end of the opera, is locked in a monastery, and the female lead in Fiend is knifed.
Quenoy offers his readers a detailed discussion of Serov's correspondence with his collaborators. Investigating articles, letters, diaries, and literary works, Quenoy threads a dense network of literati swayed by ideologies, alliances, loyalties, and disloyalties. The book sheds light on Serov's contemporaries, Lev Tolstoi and Ivan Turgenev, as well as less known or unknown writers and composers. What I miss in this book and especially in the long chapter on Serov's operas is actual conversation about music. The author, who seems to be arguing for the significance of Serov's musical contributions, does not discuss operatic structures, musical and dramaturgical choices, or the music itself in detail. The book is written in clear and enjoyable prose; unfortunately it is published in very small font, which makes it difficult to read. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in nineteenth-century Russia, especially if the volume could be accessed electronically.
