Music Files

All files are in MP3 format unless otherwise specified.
To download an MP3 file to your computer, right-click on the link to the file and select "Save Target As... ."

Tchaikovsky, The Queen of Spades (1890) - 2.85 MB
Pushkin's original story was rewritten dramatically for Tchaikovsky's opera, termed by Richard Taruskin "an early landmark of Russian Symbolism" (see handout [PDF]). Synopsis from Wikipedia:

Herman is a an army officer who falls in love with Liza, the granddaughter of a Countess who was taught the "secret of the three cards," and was subsequently known as the Queen of Spades. She has revealed the secret to two men, but if she reveals it to a third, she will die. Herman becomes obsessed with learning the secret, and it costs him his possessions, Liza and, ultimately, his own life. (In Pushkin's original story, the love affair with Liza, although still an important plot event, is subsidiary to Herman's obsession with the secret of the cards. Herman is ultimately driven mad, but does not die, while Liza goes on to live happily.)

For the curious, here's a link to Pushkin's original story; and here's a link to a fuller synopsis of Tchaikovsky's opera.

Below, I have provided MP3 tracks for all the excerpts discussed on the handout except one: Herman's love aria (the CD I have bundles it together with the entire preceding scene; not efficient or our purposes). However, Amazon.com has streaming audio of Herman's love aria in both RealPlayer and Windows Media formats. To hear the 60-second excerpt, follow directions in the table below.

Stravinsky, Petrushka (1911) - 2.85 MB
This first "tableau" of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, based on the traditional Russian puppet theatre, depicts a Shrovetide (i.e., Mardi Gras) Fair, with crowds of people coming and going. (Here's a link to a synopsis of the ballet, complete with pictures of the original sets by Alexander Benois!) Compare Stravinsky's use of multiple idioms (especially folk and "popular" ones) to create a collage effect of many voices juxtaposed, interrupting and overlaying one another, to Blok's similar use of assorted "voices" in The Twelve -- where "street" Russian jostles with high diction, political sloganeering, folklore, and chastushki (short, rhymed lyrics, often topical and generally non-serious in tone, derived from folk practice but, in pre-Revolutionary Petersburg, often used to comment on political or social events). See also the neo-Primitivist paintings of Larionov and Goncharova.

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1913) - 6 MB
Again, the mp3 file represents the first scene of Stravinsky's ballet. Here, Stravinsky has gone beyond the folk-oriented primitivism of Petrushka into a full-blown "primalism." His driving yet jagged rhythms evoke an imagined past that lies beyond the mediaeval Russian past preserved in folk culture: it lies far back in a mythic, universal, originary time (the time of Kruchenykh's "wild tribes" and Khlebnikov's "transparent cavemen"). The crudeness of the "non-refined"/"non-aestheticized" folk culture is traded in for the barbarity of a pagan, pre-national culture. (Compare to the Cubo-Futurists' quest for a transrational language and to the non-objective visual experiments of Kandinsky and Malevich.)

Shostakovich, From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79a (1948):

The songs in "From Jewish Folk Poetry" are highly coloured and reflect what Boris Gasparov calls "the paradoxical combination of hilarity and pathos" that characterised Soviet artists' portrayals of Jewish life and, one could argue, Babel's portrayals of almost everything (the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote of Babel that "he speaks in the same tone of the stars above and of gonorrhoea"). The timing of the cycle is also important: Shostakovich composed it in 1948, the year in which anti-Semitism became official policy in the USSR, and in which Shostakovich himself came under attack official attack for the second time. (The cycle was too subversive to be safely performed in public at that time; it eventually received its premiere in 1955, at the beginning of the Thaw.) Richard Taruskin (Defining Russia Musically) suggests that Shostakovich's "appropriation of Jewish folklore...was a way of identifying himself and and his colleagues, creative artists in Stalin's Russia, with another oppressed minority." In other words, Jewish culture became a metaphor for creativity crushed and mutilated by the totalitarian state; a slight but significant departure (and one presaged by Babel) from the image Jews had long enjoyed in literature as perpetual victims.

"Happiness" is the last song of the cycle; it is interesting because although it would seem that Shostakovich intended it as a sop to the authorities ("Look! Happy Jews! Bravo, USSR!"), by the time of the premiere, its final lines had acquired an ironic ring in light of the so-called Doctor's Plot (1953), in which six prominent Jewish physicians were arrested on charges of conspiring to kill high-ranking Politburo officials at the behest of "an international Jewish bourgeois organization." The line "Our sons have become doctors!" now sounded ominous rather than joyful; the "star" that "shines over our heads" in the last line now seemed to promise retribution rather than a chance to flourish.

Shostakovich, Antiformalist Rayok (1948-1968; lyrics here [PDF]) - 7.83 MB
The musical selection for "Jester Day" (Kharms/Zoshchenko), Shostakovich's cantata is a biting satire of the "musical activism" of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The basic facts about the piece (together with numerous links for further research) are available at Wikipedia. Fleshing out the historical background, Nikolai Kachanov explains:

Antiformalist Rayok [...] is an extraordinarily daring musical satire on the absurd structures of the Soviet bureaucracy. The word "rayok" in Russian means "little paradise," used ironically here in reference to the "heaven" attained by these buffoonish Party officials for their service to Stalin. It also evokes the title of an earlier Russian musical satire, written in 1870: Mussorgsky's Rayok (or The Puppet Show), which ridiculed members of the musical establishment ("puppets") who had criticized Mussorgsky and the "Mighty Handful" composers. Mussorsgky's Rayok satirizes the relationship between the artist and the authorities, using direct musical and verbal quotations. Shostakovich's Antiformalist Rayok continues this tradition but on a much bigger scale: here it becomes a political satire.

(More here.)

The St. Petersburg Musical Archive continues the story and explains the sources of biting humour in the piece (the reason it's paralleled with Zoshchenko and Kharms):

Dmitri Zhitomirski has more (scroll down to the words "10th February 1948," just over halfway-down the page).

Not "music" as such, but here's an MP3 of Nabokov reading his poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry." Recorded at the 92nd Street Y, April 5, 1964. (You can stream the whole evening's readings [1 hour] in RealAudio format and peruse a number of other interesting resources from The Times's Nabokov archive here.)

Music from Doctor Zhivago:

• Scriabin's symphonic poem Prometheus (1908-10; 8.2 MB) is just such a "cosmogonic symphony by the composer B -- with the spirits of the planets, voices of the four elements, etc." as Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedeniapin complains of in the quoted excerpt from his diary, p. 42. A theosophist by conviction, Scriabin was a confirmed Symbolist by aesthetics. (Interesting note: Scriabin's family and Pasternak's were neighbours in 1903; Scriabin was Pasternak's musical mentor when the latter thought of becoming a composer, and Pasternak later -- after abandoning his own musical aspiraitions -- wrote a memoir of Scriabin.)
  
  
• Music from the "January, 1906" musical evening held at the Gromekos' (p. 54; this is the event during which news comes of Lara's mother's attempted suicide).
  
  
  • "...a violin sonata by a young composer, a pupil of Taneyev's..."
    To the best of my musical sleuthing ability, the only likely piece I can track down that fits this description is Nikolai Medtner's Sonata No. 1 in B minor for violin and piano. The official composition dates of this work are 1909-1910, but it's possible that an early sketch for it (what we would now call a "beta version") was performed at such an intimate gathering as early as 1906 -- or that the discrepancy in dates is just another of Pasternak's efforts to muddle or obfuscate chronology.
    Click here (or right-click and "Save as...") for an MP3 of the first movement (2.36 MB).
    
    
  • "...a trio by Tchaikovsky..."
    This must be his Trio in A minor, Op. 50 -- first performed (in 1882) "in memory of a great artist," after the funeral service for Nikolai Rubenstein, founder of the Moscow Conservatory.
    Here's a short excerpt from the second movement (331 KB).
    
    
• Not strictly "music from Doctor Zhivago," but here is a beautiful setting of the Beatitudes (see pp. 49-50, 53) by Rachmaninov -- composed in 1910, "between the Revolutions" so to speak, and right in the middle of the Russian choral Golden Age. The setting brings out something interesting about that Gospel text (Matt. 5:3-12): although each line begins "Blessed are..." and the conclusion says to "Rejoice and be glad...," it's not a triumphant but rather a melancholy text; Rachmaninov sets it (largely) in a minor key. I think of this setting when I think of Lara thinking "This was about her" (49).

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