The Bolsheviks’ 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris.
Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.
Klára Móricz is the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Professor of Music at Amherst College. She is the author of Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music, coeditor of Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié, and editor of volume 24 of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition: Concerto for Orchestra.
"In Stravinsky’s Orbit puts the composer in his rightful place, both literally and metaphorically—not by downplaying his creative achievements, but by mapping the glittering constellation of Russian émigré artists who took up residence in interwar Paris. Klára Móricz is a deft guide to this milieu, helping us to see musical modernism in a new light."––Philip Ross Bullock, University of Oxford
"A tour de force. Klára Móricz’s impressive book offers an innovative rehearing of Russian emigré composers in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. By shedding new light on Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Sergey Prokofiev, Arthur Lourié, and Nicolas Nabokov alongside Igor Stravinsky—their powerful gravitational center—Móricz makes an important contribution to studies of exile, nostalgia, neoclassicism, and modernism."––Peter J. Schmelz, Arizona State University
310 pp.6 x 9Illus: 24 b/w images, 50 music examples
9780520344426$70.00|£59.00Hardcover
Aug 2020