For over a week, Borodin’s Prince Igor Overture has been haunting my brain. The haunting melodies have a somber beauty comparable to Trevor Jones’s score for The Last of the Mohicans. Prince Igor is heavily fraught with context, especially in the present day. The Igor it’s named for was a real historical person and the subject of a legendary epic. He fought the Turkic-speaking Cuman people, but he also arranged a marriage between his son and the daughter of the Cumans’ leader who was his arch-enemy. The real Igor was 100% Ukrainian from Ukraine, but the Russians claim him as their own (take note). The Prince Igor opera’s plot, summarized:
Act 1. The Polovtsi (Cumans) are encroaching too close to our realm.
Act 2. I will go push them back. I’m your huckleberry.
Act 3. Oh crap, I’m their prisoner. But hey, their floor show really rocks.
Act 4. I’ve escaped! Yay me!
It’s fraught in all kinds of ways. Borodin composed this in the 1880s while Russia was fighting and conquering more and more Turkic peoples in Central Asia. For which he also composed propagandistic music that is uncommonly beautiful.
It’s probably no coincidence that this is haunting me as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine, which I dread greatly. The melody probably stuck in my head in the first place because I’d been practicing scales, and the main Prince Igor Overture theme crafts haunting melodies out of simple descending scales. That’s all it took to get it started, and the current tense context of Russia versus Ukraine and against Turkic peoples (like Crimean Tatars, who are descended from the Cumans) makes it heavily fraught.
Not doing this to be a downer, but the Prince Igor legend was used for racist Russian propaganda against Turkic peoples for centuries. In 1941, concurrently with Stalin ethnically cleansing the Crimean Tatars, this grossly racist picture was created as mythologizing Russian propaganda for the genocide of a whole people. That’s when their nation was stolen from them and they never got it back.
If a consortium of industrialists and financiers and militarists took over a nation, and other peoples as well as their own nation’s underclasses were made to suffer, is that reason to condemn their culture?
Russian Orientalism contains more “we’re on a civilizing mission” than, say, the French product of Delacroix or Saint-Saëns which was more about Frenchy voluptuousness (and more guilty of misogyny than colonial conquest-ennobling). Borodin more so than Rimsky-Korsakoff, with on the Steppes of Central Asia for example.
Still, context is everything. I like Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. But in Augustus 2008, as Putin was about to invade Georgia, NPR played a performance of it live from Russia, oblivious to its propaganda purpose. Sheesh-takovich!
You’re taking me back to when I got my first Borodin record at the age of 10. I remember how the spelling “Polovtsian” daunted me, and how “Polovetsian” seemed more comfortable to pronounce. But shortly after that I began teaching myself linguistics, the IPA, the Cyrillic alphabet, so that Russian words held no more fear for me, so I came to prefer Polovtsian as the less-messed-with form. Digging back in my memory, I can appreciate how it seemed to other English speakers who would find Russian a bit scary at first.
I started learning Russian when I was 16. I was enrolled in a free astronomy workshop for the summer, and got private language lessons every day after class. (They weren’t required; it was purely on my own initiative.)
It took me a week or so to master the alphabet. For some reason, the Slavic languages are heavy on consonants. Teachers will tell beginners to pronounce the letter Щ like “fresh cheese,” but only Russians can say it correctly. (After 50 years, I still have trouble distinguishing between Щ and Ш.)
Ц, of course, is pronounced like “cats.”
I had already had a year of German, but that didn’t help much. It wasn’t until the next summer that I took an immersion course in Russian. After six weeks, I was speaking it fairly well.
Oddly enough, learning Russian helped improve my German skills, since I had learned grammar and gotten used to thinking in a foreign language. My senior year in high school, I was moved up a grade in German.
Orientalism at its finest. Seriously. If this operatic ballet isn’t the absolute high-water mark of Orientalist art, well I don’t know what is. Paging Edward Said. The fact that I love this so hard is an unresolved dilemma.
Borodin’s Piano Quintet is WONDERFUL— great melodies, so Russian yet universally fun and gorgeous.
Amazing he only composed on weekends — his day job was as a busy and successful research chemist in St. Petersburg!
120 Music Masterpieces, man, that brings back memories. I had that record set growing up, and would listen to it over and over. I would credit 120 Music Masterpieces and the Lyric Opera with my entire classical music education.
Of course, now I’ve got that Last of the Mohicans theme stuck in my head. When that happens, I try to exorcise it by playing it on guitar, playing it on cello, dialing up the soundtrack to listen to, in extreme cases even writing fucking music-appreciation essays. Nothing helps.
It wasn’t until the next summer that I took an immersion course in Russian. After six weeks, I was speaking it fairly well.
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