Untaken Peaks of ‘National Musical Construction’

Abstract

The article is devoted to the process of the establishment of national professional musical practices in the national culture of the 1920–1940s on the example of creating the first operas. Initiated by state policy, the accelerated rise of academic art in the new Soviet republics brought about different artistic results, where, alongside the successful solution of the tasks set, the phenomenon of creative failure was adjacent. This was especially manifested in the work on the opera as the most complex and highest genre of European music. As a result of this work, the problematic aspects of the accelerated conquest of academic artistic tasks in the national republics were distinctly expressed: lack of the necessary socio-cultural infrastructure, a weak level of musical and performing personnel and the creative unprepared pioneer composers to solve opera dramaturgical problems. The “folklore thinking” of the first opera authors encountered a number of genre problems, the overcoming of which was expressed in all kinds of national interpretations aimed at combining strict European canons (for example, the phenomenon of the so-called “Turkic opera”). The most common event in the national republics was the phenomenon of “unfinished operas”, which demonstrated a certain antagonism of the composer’s folklore thinking and the necessary genre standards. The surviving sketches of many failed opera “firstborns” are mainly exposition areas of the form — arias and choirs based on folk song material. The development sections of the form, as well as orchestration, turned out to be an insurmountable obstacle. By the end of the 1940s, a whole group of “failed operas” had already developed in Soviet music, each of which in its own way presents dramatic pages of the history of Soviet music as multinational art. Without attention to this “invincible” and often latent part of the artistic heritage, the completeness of the true conquests of Soviet national musical “construction” cannot be revealed.