Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial

Amateur Music-Making
Author(s): Julia Mannherz
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review , Vol. 95, No. 2 (April 2017), pp. 293-319
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.95.2.0293

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 Nationalism, Imperialism and
Cosmopolitanism in Russian
Nineteenth-Century Provincial
Amateur Music-Making
JULIA MANNHERZ

In his novel, Privalovskie milliony (written in the 1870s, published in 1883

and set in a mid-century provincial town), Dmitrii Narkisovich Mamin-
Sibiriak described the follow scene: three men have just enjoyed an opulent
lunch and are now retiring into the living room. They are Privalov, the host
Polovodov and the latter’s brother-in-law Verevkin. In the living room they
are joined by Polovodov’s wife and Verevkin’s sister Antonida Ivanovna:

Verevkin recovering from the after-effects of the immoderate meal, caught

hold of his sister and dragged her to the piano. ‘Play the Volga song, Tonia,
darling’, he pleaded. ‘For me. Pay no heed to Privalov. […] Sing, darling’.
Antonida Ivanovna sat down at the grand piano, played a few chords and
began to sing a Russian lyrical song in a quiet but very clear contralto
voice: The Wide Volga Waters raised,
They raised to one level with the high shore…
This plaintive song was sung the way ordinary folk sing, but which one
never encounters on stage: with the simple expression that clenches the
soul. Antonida Ivanova knew how to draw out that painful, sorrow-filled

Julia Mannherz is Associate Professor of Modern European History in the History Faculty,
University of Oxford, and a fellow of Oriel College.
I would like to thank Ol´ga Lysikova and Liudmila Kadzhaia for enabling me to spend very
successful research trips in Satarov and Perm´ respectively. I am indebted to Irina Evgen´evna
Sliva at the Saratov Conservatory, to the archivists at the State Archive of Perm´ Krai, and
in particular to Oleg Petukhov, and to Raisa Bazanova and her colleagues at the Perm´skii
kraevedcheskii muzei, who helped me far beyond the call of duty. I am also grateful for
comments on a presentation of this material by my wonderful colleagues at Oxford’s Long-
Nineteenth-Century Seminar, and for the very thoughtful criticism of the three anonymous
referees of The Slavonic and East European Review.
Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 2, 2017

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294 JULIA MANNHERZ
note which is characteristic of Russian lyrical song, filled with mute tears
and intense longing for some freedom and an unknown happiness. […]
Privalov wanted to reply something to Polovodov when the first notes
of the song were struck, but instead remained motionless in his seat, his
mouth wide open…
— This is Tonia — Polovodov said in reply to Privalov’s silent question.
— She sings Russian songs quite decently when she’s in the mood.’
Polovodov himself […] loved French chansonettes most of all, but in his
capacity as a Slavophile, he regarded it as his duty to humble himself
immediately every time his wife sang.1

Not long after this scene, Privalov enters into a love affair with Antonina
Ivanovna. As is obvious from the quote above, she seduces him by singing
a Russian folk song.
Russian nineteenth-century music is usually described through the lives
and works of its famous composers.2 In this account, the narrative of their
achievements makes up a story about the rise of Russian music, which goes
hand in hand with the gradual professionalization of musical life. Even the
history of material culture that underpinned this development — such as
the commercial activities of piano makers or the growth of the printing
industry — has been told through the lens of musical genius: the focus
here too has been on the high-quality pianos preferred by professional
musicians, or the publication history of important compositions.3
This history is, moreover, usually told in relation to national identity,
whereby composers, the groups in which artists moved and the audiences
within which their works were received, are placed in relation to a
consciously Russian or Western ideology. In particular, much has been made
of the alleged opposition between a style supposedly informed by Western
musical professionalism — symbolized by the works of Anton Rubinstein
and Petr Chaikovskii — and a national form of musical expression which
emerged seemingly organically within a group of composer amateurs, the
so-called kuchka (often referred to as the ‘mighty five’ in English).4 Even

1
Dmitrii Narkisovich Mamin-Sibiriak, Privalovskie milliony, Moscow, 1958, pp. 146–47.
2
Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, Berkeley
and Los Angeles, CA, 2002; Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and
Hermeneutical Essays, Princeton, NJ, 1997; Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and
Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin, New Haven, 2007; Iu. V. Keldysh et al., Istoriia russkoi
muzyki, Moscow, 1994.
3
Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Lanham, MD, 2014;
B Vol´man, Russkie notnye izdaniia xix nachala xx veka, Leningrad, 1970.
4
Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism; Taruskin, Defining Russia; Maes,

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 295
though Richard Taruskin and Marina Frolova-Walker have eloquently
shown that the kuchka’s compositions and their allegedly intrinsic affinity
to a national character was established by a public relations campaign
rather than being grounded in musical construction, the categories of
‘Russian’ versus ‘Western’ have remained the main analytical concepts in
their studies of Russian nineteenth-century music and in the works of other
scholars. Recently, Rutger Helmers, following from Taruskin and Frolova-
Walker, argued for cosmopolitanism as an important aspect of Russian
nineteenth-century opera, but his work, which stresses the opposite
of nationalism, namely cosmopolitanism, as an important principle in
Russian music, ultimately retains the traditional binary opposites.5
This article tries to move away from the juxtaposition of Russian
national versus Western musical expression — perceived or otherwise. To
be clear, the national and the international are present here too, but my aim
is to assess a more complex position of such musical connotations within
an imperial context. In order to access musical expressions that are less
clearly delineated along intellectual definitions of what it meant to sound
Russian or not, I turn away from the high-brow tradition that focuses on
compositional genius, on the genres of opera and substantial orchestral
works, and on performances in the cultural centres of the imperial capitals.
Instead, my attention moves into the Russian provinces and to the amateur
musical practices that dominated music-making there.
In doing so, I am partly following Lynn Sargeant’s cue, whose
study on nineteenth-century musical life devotes much attention to
the provinces.6 Yet unlike Sargeant, whose focus on the activities of
the Russian Musical Society means that she retains an emphasis on
an increasingly institutionalized and professionally organized musical
culture, my intention here is different: while also zooming in on provincial
musical activities, I focus on domestic amateur practices, which — despite
the increasing institutionalization shown by Sargeant — remained an
important cultural factor in the empire’s cities and towns.7

Russian Music; Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The
Pleasure and the Power, New Haven, CT, 2006; Lynn A. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord:
Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life, Oxford, 2011.
5
Rutger Helmers, Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in
Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera, Rochester, NY, 2014.
6
Sargeant, Harmony and Discord.
7
I thus only partly agree with Sargeant’s claim that ‘Russian musical life was effectively
relocated from the private to the public sphere, from the capitals to the provinces, from the
intimate confines of the circle and salon to modern institutions such as the conservatory,
and from the hands of amateurs to the control of professionals’. Ibid. p. 3.

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296 JULIA MANNHERZ
Research on Russian nineteenth-century music has rarely been
concerned with these more modest forms.8 Amateur musical activities
during the first half of the nineteenth century — i.e. in the period before
we can speak of the professionalization of Russian musical life — have
received scholarly attention from Richard Stites, who analysed aristocratic
culture centred around the country estate and the exquisite salon of noble
elites in St Petersburg.9 As Stites shows, musical entertainment on noble
estates before 1861 was often provided by serf orchestras, while the hosts of
elegant salons in the capitals and their guests performed and even at times
mingled awkwardly with professional musicians. Because of his focus on
aristocrats and their serfs, or on their uncomfortable interactions with
social inferiors, Stites’s work foregrounds questions of social distinctions
and hierarchies. While I retain his attention on the ‘household as center of
cultural life’, and agree with his assessment of the salon as bridge between
different social groups, social stratification is much less pronounced in my
examples.10 Instead, my material illustrates the ways in which provincial
amateur practice brought together aspects of high-brow culture and
the popular tradition which Stites describes as ‘an altogether different
universe’.11
Although imperial law classified the tsar’s subjects according to
various social estates which defined their differing rights and obligations,
historians have increasingly pointed towards cultural factors — such as
education and taste, quotidian life and wealth (or the lack of it) — that
brought people of diverse social categories together and allow us to speak of
a social middle.12 This middle strata — which included petty landowners,
8
Amateur music-making in Western and Northern Europe has received more
attention. See, for example, Andreas Ballstaedt and Tobias Widmaier, Salonmusik: Zur
Geschichte und Funktion einer bürgerlichen Musikpraxis, Stuttgart, 1989; Eva Öhrström,
Borgerliga kvinnors musicerande i 1800-talets Sverige, Göteborg, 1987; Walter Salmen,
Haus- und Kammermusik: Privates Musizieren und gesellschaftlicher Wandel zwischen
1600 und 1900, Leipzig, n.d; Rebecca Grotjahn, ‘Playing at Refinement: A Musicological
Approach to Music, Gender and Class Around 1900’, German History, 30, 2012, pp. 395–411.
9
Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts.
10
Ibid. pp. 2, 57, 71.
11
Ibid. p. 2.
12
These estates included, among others, nobles, merchants, petty bourgeois (meshchane),
‘people of varying ranks’ (raznochintsy) and peasants. Gregory L. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie
(Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History’, The American Historical Review, 91, 1989,
pp. 11-36; Harley D. Balzer (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian
History, Armonk, NY and London, 1996. Historians who have convincingly identified a
culturally defined middle include Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite
Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin, Oxford, 2001, pp. 96-100; Miranda Beaven
Remnek, ‘“A Larger Proportion of the Public”: Female Readers, Fiction, and the Periodical

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 297
junior military officers, civil servants, professionals, members of the
clergy, merchants and plebeian town dwellers — was particularly visible in
small or remote provincial towns which did not entice wealthy nobles to
spend significant amounts of time there. Perm´, in the Urals, was one such
provincial centre. The richest magnates of the empire owned huge estates
in Perm´ province, but they avoided the region and its capital because they
regarded it as remote, dull and rough.13 Consequently, cultural life in Perm´
was dominated by civil servants, merchants and other representatives of
Russia’s middling sort.
These urban inhabitants espoused an ideology of domesticity in
which amateur music-making was one important component. The shared
enthusiasm for violins, for example, brought Mikhail Petrovich Norin
(1834–1905), an employee at the governmental excise office in Perm´, into
contact with the local pharmacist and other hobby instrument makers;
while regular rehearsals at home united his extended family and friends.14
Similarly, the joy of playing duets fostered the friendship between the
teacher Iulii Mikhailovich Shtokman (1839–1905) and the retired general
Ivan Andreevich Klinger (1819–97) in Kursk.15
As only few cities entertained their inhabitants with regular concerts,
most contemporaries — like Norin, Klinger, Shtokman, or Antonida
Ivanovna’s fictional audience — encountered secular music mainly in their
own private homes. And within the private realm, the drawing room or

Press in the Reign of Nicholas I’, in Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (eds), An
Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, Durham,
NC and London, 2001, p. 46. For a similar approach in relation to Western Europe, see
Jürgen Kocka’s definition of the middle class. According to Kocka, this social group was
too diverse for it to be defined in strict Marxist terms that rely upon economical means
of existence and production. Jürgen Kocka, ‘The Middle Classes in Europe’, Journal of
Modern History, 67, 1995, pp. 783–806. On a bourgeoisie that, like its Russian counterpart,
was comparably varied, see Jesus Cruz, Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Spain, Baton Rouge, LA, 2011.
13
According to the imperious and opinionated Anna Ivanovna Diagileva, there were
only ‘prisoners in shackles’ in the city. E. V. Diagileva, Semeinaia sapis´ o Diagilevykh,
St Petersburg and Perm´, 1998, p. 23. Similar, although slightly less scathing views were
voiced by the writers Pavel Ivanovich Mel´nikov (alias Andrei Pecherskii) and D. N.
Mamin-Sibiriak. Pavel Ivanovich Mel´nikov (alias Andrei Pecherskii), ‘Dorozhnye zapiski
na puti iz Tambovskoi gubernii v Sibir´’ (first published in Otechestvennye zapiski, 1839),
Polnoe sobranie sochineniia, vol. 12, St Petersburg, 1898, pp. 359–68; D. N. Mamin-Sibiriak,
‘Staraia Perm´: putevye ocherki’, Sobranie sochineniia, vol. 12, Sverdlovsk, 1951, p. 295 (first
published 1889).
14
Gosudarstvennoe kraevoe biudzhetnoe uchrezhdenie kul´tury ‘Perm´skii
kraevedcheskii muzei’ (hereafter, GKBUK PKM, No. POKM-NV-2896/2; GKBUK PKM,
No. POKM-NV-2896/7).
15
Vera Shtokman, ‘Iz moikh vospominaniakh: I. A. Klinger’, Gitarist, 1904, pp. 2–4.

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298 JULIA MANNHERZ
salon became the most important place for musical activity. Scholars have
described the salon of the urban home as one of the ‘most important spaces
of musical activity in the nineteenth century’.16 In the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century, it was a venue for polite aristocratic sociability,
where those present discussed art and literature, played agreeable games
and guests or visiting musicians offered (background) entertainment.17
The real triumph of salon music, however, occurred in the second half of
the nineteenth century. By that time, the urban bourgeoisie had adopted
salon sociability and transformed its ritual in ways that expressed middle-
class aspirations and values.18
The salon was the representative room of the bourgeois home, which
displayed both the family’s material and spiritual accomplishments. In one
merchant house in Saratov on the Volga river, for example, the walls of
such a room were adorned with ‘expensive wallpaper, the ceilings painted
with flowers and figures of Cupid’, while portraits of the emperor and
empress hung over the sofa. Further attractions in this particular ‘zal’ were
a portrait of Napoleon, an oil painting mounted in a massive gold frame
depicting Dmitrii Donskoi after the battle of Kulikovo in 1380, and a ‘large
organ with a considerable number of stops’.19 This salon thus underlined
the family’s patriotic sentiment by celebrating the Romanov rulers and
important military events of the country’s past. It also stressed its owners’
material well-being by flaunting expensive items, and drew attention to
their historical and aesthetic sophistication through pictures, ornaments,
references to classical mythology and the organ.
Music played an important role in this visible bourgeois culturedness,
not only in the Russian empire, but throughout Europe.20 Arthur Loesser
has suggested that a bulky piano (or organ) tied a family dwelling to culture
in a particularly firm way. Unlike a guitar or any other small instrument,
16
The other venue with a comparable significance according to Christensen is the
operatic stage. Thomas Christensen, ‘Public Music in Private Spaces: Piano-Vocal Scores
and the Domestication of Opera’, in Kate van Orden (ed.), Music and the Cultures of Print,
New York and London, 2000, p. 88.
17
On the Russian aristocratic salon and its decline, see Kelly, Refining Russia, pp.
58–60.
18
Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik; Öhrström, Borgerliga kvinnors musicerande;
Eva Öhrström, Klaveret, notboken och behagligheten: Om kvinnors musicerande under
romantiken, Stockholm, 1991; Lina Bernstein, ‘Women on the Verge of a New Language:
Russian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Helena Goscilo
and Beth Holmgren (eds), Russia, Women, Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN,
1996, pp. 209–24.
19
I. Ia. Slavin, Minuvshee — perezhitoe: Vospominaniia, Saratov, 2013. p. 27.
20
Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik; Öhrström, Klaveret, notboken.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 299
which ‘a son might readily conscript for tavern conviviality’, and which
might even end up in a dark closet, a heavy piano could not be moved
about that easily. It thereby ‘anchored the music firmly within the family
circle. Its inertia, if nothing else, made it the focus of the domestic musical
life’.21 This might be one reason why throughout Europe, aspiring town
dwellers wanted to display such an instrument in their homes. Russia’s
middling population was no exception. One commentator observed in 1859
that everyone, from the aristocrat, the official, merchant, to the craftsman
wanted to have a piano.22
The domestic character of the piano tied the instrument to contemporary
ideas about femininity. In the first half of the nineteenth century, women’s
journals, which were read throughout the empire, were the prime locus of
music publishing.23 These publications taught their readers about music
by reviewing concerts, portraying touring virtuosos and printing sheet
music. In journals such as Damskii zhurnal (The Lady’s Journal), Damskii
al´bom (The Lady’s Album) or Vaza (The Vase), music-related articles sat
side by side with instructions on good housekeeping, suggestions for home
decoration and patterns for fashionable laces, hats, dresses, shoes and hair-
dos. Nineteenth-century women’s journals thereby suggested that musical
accomplishment was as fundamental a component in a woman’s character
as the ability to dress fashionably or the capacity to lead a household.
Like the piano, which embellished the home, an accomplished lady
entertained guests with agreeable conversations or charming little pieces,
and was thus herself a decoration to her family. Young women, of course,
had to learn these artistic skills, and musical training figured prominently
in the curricula of girls’ schools, while private music schools throughout
the empire advertised their additional services.24 In the provinces, school
concerts played a prominent part in urban cultural life in mid-century, and
they offered occasions at which young musicians enjoyed attention and
admiration. The newspapers of Perm´ and Saratov provinces, for example,
reported such school concerts in the 1840s and 1850, and celebrated
the skills of local pupils.25 Famous institutes in the capitals even hired
21
Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, New York, 1954, p. 54.
22
V Morkov, ‘O musykal´nom obrazovanie v Rossii’, Vaza, 1859, pp. 253–54.
23
Vol´man, Russkie notnye izdaniia, pp. 182–204. For information about the geographic
spread of the readership see, for example, the list of subscribers in Vaza. ‘Chislo gg.
podpischikov po 1 aprelia’, Vaza, 1848, unpaginated.
24
Adres-kalendar´, Perm´, 1894, for example, lists the teachers on the payroll of schools
in Perm´, while advertisements for a music school can be found at GKBUK PKM, No.
POKM-NV-2889/7-2.
25
‘Ob eksamene v pansione gospozhi Shumakher’, Damskii zhurnal, 1827, pp. 321–23;

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300 JULIA MANNHERZ
prominent instrumentalists as teachers — such as the Irish piano star
John Field — thereby highlighting the aesthetic accomplishment of their
students.26
Memoirists describe the piano-playing young woman as an important
figure during social gatherings.27 While men could also play other
instruments, as the aforementioned Norin with his enthusiasm for violins
illustrates, playing the piano or singing were deemed to be particularly
appropriate musical activities for women. Norin’s wife and daughters
in Perm´ were consequently pianists while the men played their violins
and cellos.28 A woman who played the piano offered not only pleasant
entertainment, but also indicated to others that her family was cultured,
had the means to obtain instruments and provide musical instruction.
In short, her musical skills came to stand for a certain social status. This
led some parents, such as Praskovia Tatlina (1808–99), the wife of a low-
ranking state official and resident of Moscow, to force piano lessons on her
daughters as part of her attempt to underline their social distinction.29
According to Miranda Beaven Remnek’s analysis of subscription lists,
about half the readers of women’s journals belonged to society’s middling
ranks in the first half of the century.30 Yet despite — or maybe because
of — this fairly democratic readership, these journals created, in Gitta
Hammaberg’s word, a rather exquisite ‘ambience’ that revolved around a
luxurious toilette, made frequent references to high society, and blurred
the distinction between a woman and ‘her ornamental world’.31 With the
rise of consumer culture in the second half of the century, domestic music
— while remaining a symbol of cultural distinction — was practised by a
wider constituency.
‘Ob ispytaniiakh v Perm´skom pansione dlia blagorodnykh devits g-zhi Shtikkel´’,
Perm´skie gubernskie vedomosti, 1848, pp. 95–96; A. S. Maiorova, ‘Muzykal´naia zhizn´
Saratova 50-x gg. ХIX v. na stranitsakh “Saratovskikh gubernskikh vedomostei”’, in S. V.
Fomina (ed.), ‘Grad Kitezh’ russkoi kul´tury: Ot zabveniia k vozrozhdeniiu. Sbornik statei
po materialam Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Saratov, 2014, pp. 64–65.
26
Damskii zhurnal, for example, reported in 1830 about a recital of the famed pianist
John Field and his students from one St Petersburg school. ‘Muzykal´nyi vecher na
pansione g-zhi Diuperon’, Damskii zhurnal, 1830, pp. 75–76.
27
Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1955, chapters 1 & 2.
28
GKBUK PKM, No. POKM-NV-2896/1.
29
Praskovia Tatlina, ‘Reminiscences’, in Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowels (eds),
Russia Through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, New Haven, CT, 1996.
pp. 242–80.
30
Remnek, ‘A Larger Proportion’, p. 31.
31
Gitta Hammarberg, ‘The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of
the Reader’, in Alessandra Tosi and Wendy Rosslyn (eds), Women in Russian Culture and
Society, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, pp. 85–90.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 301
In the 1850s, the Saratov salon described above stood out by its luxury and
its owner’s affinity to the values of classical education.32 Yet the emergence
of more and more music shops and piano manufacturers throughout
the Russian empire in the second half of the century demonstrates the
growing number of customers who obtained such items.33 Similarly, advice
literature in the late imperial period, which among other things informed
readers about the items that a respectable household ought to contain,
frequently made references to keyboard instruments.34
Throughout Europe, the success of salon music among the bourgeoisie
was made possible by the economic and social developments of the
century. Industrialization and urbanization increased the number of
entrepreneurs, merchants and professionals, i.e. those members of society
who championed this culture. It also furthered the wealth that was needed
to obtain instruments, sheet music and to pay teachers. Technological
advances in turn accelerated the production of musical commodities. In
1878, for example, the firm of P. I. Jurgenson, Russia’s most successful
music publisher, managed to cut the price of his sheet music by 50 per
cent, thanks to the introduction of high-volume lithography.35 Jurgenson’s
motivation to sell more printed music was in turn prompted by the soaring
production of instruments. Instrument makers constantly developed
new, or improved existent musical devices. In the case of the piano, the
development of metal frames and cross stringing, which influenced the
production and shape of keyboard instruments and their sound, have
been noted by many scholars.36 Instrument makers also developed smaller
versions of the grand piano, such as uprights or cabinet instruments,
and they sold these together with the even less expensive pump organ to
customers with smaller purses and less space at home.
The market for musical products in the Russian empire became
so vibrant in the second half of the nineteenth century that musical
commodities were advertised widely in newspapers and journals, and
a growing number of instrument makers and traders promoted sheet
music and affordable instruments for shipment throughout the empire.37
32
Slavin, Minuvshee, p. 27.
33
Swartz, Piano Makers.
34
Kelly, Refining Russia, pp. 161–62.
35
Vol´man, Russkie notnye izdaniia, p. 163. On Jurgenson and his business, see S. V.
Belov, Muzykal´noe izdatel´stvo P. I. Iurgensona, St Petersburg, 2001.
36
Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, Oxford, 1990; Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos;
Swartz, Piano Makers; James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the
Piano, New Haven, CT and London, 1999.
37
Swartz, Piano Makers, pp. 96–110.

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302 JULIA MANNHERZ
Jurgenson, for example, operated with agents throughout the empire, as
did his Petersburg competitor Gutheil, from whom Norin in Perm´ ordered
parts for his violins in 1864.38 How successfully musical commodities
produced in the capitals reached the provinces is also illustrated by
the holdings of regional libraries in Saratov, whose pre-Revolutionary
collection of sheet music provided the starting point for the analysis of the
provincial music repertoire which informs the second part of this article.
At the same time as traders established a tight network of deliveries,
an increasing number of music shops and even factories emerged in the
empire’s provinces. In 1886, for example, Dmitrii Ivanovich Iumanov
opened a piano and pump organ factory in Perm´.39 Iumanov also sold string
instruments and sheet music at his two music stores. In 1910, Iumanov’s
widow was one of eight traders of musical items in Perm´; a number that
further underlines the rising demand for musical commodities throughout
the country.40
In Perm´, Saratov and elsewhere, the domestic setting and its association
with women’s activities gave amateur music an intimate quality. The
repertoire of salon music further emphasized this feature by stressing
sentimentality. Yet all music, irrespective of the place it is performed
in or the stories it tells, appeals to the emotions in strong ways, while
musicologists have argued that the emotional experience of music is
both psychological and physical. Because musicians have to move arms
and legs to play instruments, adjust their breathing or vibrate their vocal
chords in order to sing, making music is also a physical experience. First
and foremost, it is a form of individual self-expression in which the artist
aims to overcome motoric challenges — such as slow fingers, resisting
instruments or crackling vocal chords — to produce a sound that enables
aesthetic enjoyment and which can express significant ideas.41 Yet music-
making is also very much a communal activity, which links one musician
to his or her fellow artists and also to audiences. A common repertoire and
shared tastes tie music-lovers together, but listening also links performers
and audiences because music gives rise to shared empathy.42 Musicologists

38
GKBUK PKM, No. POKM-NV-2896/2, p. l.2.
39
E. Speshilova, Staraia Perm´, Perm´, 1999. p. 113.
40
Spravochnaia kniga ‘Vsia Perm´’ na 1910 god, Perm´,1910, pp. 104, 108.
41
Tom Cochrane, ‘On the Resistance of the Instrument’, in Tom Cochrane, Bernardino
Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer (eds), The Emotional Power of Music: Multidisciplinary
Perspectives on Musical Arousal, Expression, and Social Control, Oxford, 2013, pp. 76–83.
42
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ‘Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in
Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64, 2011, pp. 349–90; Joel Krueger,
‘Empathy, Enaction, and Shared Musical Experience Evidence from Infant Cognition’, in

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 303
have stressed that the shared emotional experience evoked by a certain
piece of music calls forth both cognitive and bodily participation.43 The
collective enjoyment of music which ties audiences and musicians together
was even more pronounced in contexts such as the provincial salon, where
the boundary between performers and listeners was weak or else altogether
absent.
The music provincial amateurs made during the nineteenth-century,
then, is revealing not only about contemporary musical practice, but
also about the cultural values underlying musicians’ choices. Amateur
musicians chose their repertoire freely, and felt it intimately. Analysing
the repertoire of pianists and singers in Perm´, Saratov and Kursk thus
allows us to shift the focus away from institutionalized expression of high
art in the capital and the intellectual discourse around national identity
that emerged around it, to the sentimental experience of everyday musical
practice.
Women’s journals, the catalogues of publishing houses and private
papers of individual music lovers that have survived in archives are revealing
about the artistic choices of provincial music lovers. In the first half of the
century, women’s journals published mainly dances alongside short piano
pieces or sentimental songs. These had titles such as ‘Varin´ka: Polka-
Mazurka’, ‘Bouquet de Champagne: Galop’, or ‘La Jeune pauvre Orpheline’,
‘Chernooka’ (The Dark Eyed Girl), ‘Mechtaniia devy’ (The Maiden’s
Dream) and ‘Tsyganka’ (The Gypsy Girl).44 The popularity of French titles
associated these publications with a world of aristocratic cosmopolitanism.
But dances and character pieces with an international flair were also part of
the commercially successful compositions intended for moderately skilled
and sentimentally inclined amateurs during the second half of the century.
Some piano pieces with pensive heroines in their titles became international
hits, such as Tekla Bądarzewska’s ‘Prayer of a Maiden’ (1856).45
Publishing houses made most of their profits with such fare, alongside
adaptations of operatic arias and marches. This is obvious from their
catalogues, in which these genres figured prominently, but it is also
evidenced by the correspondence between publishers and composers.
When Petr Chaikovskii desperately needed money in 1877, he beseeched
his friend and publisher Petr Jurgenson:
Cochrane, Fantini and Scherer (eds), The Emotional Power of Music, p. 181.
43
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis, MN,
2002. p. 23.
44
Vaza, 1851, no. 3; Damskii al´bom, 1856, nos 5, 6, 8, 9 and 12.
45
On that piece see Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik.

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304 JULIA MANNHERZ
Can you order something from me that will be useful to you? I’ll accept
any work, as long as it brings in money. What do you need? songs, [piano]
pieces, arrangements, translations? For God’s sake, don’t be shy to request
the most terrible work.46

Chaikovskii translated love songs into Russian, arranged operatic arias for
piano and voice, and harmonized simple songs. Upon Jurgenson’s request,
he also composed a march in 1877.47
One further popular genre in Jurgenson’s catalogue was folksong. As
the episode of the fictional Antonida Ivanovna illustrates, Russian songs
had a strong sentimental force. The adoption of folksong for a salon setting
began in the late eighteenth-century with the first publications of song
collections.48 This process owed its intellectual impetus to the philosophy
of Johann Gottfried Herder and the Romantic movement, and gained
additional traction during the Napoleonic wars, when elites throughout
Europe rejected French cultural hegemony and turned to local lore instead.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, middle-class enthusiasm for
rural song, fairytales and costume became part of urban mass culture.
As the learned and weighty editions of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century gave way to cheap and slim editions of folksong,
however, oral traditions were significantly altered to fit middle-class tastes
and morality.49
In the Russian empire, the most influential early adaption of folksong
to the requirements of the salon was Russkie narodnye pesni (Russian
Folksongs), published by N. A. L´vov and I. Prach in 1790 and reprinted
in 1806, 1815 and 1896. In this collection, each song — unlike its rural
equivalent — was presented as a short piece with a stable rhythm, а clear
tonality and piano accompaniment.50 The process of adapting folkloric
music to the aesthetic tastes of urban dwellers, educated on Western-style
music, was further developed in later folksong editions. Gradually the
piano obtained a clear accompanying role in these collections, while the

46
P. I. Chaikovskii and P. I. Iurgenson, Perepiska, Moscow, 2011, p. 26.
47
Ibid. pp. 33, 50, 58.
48
On this process see, for example, Mark Konstantinovich Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi
fol´kloristiki, Moscow, 1958.
49
One prominent example of this process are Grimms’ fairytales. Ruth Bottigheimer,
Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, New Haven,
CT, 1989.
50
Michael Hamrick Brown (ed.), A Collection of Russian Folk Songs by Nikolai Lvov and
Ivan Prach, Ann Arbor, MI, 1987.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 305
melody was taken over by the voice.51 Throughout all these modifications,
folksongs remained easy to perform and thus appropriate for most amateur
musicians.
Folksongs were also adjusted thematically to the sentimental tastes
of the domestic sphere. The overwhelming majority of songs focused on
themes of love, romance and longing, while folksongs with rough content
— such as drinking songs or texts with explicit sexual themes — did
not find their way into printed collections.52 Sentimental topics already
made up the majority of the L´vov-Prach collection, which seems to be no
coincidence, for Prach worked as a piano teacher at the Smolnyi Institute
for Noble Girls and probably had his students in mind when working
on the song book. In later collections, other issues seemed of no interest
whatsoever. And since most of these songs were tales of unrequited love or
abandonment, the obvious harmonic setting for these songs were minor
keys, which contributed to the stereotype of the melancholic Russian song.
These folk songs were influenced by and in popular culture merged
with art-song, giving rise to the genre of the (zhestokii) romans, or
(cruel) romance by the second half of the century. These were simple
and sentimental songs about spurned love and suppressed passion.53
Robert Rothstein has described this development as a ‘process of mutual
accommodation in which aristocratic poets imitated peasant songs while
the urban middle and lower classes […] developed their own style with
roots in peasant folklore but with inclinations toward upper-class poetry’.54
Indeed, songs set by composers to well-known poems became such an
integral part of the oral tradition that early twentieth-century collectors
sometimes regarded them as folksong.
Musicologists have noted that the entry of folksong into the domestic
space enabled a patriotic form of enjoyment that focused on the Russian
people and their culture. In the words of Richard Taruskin, the relocation
of folksong from a popular and potentially rough setting such as the
51
V. Beliaev (ed.), Russkie narodnye pesni: Sobrannye i izdannye dlia peniia i fortep´iano,
Moscow, 1959.
52
Such rough songs survived in oral culture and in manuscript form. See, for example,
Gosudarstvennyi archiv saratovskoi oblasti, f. 407, op. 2, d. 825.
53
Dieter Lehmann, ‘Zur Genesis der russischen Romanze’, Deutsches Jahrbuch der
Musikwissenschaft, 10, 1965, pp. 57–81; Robert A. Rothstein, ‘Death of the Folk Song?’, in
Stephen Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (eds), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Practices, and
Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, NJ, 1994, pp. 108–20.
54
Robert A. Rothstein, ‘From the Traditional Ballad to the “Cruel Romance”’, in Robert
A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake (eds), American Contributions to the 13th International
Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003, Volume 2: Literature, Bloomington, IN, 2003,
p. 152.

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306 JULIA MANNHERZ
street or tavern into a stylish drawing room produced ‘a new genre that
purposely mediated or transcended the borders between genres [and]
social classes’.55 What Taruskin describes here is the classical mechanism
by which nationalism succeeds: commercial success in the modern public
sphere allows for identification across social divides.
However, folksong published in the Russian empire and played by
amateurs in the centre as well as in the provinces was not only ‘Russian’
(russkii). Alongside rarer examples of Caucasian ethnic music, two other
ethnicities were prominently represented in this genre: Ukrainians and
Gypsies.56 Ukrainian and Gypsy song could already be found in the L´vov-
Prach collection, and both enjoyed enormous commercial success towards
the end of the empire.
According to L´vov, writing in the foreword of the 1806 edition of
Russkie narodnye pesni, Ukrainian song was almost indistinguishable
from Western European music. Ukrainians, he stated, had introduced
the rules of art music into their popular singing, which endowed the
latter ‘with a certain perfection, [but also] effaces the characteristic folk
melody; the melody […] becomes assimilated into song in general as
practiced in all countries’.57 Later scholarly literature is notably quiet on the
musical specificity of Ukrainian music.58 On the rare occasions when its
characteristics are mentioned, these turn out to be the basic components of
Western European or Russian music, such as tonalities or the juxtaposition
of lyrical versus lively song types.59
While the cosmopolitanism of Ukrainian music was a drawback
in the eyes of L´vov and other ethnographers in search of national
distinctiveness, it was exactly what later composers aspired to. In 1861–62
55
Taruskin, Defining Russia, p. 17. The same point is made by Maes, Russian Music, p. 15.
56
In using the term ‘Gypsy’, I follow the usage of my sources.
57
Hamrick Brown, Russian Folk Songs, p. 81.
58
Most literature dealing with Ukrainian song does not address its musical quality
at all, but focuses on its social significance instead. William Noll, ‘The Social Role and
Economic Status of Blind Peasant Minstrels in Ukraine’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 17,
1993, pp. 45–71; Bohdan Klid, ‘Songwriting and Singing: Ukrainian Revolutionary and Not
So Revolutionary Activities in the 1860s’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 33–34, 2008–09, pp.
263–77; K. A. Papmehl, ‘An Eighteenth-century English Translation of a Ukrainian Folk
Song’, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 24, 1982, pp. 175–80.
59
According to Ivan Mirtschuk, Ukrainian music differentiates between major and
minor harmonies, a distinction that is, of course, one of the important principles of
European music. The other characteristics of traditional Ukrainian song that Mirtschuk
mentions are typical for Russian song, such as recitative vs. lively types of song, and a lead
voice which is eventually joined by independent voices that give rise to harmonies. Ivan
Mirtschuk, ‘History of Ukrainian Culture: Part 10 Music’, The Ukrainian Review, 32, 1984,
pp. 62–71.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 307
Anton Kotsipinskii, a Viennese trained Galician musician, composer and
owner of a music store in Kiev brought out his collection of Ukrainian song
with piano accompaniment.60 This collection, which presented traditional
songs as short character pieces with a simple melody and straightforward
piano accompaniment, later became a source of salon pieces which could
be obtained individually and at fairly modest prices. In a similar vein, the
composer Alois Edlichka, who like Prach was Czech but settled in Poltava
in 1848, published Ukrainian folksong alongside romansy and short piano
pieces. Edlichka’s output was thus clearly linked to the salon. Indeed,
his attitude towards folksong shows a number of characteristics usually
encountered in pieces intended for the bourgeois home. His Little Russian
Folksongs commonly begin with piano preludes, and have user-friendly
left-hand accompaniment consisting of arpeggio chords, or of one strong
chord followed by two identical weaker ones. German nineteenth-century
critics of salon music pejoratively called the latter pattern the ‘bumjakjak
accompaniment’.61 We see this device, for example, in Edlichka’s rendering
of ‘Sontse nyzen´ko’ (The Setting Sun), a song in which the narrator walks
through an evening landscape in the futile search of his or her loved one.
The song was popular throughout the empire, appearing in a number of
collections.62 Its simple melody is made up of the repetition of a simple
theme, with a two bar cadence added at the end. In Edlichka’s rendering,
the E minor theme is introduced by a four-bar piano prelude before it
is handed over to the voice, while the piano is assigned a harmonically
simple bumjakjak accompaniment, consisting exclusively of E minor and
diminished seventh chords. Edlichka thus combines a simple folk tune
with the musical conventions of the salon.
Even more explicit in his attempt to bring folksong into the bourgeois
salon was P. P. Sokal´skii, whose arrangements of Ukrainian songs were
published in Petersburg and Moscow in 1903, but also found their way
to Saratov. In the introduction to this work, Sokal´skii discussed the
adaptation that folksong experienced on its journey from the fields to
the urban salon. He mentioned how folkloric intonation was adapted to a
well-tempered tuning, how regular rhythms and set keys were introduced,
and how melody was privileged over harmony. And while he conceded
that this new form was a straitjacket for folksong, he ultimately celebrated
60
On Kotsipinskii, see Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´, St Petersburg, 1891–1907.
61
Alois Edlichka, Sobranie malorusskikh narodnykh pesen, Moscow, n.d. On this style
of accompaniment, see Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik, p. 264.
62
See, for example, N. Eroshenko, Malorusskie vechera khorovogo peniia: Sbornik
ukrainskikh 3-kh i 4-kh golosnykh pesen, Moscow, n.d. p. 6; M. Vasil´ev, Natalka Poltavka:
Operetka iz Malorossiiskikh pesen. Dlia peniia s fortepiano, Moscow, n.d. p. 17.

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308 JULIA MANNHERZ
this development: ‘What once was nature, is now art.’ 63 And indeed,
his compositions conformed to the expectations of salon music in every
respect. In addition to being accessible to a modestly skilled amateur,
allocating melody to the voice and accompaniment to the piano, they
also showed the extra virtue of appearing to be virtuoso pieces. This was
achieved by soloistic preludes and codas for the piano that covered the full
range of the keyboard, including grand intervals, arpeggios, tremolos and
grace notes. Thematically and musically they dealt with longing, love and
nature, or jokingly addressed women’s love for clothes and shoes. Although
these qualities already associated his songs with a female sphere, Sokal´skii
moreover labelled them with the word ‘female’.
What, then, was Ukrainian about these songs? First of all, many of these
songs were linguistically Ukrainian.64 This is interesting, considering
that the Ukrainian language was barred from publishing in 1863 and
again in 1876, a prohibition that was only partially revoked in 1905, but
apparently not adhered to when it came to sheet music. Second, there were
thematic references to Ukrainian life in these songs. Lovers were invariably
Cossacks; Poles and Jews were also mentioned, although in less favourable
terms. In some instances these stereotypes of Ukrainian life were further
illustrated by images. The cover of Edlichka’s songs, for example, depicted
Cossacks with baggy trousers and long moustaches dancing in front of
a reed-thatched hut, admired by women in national costume.65 These
attributes acknowledged the perception among Russian music lovers of
a separate cultural and ethnic Ukrainian identity, and they represented
Western exoticism: to a buyer in Moscow, St Petersburg, Saratov, or Perm´,
the lyrics and settings of these songs would have been mildly strange, but
not too alien to be incomprehensible.66
The same exoticism made Gypsy music highly appealing. Unlike
Ukrainian music, Gypsy song always came with Russian lyrics. Indeed,
L´vov went as far as to claim that ‘without doubt, these Gypsy songs
were composed by Russians’.67 But unlike Ukrainian music, certain
musical devices signalled its Gypsy character. Throughout Europe, Gypsy
music was salon music par excellence by the late nineteenth century: ‘A
63
P.P. Sokal´skii, Malorossiiskie i belorusskie pesni, Moscow and St Petersburg, 1903.
64
This was not always the case. Eroshenko’s collection of Ukrainian songs, for example,
consisted mainly of tunes with Russian texts. Eroshenko, Malorusskie vechera.
65
Edlichka, Sobranie malorusskikh narodnykh pesen.
66
On the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian cultural identities in the
nineteenth century, see Edyta M Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and
Russian Nationalism, Cambridge, MA, 2007, pp. 14–36.
67
Hamrick Brown, Russian Folk Songs, p. 80.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 309
considerable number of — today mostly forgotten, half-professional —
composers, supplying easy pieces for domestic music-making, began to
compose works entitled “Gypsy” fantasies, ballades, caprices, marches,
dances, airs and so on.’68 These songs were published in huge quantities
and stressed emotionality.
The idea of the emotional Gypsy was rooted in Romantic ideas about
the noble savage.69 In the early nineteenth century, Romantic poets such
as Gavrila Derzhavin, Aleksandr Pushkin and others celebrated passionate
Gypsies who seemed to exist beyond the constraints of urban life. This
stereotype, which reached its European-wide zenith with Bizet’s 1875 opera,
Carmen, associated Gypsies with sensuality, wild emotionality, ‘inborn’
and bountiful musical talent, love of freedom and fierce independence.70
Meanwhile, the alleged eroticism of Gypsy women, and the descriptions
of them as sexually ‘available’ combined notions of romantic love and
exotic perversity. As Anna Piotrowska has noted, by consuming such
music, audiences enjoyed voyeuristic pleasure ‘while maintaining a sense
of (apparent) moral superiority over Oriental peoples’.71
Russian Gypsy songs celebrated love and passion unrestrained by
social convention. Pieces such as ‘Otdai mne etu noch´’ (Give Me This
Night), which included the line ‘forget tomorrow’, explicitly expressed
a disregard for societal norms. Another example of such an attitude is
Maksimilian Oseevich (M. O.) Shteinberg’s hugely popular ‘Gai-da Troika
‘(Race, Troika), in which a couple enjoys a sledge ride and the intimacy and
freedom that the distance from others bring with it. However, after a night
only in the company of the shining moon and the sparkling snow, they
return home and thus exchange erotic escapism for societal integration. By
singing a song in a salon about ‘life among the Gypsies’, contemporaries
could for a short while enjoy the fantasy of a life free of social norms and
expectations.72
Musically, Gypsiness was expressed through scales with an augmented
second, an interval commonly associated with musical exoticism in
European culture. Other flamboyant ingredients of Gypsy music included
free accentuation, rich chromatics and ornaments, sudden pauses, multiple
68
Anna G. Piotrowska, ‘“Gypsy Music” as Music of the Other in European Culture’,
Patterns of Prejudice, 47, 2013, pp. p. 396.
69
On orientalism in music see, for example, Derek B. Scott, Musical Style and Social
Meaning: Selected Essays, Farnham, 2010.
70
On the immoral female in Carmen see, McClary, Feminine Endings, pp. 63–68.
71
Piotrowska, ‘Gypsy Music’, p. 401.
72
‘Life among the Gypsies’, was the series title of Gypsy songs brought out by the
publisher K. Leopas.

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310 JULIA MANNHERZ
changes of rhythmic patterns and metres, as well as the use of syncopation,
diminished seventh and dominant chords with augmented fifths. As
scholars have noted, these components were not intended to authentically
reflect the musical practices of the East, but instead met European
expectations of the exotic.73
As I have suggested above, Gypsy music might have allowed
contemporaries a temporary escape from the more rigid norms of
nineteenth-century propriety. But they also contributed to identity
formation through music. While both Ukrainian and Gypsy music offered
otherness — one Western, the other Oriental — neither of these genres was
ultimately so different as to be perceived as foreign. Indeed, the instrumental
exoticism of Gypsy music was toned down considerably in Russian Gypsy
romances. Typical Gypsy instruments — violins, clarinets and cymbals —
gave way to the bourgeois piano, hardly an appropriate instrument for an
itinerant lifestyle; and much of the rhythmic and harmonic otherness of
the genre was equally subdued. The Western quality of Ukrainian music
that L´vov remarked upon in the late eighteenth century had become the
universal musical idiom in Russian towns and cities half a century later. In
this way, both Gypsy and Ukrainian music offered exoticism, but this was
exoticism ‘light’ that could easily be incorporated into a notion of ‘ours’.
Instead of stressing the otherness of these two genres, then, it is
more fruitful to analyse them together with Russian folksong of the
salon setting. The Russian, Ukrainian and Gypsy musical idioms added
national flavouring and by so doing gave rise to a specifically imperial
domestic space.74 This setting acknowledged both the westward and
eastward expansion of the Russian empire, and in a limited fashion it also
represented the country’s heterogeneous linguistic and cultural customs.
The imperial quality of fashionable music was further underlined
by popular Cossack songs. The Cossacks, who as mentioned above also
featured prominently in Ukrainian tunes, were an ethnically diverse group
united by their lifestyle as military settlers and defenders of the empire’s
southern and eastern borders. Because of the Cossacks’ ethnic diversity
and their loyalty to the tsar, they can be regarded as the quintessential
imperial people who combined Russian culture with regional traditions,
and were devoted to an imperial mission.75 Cossack songs consequently

73
Ibid. p. 400; Scott, Musical Style and Social Meaning; Richard Taruskin, ‘“Entoiling
the Falconet”: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4, 1992,
pp. 253–80.
74
For a similar approach in the field of literature, see Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol.
75
On this cultural fusion in Cossack communities see, for example, Willard

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 311
dealt with courage in battle, but also addressed the pain of separation from
loved ones, faithfulness and death.
Cossack song and salon music met, for example, in the work of
Aleksandra Zheleznova.76 Like Edlichka’s or Sokal´skii’s oeuvre, Zheleznova
wrote sentimental salon music and songs inspired by folkloric material.
She adapted folksong to the tastes of urban music lovers when she, together
with her husband, brought out Cossacks songs in 1899. The couple had
collected the tunes in the Orenburg area, where Zheleznov, a Cossack
officer in the Ural Host (uralskie voiska) was based, before harmonizing
and adapting them for piano and voice. The resulting melodies were short
pieces with simple accompaniment, including the broken chords and the
bumjakjak pattern that we encounter so frequently in salon pieces.
The exoticism of border regions also found its way into provincial
middle-class homes through popular art-songs which, like Cossack
melodies, were set on the fringes of the empire. Among the tunes that
amateurs appreciated were ‘V poldnevnyi zhar v doline Dagestana’ (In
the Midday Heat in the Mountains of Dagestan) based on verses by
Mikhail Lermontov, or ‘Khas Bulat’ which musically reworked Aleksandr
Ammosov’s ‘Elegiia’. Both of these songs commemorated the Caucasian
wars of the first half of the nineteenth century and were set in the
mountains inhabited by Muslim tribes. Another tune that amateurs sang
enthusiastically was Aleksei Verstovskii’s musical setting of Pushkin’s
‘Chernaia shal´’ (The Black Shawl). These songs — like Gypsy music —
focused on the exoticism of the empire’s ethnicities and their wild ways.77
The characters encountered by the (most likely) Russian narrator in
‘Chernaia shal´’ are Greek, Jewish and Armenian, while the story itself tells
of passion, betrayal and murder in Bessarabia.
By buying and performing Russian folksongs, Ukrainian melodies,
Gypsy romances and songs set on the empire’s borders, amateur musicians
infused the home with an imperial presence. Catherine Hall, Sonya Rose
and Joanna de Groot have argued, for the British case, that empire was

Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution,
Ithaca, NY and London, 2014, pp. 63–82.
76
Vladimir Zheleznov and Aleksandra Zheleznova, Pesni ural´skikh kazakov, St
Petersburg, 1899. On Zheleznova, see Vsevolod Rukopolev and Eva Öhrström, ‘Alexandra
Zheleznova-Armfelt: Rysk tonsättarinna med rötter i Sverige’, Svensk tidskrift för
musikforskning, 1993, pp. 63–82.
77
Georgii Petrovich Bazilevskii, Son, St Petersburg, 1905; Kristian Genrikh Paufler,
Son: Dlia peniia s soprovozhd. f.-p, Moscow, 1871, reprinted by Jurgenson in 1885; A. V.
Tolstaia, ‘Son: Romans dlia golosa s soprovozhd. f.-p.’, n.d. [1864]; A. N. Verstovskii,
Chernaia zhal´, Moscow, 1888; Pesni: Khas-Bulat i dr, Tiflis, 1911.

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312 JULIA MANNHERZ
taken for granted in everyday lives. Quotidian activities, they note, ‘had
powerful, if implicit associations with patriotism (through the use of
“empire” goods) and exotic pleasures (the glamour of familiar tropical or
oriental products)’. In the British empire, ‘the combination of the domestic
(indigenous rural purity) with the colonial (tropical exotic flavour) […]
had cultural power and impact’.78 The same, I contend, also applies to
nineteenth-century Russia and was in no ways restricted to amateur music.
Niva (The Cornfield), Russia’s most popular illustrated journal with a
faithful readership among the urban middle classes, reported from far-
flung corners of the empire, such as Vladivostok on the pacific ocean, the
Altai mountains bordering China and the steppes stretching all the way
from Ukraine in the west to the Ottoman, Persian and Chinese empires
in the east. Niva — like the Cossack troupes in military terms — thus
discursively defined and consolidated the faraway frontiers of the tsarist
empire. The journal also outlined technological achievement at home and
abroad, discussed Russian history, religion and art, and communicated
developments in the imperial family whilst also depicting chubby babies
and domestic bliss. Patterns of everyday consumption and everyday
activities, such as reading Niva, or playing romansy, brought the empire and
its diversity into provincial drawing rooms and also situated this empire
within the international context of foreign news. Consumption and music-
making thus shaped the imperial selves of readers and musicians. This
process translated the harsh realities of imperial rule into harmonious,
picturesque and pleasing forms.
Shteinberg’s Gai-da Troika is an example of this imperial bricolage. It is
a Gypsy romance set in a Russian wintery scene replete with snow and a
troika, the sledge drawn by three horses which, since Nikolai Gogol´’s novel,
Dead Souls (1842), had become an archetypal symbol of Russia itself. Gai-
da troika was written by the Jewish composer Shteinberg, son of a biblical
scholar and Rabbi from Vilnius and son-in-law to the nationalist composer
Rimskii-Korsakov. The piece was dedicated to the nineteenth-century
Russian general Nikolai Nikolaevich Pushchin and published by the
Petersburg-based music store of the German Julius Heinrich Zimmerman.
Zimmerman, who was also the exclusive purveyor of musical instruments
to the Russian army, advertised Gai-da Troika as part of a series of songs
sung by the famous performer of Gypsy tunes, Anastasiia Vialtseva.

78
Joanna de Groot, ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on
Consumption and Empire’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds), At Home with the
Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge, 2006, p. 170.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 313
Musically, Gai-da troika contains many of the ingredients that signified
exoticism to Western audiences: syncopations and dotted notes, stark
rhythmic changes and a C minor section with raised fourths, i.e. with a
harmonic setting that corresponded to Franz Liszt’s understanding of a
Gypsy scale. But Shteinberg also used elements that were characteristic
of salon repertoire: Gai-da troika is to be played in tempo di valse, it
contains many grace notes, which according to Ballstaedt were ‘the
epitome of the sentimental expression in salon music’.79 Moreover, the
left-hand accompaniment of Gai-da troika consists of one strong chord
followed by two identical weaker ones, i.e. the bumjakjak pattern that
we have already encountered in pieces by Edlichka and Zheleznova.80
In Shteinberg’s song therefore, Russian imperial greatness (general,
Zimmerman’s army connection) was combined with Eastern exoticism
(Gypsy music), Russianness (troika, winter, Rimskii-Korsakov), Central
European Jews and Western culture (piano, Zimmerman, tempo di valse).
The popularity of Ukrainian songs can equally be seen to express
approval of the imperial project. Faith Hillis has recently argued that
support for ‘little Russian’ (i.e. Ukrainian) culture was first and foremost
an expression of an imperial mentalité that stressed the harmony between
the empire’s people and was directed against the national aspirations of the
Poles.81 In the long run, however, the ‘little Russian lobby’, as Hillis calls the
activists advancing Ukrainian culture, consolidated a sense of Ukrainian
otherness that contributed to the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism and
undermined the stability of the empire.
Yet, as the piano and Shteinberg’s waltz tempo illustrates, salon music in
Russia was from its very beginnings also part of larger European cultural
developments. Not only was folksong adapted for the salon setting to the
harmonic and rhythmic structures of Western music and accompanied on
pianos, printed folksongs and other salon fare came with universal Italian
instructions such as allegro, ritardando or mezzo forte.
Yet Western musical culture was even more visible (and audible) in
Russian salons when contemporaries sang adaptations from operas.
Russian publishers, of course, sold arias with piano accompaniment taken
from the works of Glinka, Rimskii-Korsakov, Chaikovskii and Verstovskii;
but they also brought out popular tunes lifted from operas by Donizetti,
79
Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik, p. 330.
80
Ibid. p. 264.
81
Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian
Nation, Ithaca, NY, 2013. Edyta Bojanowska similarly situates the topos of Ukrainianness
in Russian literature within an imperial context. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol.

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314 JULIA MANNHERZ
Rossini, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Mozart and Wagner. Jurgenson, for example,
sold the Souvenir de l’Opéra series, which allowed customers to obtain
well-known operatic arias for a comparably modest price of 15 or 20
kopeks.82 All pieces in the series came with the original Italian, French or
German libretti, but also offered alternative Russian translations. As the
pricing and the translations indicate, these publications were marketed
for Russian customers, yet on the cover of the individual arias, the content
and the publishing house were exclusively advertised in French. Even if the
opera lovers who eventually obtained these publications chose to sing the
arias in their native Russian, the series’ cosmopolitan character allowed
them to stress their own worldliness and international sophistication.
In addition to these operatic adaptations, Jurgenson and other publishers
also sold gallops, waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, tangos and cake-walks for
piano, i.e. French, Polish and American dances. In a salon, music lovers
might perform and listen to a potpourri of Ukrainian song, Gypsy love
and Italian passion, before impersonating French courtesans, Italian
nobles, Spanish aristocrats, German knights, Nubian princesses or Dutch
sailors, and even trying a few tango steps. In addition to this multi-cultural
bricolage, the national identities of dances were often ambivalent, if not
outright confused, as a particular Troika, a ‘Russian polka’ composed by
the Frenchman Georges Hauser illustrates.83
Amateur music-making, then, was not only infused with the national
as expressed in Russian patriotic operas or folksongs. The commercial
success of folksong was from its origins also part of a musical culture that
situated the Russian within a larger imperial and international context, and
often amalgamated all three. The different types of music that sounded in
Russian homes, then, simultaneously gave rise to imperial, national and
cosmopolitan sentiments.84 Even if the fictional Polovodov forced himself
to appreciate his wife’s performance of Russian folksongs, there was no
getting away from French chansonettes.
It is, of course, possible that individual amateur musicians restricted
themselves to one of the various genres on offer. Personal accounts about

82
Souvenir de l’Opéra: Choix d’airs, romances, duettinos, tios, quatuors, etc. Avec des
paroles italiennes et russes ou russes et allemandes ou françaises, Moscow, n.d.
83
Bal XX-ogo veka: Sobranie samykh liubimykh i novykh salonnykh i natsional´nykh
tantsev iz repertuara pianistov, St Petersburg, n.d.
84
I disagree with Marie Sumner Lott here, who argues that Scottish, Hungarian and
Czech songs in the German musical repertoire signify that contemporaries implied that
those cultures ‘belong together in one German collective’. Marie Sumner Lott, The Social
Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities,
Urbana, IL, 2015, p. 76.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 315
musical practice, however, indicate that such selectivity — if it existed —
must have been the exception rather than the rule. Elena Valerianovna
Diagileva (stepmother to the impresario Sergei) remembered how she and
her future husband enthusiastically intoned Gypsy romances alongside
operatic arias, played dances on the piano and even staged a Ukrainian
opera at home in the 1880s and 1890s.85 Norin, the violinist from Perm´
who played piano trios with his wife and daughters, also sang Pushkin’s
‘Chernaia Shal´’.86 The papers of Aleksandr Dmitrievich Gorodtsov, a
choir conductor and public figure in Perm´, contain hand-written music
that include all the types of music of Russian salon entertainment: a
simple piano piece, the Seufzerwalzer (Sigh waltz) by the Austrian-
Romanian composer Josif Ivanovici, Ukrainian folksongs, Glinka’s setting
of Pushkin’s ‘Roza’ (The Rose) and a ‘Hungarian Csárdás’, a dance which
contemporaries would have equated with Gypsy music.87 Gorodtsov was
also a lover of Russian and Cossack songs and we can assume that these
were also intoned in his home.88
The most complete insight into a music lover’s repertoire can be gleaned
from the notebooks of Efim Artem´ev Sal´nikov, a resident of Perm´ and
graduate of the city’s middle school (uezdnoe uchilishche). His papers
indicate that Sal´nikov, who was of modest peasant-estate background
and born around 1883, was an inquisitive man whose interests expressed
middle-class values. He had an interest in folklore and collected songs and
stories from the age of fifteen, and was also fascinated by international
technological inventions.89 In 1900, Sal´nikov filled five pages of his
notebook under the rubric, ‘I know the following songs’. The 148 titles in
his inventory include Russian folksongs, romansy based on the verses of
Russian poets, arias taken from the operas of Rimskii-Korsakov, Verdi
and Verstovskii, Cossack songs, Ukrainian songs, Gypsy songs, Russian,
French and Bulgarian marches. Like his contemporaries, Sal´nikov sang
‘Chernaia shal´’, ‘V podnevnyi zhar v doline Dagestana’, ‘Khaz bulat’
and ‘Solntse nizenko’, while three of his Cossack songs also appear in
Zheleznova’s collection.90 Geographically, Sal´nikov’s songs mentioned the
85
Diagileva, Semeinaia sapis´, pp. 72, 77–80.
86
GKBUK PKM, No. POKM-NV-2896/3. p. l.4.
87
GAPK, F. 690, op. 1, d. 76.
88
GAPK, F. 690, op. 1, d. 79. Russian and Ukrainian songs were prominent in the
repertoire of Gorodtsov’s choirs GAPK, F. 690, op.1, d.33. p. l.2ob-l.2o3.
89
His papers contain, among other things, a list of ‘Discoveries and inventions of
the nineteenth century’, and a list of his teachers. GKBUK PKM, No. POKM 2125/4, p.
unpaginated.
90
‘Solntse za lese zakatilos´’, ‘Kak po moriu’, ‘Dolina dolinushka’.

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316 JULIA MANNHERZ
local trade fair in Irbit, the Ural moutains, but also the Caucasus, Nizhnyi
Novgorod, Iaroslav, Moscow, St Petersburg, the rivers Volga, Kazanka,
Neva and Don, as well as lake Baikal. Sal´nikov’s repertoire then, like Niva,
outlined the reaches of the empire. Indeed, some of his songs describe
battles against the Ottoman empire or Cossacks guarding the frontier and
thus very explicitly delineate the empire’s borders.
Unlike the catalogues of printing houses and the musical repertoire of
Gorodtsov, Sal´nikov’s list also contains numerous prisoners’ songs and
tunes about exile, which sit awkwardly next to the monarchical tunes he
also sang. It is, however, quite possible that numerous Russians sang such
songs, even if censors ensured that they were not published or performed
publicly. Sal´nikov’s patriotic tunes, such as ‘Bozhe Tsaria khrani’ (God
Save the Tsar) or ‘Slava na nebe’ (Glory in Heaven), are, moreover, at odds
with the international songs he clearly loved, such as Italian arias, a song
about Spain, a French march, or a romans based on verses by the Irish
poet Charles Wolfe. Taken together, however, it is striking how similar
Sal´nikov’s repertoire is to the print output of publishing houses.
Tara Zahra has recently suggested that the populations of European
empires were frequently indifferent to nationalism.91 It is tempting to
assume that salon music, with its bricolage of national, imperial and
international voices, is an instance of this national disinterest. After all,
contemporaries sang songs about imperial campaigns alongside tunes that
required them to take on the roles of Russian or Ukrainian peasants, Gypsy
travellers, prisoners and exiles, or Western European nobles. Performing
these different roles themselves, or watching family members intone their
voices, required music lovers to identify more deeply with these diverse
figures than an audience would have done with the musical heroes on a
spatially separated operatic stage.
Nonetheless, the patriotism and conservatism of Russia’s middling
sort should not be dismissed too quickly. Monarchism, as expressed
in Sal´nikov’s patriotic hymns, illustrated journals, urban celebrations,
imperial portraits in private homes or memoirs, was truly felt. And of
course, the salon repertoire also invited music lovers to relate to Russian
national heroes, such as Cossack soldiers, or the seventeenth-century
peasant Ivan Susanin and hero of Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar.
Moreover, the tolerance of ethnic otherness remained limited to relatable
Ukrainian themes and Gypsy tunes. The songs of ethnic minorities that
mainstream imperial culture regarded as irredeemably alien, such as
91
Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of
Analysis’, Slavic Review, 69, 2010, pp. 93–119.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 317
Jewish Klezmer music — a popular export item of the Russian empire to
audiences in the New World around the turn of the century — was not
consumed by ordinary amateur musicians in the Russian empire; nor did
the pentatonic harmonies of the empire’s Muslim population enter the
common middle-class salon.92 Even those songs that seemingly challenged
authority, such as prison songs or tunes about the lonely deaths of soldiers
in Dagestan’s mountains, did not necessarily undermine the approval of
the political status quo; nor did romansy that lamented the pain of lovers
seriously question the social norms that stood in the way of these amorous
unions. Even if such songs introduced a careful fantasy about alternative
possibilities, this vision was quickly abandoned as song texts ensured that
singers embraced a form of fatalism that wallowed in sorrow and celebrated
the power of destiny. When enemies were defeated or adventurers returned
home, sentimental songs reinforced imperialism, autocracy and the values
of patriarchy.93
Yet the musical patriotism of the Russian salon was not quintessentially
ethnic Russian, but instead allowed the expression of a dynastic imperial
loyalty. For many amateur musicians, singing Russian, Ukrainian and
Gypsy songs might thus have offered the possibility to express an
imperial identity which, as Mark Bassin argues, was central to Russian
nationalism.94 According to Taruskin, the orientalism of Russian opera and
art song expressed clear support for imperial expansion; and like Bassin,
Taruskin identifies an expression of Russian superiority in this appeal of
the exotic.95 While some Russian amateur musicians might indeed have
felt superior to members of ethnic minorities, this conclusion seems to be
both too quick and too sweeping in relation to amateur music-making.
The message of salon music, with its combination of Russian, Eastern and
Western components, was more complex. There was no clear juxtaposition
of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in this repertoire, and Russian, Ukrainian, exotic or
indeed international themes remained open to straightforward serious
performance as well as to ironic subversion. Salon music, therefore, did not
92
The Gramophone Company, for example, recorded numerous tracks of Klezmer
music in the Russian empire for its American market. John R. Bennett, A Catalogue
of Vocal Recordings from the Russian Catalogues of the Gramophone Company Limited
Obshchestvo Grammofon c OGR. OTV. 1899–1915, Blandford, MA, 1977, pp. 15, 157.
93
A similar point is made by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva in The Worlds
of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise, Madison, WI, 2012. I
would also like to thank Anna Ljunggren for drawing my attention to the importance of
fatalism.
94
Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion
in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 11–13.
95
Taruskin, ‘Entoiling the Falconet’.

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318 JULIA MANNHERZ
clearly juxtapose national, imperial or cosmopolitan identities, but instead
enabled a combination of all three. The amateur repertoire thus created the
aural equivalent to the Saratov home decorator who hung an oil painting
of Napoleon next to the images of a tsar and his tsarina and enjoyed the
aesthetic result.
Within the diverse national and cosmopolitan messages that the
different musical genres offered, connotations of domestic comfort,
bourgeois propriety and middle-class ideals about graceful feminity
remained strong. Amateur musicians throughout the empire practised
and performed entertaining pieces in carefully decorated drawing rooms.
They chose the music they made freely, enjoyed their own artistic abilities
proudly and felt the emotions that they could convey through their pieces
intensely. Amateur musicians also situated their domestic performances
within the cultural landscape of their local towns, and they placed them
within the wider empire and in international contexts. Of vital importance
within this setting was that these pieces allowed for pleasant entertainment,
and stood for time passed in a leisurely fashion.
Yet the light-hearted character and conceptual ambiguity of the salon
was precisely why the intellectual guardians of ideological commitment
and artistic taste were not prepared to appreciate the aesthetic jumble,
the dogmatic confusion and the moral ambiguity of salon music, and
declared it artistically wanting and driven by the greed of publishers. The
piano playing of bourgeois girls and women was decried as banal at best,
but more frequently described as worryingly tasteless.96 According to V.
Morkov writing in 1859, Russian girls only learned to play the ‘vulgar tunes
of a few Italian operas’.97 Almost half a century later, Anton Chekhov used
Tekla Bądarzewska’s hugely popular salon piece, ‘Prayer of a Maiden’, in his
play Three Sisters (1901) as a metaphor for the uninspired life from which
his characters longed to escape.98 Three years after him, Vera Shtokman,
although pleased about the popularity of the piano, bemoaned that the girls
who operated this instrument played mostly ‘light salon pieces, fashionable
dances etc.’. This ability, she concluded, ‘might provide a girl with an
opportunity to succeed in polite society but from musical education she
remains far removed’.99 Morkov’s and Shtokman’s contemporary views
96
The juxtaposition of the aristocratic salon as artistically sophisticated versus the
bourgeois one as aesthetically and socially limiting is a long-lived concept. This idea is, for
example, stated but not established in Öhrström, Klaveret, notboken.
97
Morkov, ‘O musykal´nom obrazovanie v Rossii’. On intellectual dismay in the face of
female amateur pianists, see also Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, pp. 21, 197.
98
A. P. Chekhov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v trekh tomakh, Moscow, 1967, p. 542.
99
Vera Shtokman, ‘Neskol´ko slov o muzykal´nom obrazovanie’, Gitarist, 1904, pp.

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 AMATEUR MUSIC-MAKING IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 319
have survived in the scholarly literature. In the words of Soviet scholar
Boris Vol´man, the popularity of salon pieces in general and of Gypsy song
in particular constituted an ‘avalanche of vulgarity that descended onto
the [late imperial] market of printed music’.100 Irrespective of whether or
not this commercially successful salon music only appealed to women (and
there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it did not), the association of the
genre with the fair sex, with amateur activity and with a domestic setting
meant it could easily be rejected as artistically insignificant.
Publishers and the many owners of music stores in St Petersburg,
Moscow, Saratov, Perm´ and other provincial towns throughout the
empire, however, could not have dismissed salon music as unimportant.
It was vital for the financial success of their enterprises. In a letter to the
composer Milii Balakirev, Boris Petrovich Jurgenson (son and heir to
the founder of the publishing house) acknowledged in 1908 that he did
not regard popular songs as artistically meaningful. But, he added, ‘you
know that some of these [Gypsy] romansy sell 10 times as much in one
or two years as works by you, Chaikovskii and our other great composers
do in decades’.101 Jurgenson and his competitors could not have run
successful firms without catering to the taste of amateur musicians. Yet if
we take the commercial success of these pieces seriously, we also have to
acknowledge that salon pieces were the music that most contemporaries
made and heard. With this in mind, we should reassess the allegedly
national or cosmopolitan character of nineteenth-century Russian musical
culture. Rather than these binary opposites, internationalism and ethnic
heterogeneity within a domestic setting were the defining features of the
empire’s musical identity.102

8–9. Oleg V. Timofeyev, ‘The Golden Age of the Russian Guitar: Repertoire, Performance
Practice, and Social Function of the Russian Seven-String Guitar Music, 1800–1850’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1999, p. 337; Vera Shtokman, ‘Pis´mo v
redaktsiiu’, Gitarist, 1904, p. 8.
100
Vol´man, Russkie notnye izdaniia, p. 173. In a similar vein, the New Grove, the most
authoritative English-language reference work on music, suggests that M. O. Shteinberg,
author of Gai-da Troika, only composed serious music, thus disassociating him from
the seemingly embarrassing salon genre. Grove Music Online (GMO) <http://www.
oxfordmusiconline.com> [accessed 14 September 2015].
101
A. S. Liapunova (ed.), Perepiska s notoizdatel´stvom P. Jurgensona, Moscow, 1958,
p. 287.
102
Edyta Bojanowska has made a similar point in relation to Russian literature.
Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol, pp. 26, 377.

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