The Mighty Handful set before themselves the goal of producing a Russian classical music, a tradition liberated from the mimetic anxiety of European influence. I am not qualified to comment on the music itself: it all sounds ‘good’, but the minutiae of tone and movement are topics best left to others. I would, however, like to examine some of the themes chosen by the Handful for their music, themes that, when considered together, outline the Handful’s Romantic conception of ‘Russianness’.

The ‘Russia’ for which the Mighty Handful aim to forge a classical tradition is at once geographically expansive and culturally consistent. Alexander Borodin’s ‘Russia’ can encompass the steppes of (recently acquired) Central Asia, thus reifying ‘the Orient’ into an object for Russian cultural production. Meanwhile, Mussogorsky’s ‘Russia’ stretches west into a distant and mythologized past: the Great (Golden) Gate of Kiev is suspended between the new Romantic language of the present and the romanticized mists of the Kievan Rus past.  Between these geographical extremes, Russian culture and a ‘Russian tradition’ is expressed almost wholly through the lense of folk culture, or variants upon it. The folktale-uncanny is a source of wonder and inspiration, as shown by Mussogorsky’s ‘Baba Yaga’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ (a narrative of the darkly fantastic, as discussed by John in his post.) Religion is a source of material as well, both in its ‘public’ forms (through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Easter Overture) and in its ‘folk’ forms (through Liadov’s Religious Chant and Carol). In Liadov and Glinka, folk motifs abound, while Balakirev’s choice of theme brings all the strands together: Russia.

In creating a new musical language for the Russian tradition, these composers operate upon a diverse and malleable symbolic language. The ‘Russia’ they evoke can be Oriental or ancient-European, folk-occult or overtly religious. For these composers, Romanticism offers a palette both stylized in content and opaque in meaning.