Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

Russian operas. He concentrates on different types of creative personalities and
worldviews in Russian operatic world.
Another important aspect is methodological. Asaf’ev questions the traditional means of
analysing music. According to him, research needs to be conducted in respect to the
peculiarities of the object and not according to some past trends. This trait connects him
in a sense to the Russian Formalist scholars. In his analysis he tries to re-evaluate the
Russian musical past and to indicate new perspectives for the musicological study.
Within that Asaf’ev already grounds his study on different composers such as Glinka.
Glinka remained dear to Asaf’ev throughout his career. However his monography on
Glinka was not published until in 1947. In it, Asaf’ev presents an extensive analysis on
Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ljudmila 288 .
In Symphonic Etudes Asaf’ev states that for example Glinka was a genious musician but
not as big thinker and philosopher as Wagner who was able to reflect enormous
idelogical constructions. For that reason, many people have disappointed to Glinka’s
diaries since his ideas are not as big as his music. However, Asaf’ev notes that the
grandiosity of Glinka’s music is not tied to his diaries but to life. 289 He concludes that in
order to understand the setting of Ruslan and Ljudmila one must be precise when
dealing with the music and the people (Glinka’s contemporaries) of time period i.e.,
reconstruct the Russian musical way of life in detail 290 . Asaf’ev writes that Glinka’s
gradiosity is attainable through an empathy with his music and sensible through an
intuitition 291 . Thus in his study Asaf’ev fuses the concepts of Lipps and Losskij/Bergson
concepts on music. He states:
One can compile a table form calcultion with a help of Glinka’s diaries and letters, but
the more powerful evaluation of life and beauty is totally another thing. It is hard to reach
what Glinka felt and how he lived. His music is simply something that has to be trusted.
It is impossible to evaluate one’s life completly [..] one must believe and the one who
288
See Asaf’ev, Boris V. Glinka. Moscow: Muzgiz, 1950.
289
Asaf’ev: Simf.E 1970, pp. 22–23.
290
Ibid., p. 17.
291
In order to understand Glinka’s music he emphasizes importance of empathy with the psychological
basis of the musical style, “penetrating into the world view of Glinka’s characters (Ibid., pp. 17–18). “-we
sense intuitively the greatness of the work --” (Ibid., p. 24).
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