Many
of the recordings featured here represent the gypsy repertory--
heart-rending songs of passionate, often hopeless love. "Gypsy"only in
the Russian imagination, the genre brought a whole range of improper,
seemingly "uncivilized" emotions into the popular idiom. Of the leading
performers, only Varya Panina could claim gypsy origins, but she as
well
as Tamara Tseretelli (a Georgian), Nadezhda Plevitskaya and Anastasia
Vyaltseva made the genre a mainstay of popular culture.
- National
identity figured prominently in other music as well. Grechanin's sad
song of the steppe was a more explicitly Russian brand of melancholy,
set in the vast geographic expanse of the empire's interior. Stepanov's
vaudeville act satirizes the Jewish residents of the Empire, who
represented a significant other for comics and many other Russians.
Finally, the Andreev Russian Balalaika Orchestra, which eventually won
the
patronage of the Romanov Court, symbolized a kinder, more bucolic, if
less grounded version of Russian nationality and culture. A
historically peasant instrument which the peasantry had abandoned by
the twentieth century, the balalaika was resurrected and "improved"
into an orchestral instrument by Andreev.
Imperial Russian Balalaika Court Orchestra, W. W.
Andreev, Conductor. Remembrance of
Gatchina,Valse. [1911]
