On our way back from our first trip up north to San Luis Obispo, my wife and I made a brief stop in Santa Barbara for lunch. As we approached our exit, we saw the overpasses approaching our destination festooned with Ukrainian flags. Shortly before we made the turn to our destination, in fact, there was a street corner that had probably at least about two-dozen such flags of various sizes planted about. It was the spring of 2022, war-euphoria was running high and, as a result, all kinds of bellicose sentiments—hysterical and cynical, often expressed simultaneously—proliferated. Cultural chauvinism of the likes not seen since the days of “freedom fries” had returned with a vengeance.[1] The kind of atmosphere that could contrive the arrest of a Karl Muck no longer seemed to belong to a remote past.[2]
Whatever good there is in Russian culture, one typically hears now, is actually Ukrainian.[3] Anything that remains is best to be put under “mental quarantine.”[4] Occasionally these tendencies clash, as seen in the continuing debate about the museum in Kiev honoring Mikhail Bulgakov; a native son opposed to Ukraine’s independence.[5][6] These came to mind recently while listening to a forthcoming CD of chamber music by three “Ukrainian masters”; its program illustrative of the simplistic, if perhaps well-intended revisionism that currently shows no signs of abating.
On the face of it, the music of Sergei Bortkiewicz seems to be an odd battlefield for proxy cultural wars. Born to Russian and Polish aristocrats in the city of Kharkov, then part of Russia, Bortkiewicz was a talented pianist whose music briefly gained notice, before revolution and two devastating world wars led to its consequent oblivion for several decades. At its best, such as heard in the Violin Sonata, Op. 26 included on this album, Bortkiewicz’s sub-Rachmaninoffian music is attractive and gently entrancing, if not necessarily the ultimate in authorial distinction.
Given that modern Ukraine is still in the process of nation-building, Bortkiewicz has understandably been appropriated as a notable figure in the development of its academic music—an outcome that would have mystified the composer himself. As studies by Jeremiah A. Johnson[7] and Ishioka Chihiro[8] have demonstrated, Bortkiewicz identified as Russian, his music a product of Russia and its culture. He was hostile to the notion of Ukraine apart from Russia, as his remarks on the Ukrainian language, recorded in his memoirs, testifies:
[It] is simply a dialect of Russian, its differences comparable to that between High and Low German. Why nationalist renegades insist that Ukrainian is its own language and must be used in South Russia I will never understand.[9]
Bortkiewicz throughout his life referred to his homeland as “Little Russia” or “South Russia,”[10] among many now deprecated terms that continue to resonate with partisan undertones; at one point he called it “the so-called Ukraine.”[11] He was also considered Russian by his colleagues and, unpropitiously, by the NSDAP; disastrous for a musician whose career, already in decline by the 1930s, took place mostly within German-speaking lands. To his chagrin, fellow Russian émigrés often considered him not one of their own, not even Ukrainian, but Polish because of his mother’s ancestry.[12]
Like Rachmaninoff, whom he admired,[13] Bortkiewicz fled his native land from the Bolsheviks, never again to return. Formerly a teacher at the Kharkov Conservatory, he was designated by the authorities of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets as a “bourgeois” and fired from his post. Unable to work and stripped of his property, Bortkiewicz’s later hatred of Bolshevism and socialism hardly comes as a surprise. Compounding his woes amidst the chaos that erupted from the October Revolution and Russian Civil War, his mother died—a devastating personal loss. Decades later as an exile in Vienna doubly estranged from his homeland, physically and culturally, his grief-saturated fury is palpable in portions of his memoirs that condemned the 1917 reforms of the Russian language as perversions that he likened to the “cacophony” of atonal music, and blamed an “immature” Russian civil society incapable of meeting the ideals of its culture for the collapse of the empire sustained by the House of Romanov.[14]
A man of mixed heritage, who identified entirely with one nation, but whose music (including works titled with “Russian” descriptors) is permeated by the influence of another he routinely denigrated,[15] his legacy now bitterly fought over: “Bortkiewicz” is practically a synecdoche for the blood feuds that continue to fester in Eastern Europe, even over matters that may seem befuddlingly trivial to outsiders. Whether he would have cared to acknowledge it or not, the composer was very “Ukrainian” after all; albeit in an unexpected sense peculiar to his birthplace, its complex history of overlapping and competing ethnic communities, and in spite of those who wish to sequestrate his bequest wholly for their preferred team.
A May 2022 op-ed by Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times was typical—both of the delirious pro-Ukraine mood at the time and his writing in general—in that it managed to get the facts right, yet entirely miss the point:[16] political boundaries and identities are things often imposed in spite of reality, especially in Eastern Europe; a hard lesson the Archduke Franz Ferdinand learned along with the rest of the world one fateful day in Sarajevo. Acceptance of the other, including that within ourselves: there is entangled within Bortkiewicz, his music, and its legacy, another lesson—if we choose to listen.
Notes
[1]: Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. (March 12, 2003). “Threats and Responses: Washington Talk; An Order of Fries, Please, But Do Hold the French”. New York Times. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/us/threats-responses-washington-talk-order-fries-please-but-hold-french.html.
[2]: Burrage, Melissa D. (2019). The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America. University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-950-0. Page 171. (The tale of the hapless German conductor’s eventual arrest, internment, and deportation—a result of nationalist paranoia, xenophobia, personal intrigues, and a servile press—continues to have a familiar ring.)
[3]: Swed, Mark. (May 12, 2022). “Commentary: What is Ukrainian music, and what does it say about the war?”. Los Angeles Times. URL: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-05-12/commentary-what-is-ukrainian-music-and-what-does-it-say-about-the-war.
[4]: Stiazhkina, Olena. (May 16, 2023). “Great Russian Culture: Canceling, Boycotting, Quarantine”. TORCH. Oxford Research Center of the Humanities. URL: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/article/great-russian-culture-cancelling-boycotting-quarantine. (That the authoritarianism and, therefore, bloodlust for the sake of a “good cause” implicit in this text—to say nothing of its explicit reduction of an entire civilization as verminous and irredeemably destructive Untermenschen—are increasingly mainstream sentiments ought to give pause, whatever one’s sympathies in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.)
[5]: Harding, Luke. (December 31, 2022). “‘Propaganda literature’: calls to close Mikhail Bulgakov museum in Kyiv”. The Guardian. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/31/mikhail-bulgakov-museum-kyiv-calls-to-close
[6]: (June 3, 2023). “Kyiv culture war leaves famous Russian writer red-faced”. France24. Agence France-Presse. URL: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230603-kyiv-culture-war-leaves-famous-russian-writer-red-faced.
[7]: Johnson, Jeremiah A. (October 2016). “Echoes of the Past: Stylistic and Compositional Influences in the Music of Sergei Bortkiewicz”. University of Nebraska—Lincoln: Student Research, Creative Activity, and Performance—School of Music. 114. URL: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicstudent/114.
[8]: Ishioka, Chihiro. (June 15, 2017). “セルゲイ・ボルトキエヴィチ研究 〜自筆資料に基づく生涯・音楽観・ピアノ作品の考察〜”. [“A Study of Sergei Bortkiewicz: His Life, Musical Views, and Piano Works Based on the Manuscripts”]. (in Japanese). [Doctoral dissertation, Tokyo College of Music]. URL: https://tokyo-ondai.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/1080.
[9]: Ibid, p. 97.
[10]: Johnson 2016, p. 18.
[11]: Ibid, p. 5.
[12]: Ibid, p. 26
[13]: Ibid, p. 75.
[14]: Ishioka 2017, p. 98.
[15]: Johnson 2016, p. 42.
[16]: Swed 2022. (With respect to Swed, never one to pass up a chance to say a whole lot of nothing, his op-ed is a characteristic also-ran of pre-determined opinions—which arrive to him fourth-hand after being regurgitated and accepted as consensus by other approved commentators—topped with a frosting of factual errors that one never quite knows whether they are borne from laziness or are calculated piques intended to wake up his readers, whom he otherwise would leave snoring. Among the latter is the statement that Stravinsky’s mother was “Ukrainian.” She was not, but Gavriil Nosenko, the composer’s maternal uncle by marriage, was. Nosenko was also, incidentally, the father of Igor’s cousin Yekaterina, who later became his first wife. Claims of Stravinsky’s “Ukrainian” ancestry are relatively recent. See Walsh, Stephen. (1999). Stravinsky—A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-679-41484-3. Pages 6; 552, note 17.)