In the wake of political revolution, economic upheaval and social unrest, contemporaries of all eras find ways to examine the social ills inflicting humanity, understand their causes, and seek their immediate resolution. The cultural elite of late-Imperial Russia were no exception to this rule. In a ground-breaking analysis of cultural life in the lead up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Rebecca Mitchell’s monograph Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire explores how and why music became seen as a force through which to overcome the social, economic and political divides across the Russian Empire. More specifically, Mitchell’s theoretical lens focuses on the cultural discourses around ‘musical metaphysics’; the core underpinning of this worldview claimed that music was ‘the ultimate transformative and unifying force, capable of overcoming the division of modern life and ushering in a new stage in human history’ (p. 3). Within this broad outlook of ‘overcoming’ (a Nietzschean concept in itself), an Orpheus figure – reincarnated in the form of a composer – was to appear before the musical masses to usher in a higher spiritual order and bridge the social gap between the narod (lit. ordinary people) and the educated elite. Although Russia’s cultural intelligentsia remained philosophically indebted to the intellectual frameworks developed by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Mitchell asserts they were orphans in the sense that they rejected Nietzsche’s anti-Christian and amoral values, which produced multiple and diverse Russian conceptions of musical life, culture and identity.

While Nietzsche’s Orphans fits into a broader trajectory of scholarship that has examined Nietzsche’s influence in Imperial and Soviet Russia, Mitchell adds a musical dimension to these studies by outlining how Russian intellectual thought collided and meshed with German romantic philosophy to create a unique musical identity in this period.Footnote ¹ In this way, this book is significant in that it complements recent scholarship in overcoming traditional historical boundaries between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods, through tracing a discursive ‘metaphysical’ lineage across 1917, and it simultaneously seeks to highlight Russia’s continued engagement with European intellectual thought. Mitchell’s study also complements recent cultural studies that explore the history of emotions; music and its association, positive or negative, with the human lived experience was a significant cause of anxiety and hope in this pre-revolutionary period marred by war and revolution.Footnote ² By interrogating the metaphysical worldview through cultural discourses, Mitchell recreates a world in which the utopian optimism, disillusioned visions and troubled anxieties plagued the thoughts and views of a diverse musico-aesthetic community – Nietzsche’s Orphans.

In her first chapter, Mitchell convincingly sets out the intellectual grounding of her term ‘musical metaphysics’. There are three distinct trends to this worldview. First, music was seen to create social unity: Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian concept of ‘unity’ merged with the Russian religious understanding of ‘theurgy’ (teurgiia) – art’s ability to transform life – and ‘communality’ (sobornost’) (p. 32). Second, music was seen to transcend time, which counterbalanced German visions of historical progress and decline that was seen to be linked to a linear conception of time (i.e. new technological innovations and scientific discoveries that helped to make time and space objective and standardized).Footnote ³ The third key theme resides in the search for a musical ‘genius’, which was reflected through the image of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the Christian messianic imagery of Orpheus. Yet, as Mitchell demonstrates, while Nietzschean thought provided the intellectual basis for interpreting music’s meaning, this developed in new and exciting ways. Most importantly, Mitchell identifies three contradictions inherent in musical metaphysics:

While the cultural elite were beholden by a shared vision of social transformation through music, they disagreed fundamentally on the ways in which this transformative process should be achieved.

In the following three chapters (2, 3 and 4 respectively), Mitchell presents individual case studies – Aleksandr Scriabin, The Medtners (Nikolai and Emilii), and Sergei Rachmaninoff – to explore the contradictory and complex application of ‘musical metaphysics’ in action. Seen by many as a Russian Orpheus, Scriabin was philosophically obsessed with creating unity through music, transcending time and space, and moving beyond the ‘individualistic and materialist limitations of life’ (p. 66). As expected, Scriabin’s worldview filtered into his theoretical approach towards music. He proposed the ‘mystic’ (or Prometheus) chord to overcome division: major-minor tonality would be resolved, melody and harmony would be unified, and the concepts of consonance and dissonance would coexist and unite in the single ‘mystic’ chord. Yet, according to Mitchell, the complexity of his musical language was not for art’s sake, but based on his search for new sensations or feelings (expressed musically); according to the Moscow composer Mikhail Gnesin, Scriabin was not concerned with new harmonies per se, but rather ‘“new sensations [oshchushchenie]”’ – ‘what do you feel here?’ (p. 76), Scriabin would ask Gnesin. While Scriabin’s supporters embraced him as symbol of musical progress and spiritual rebirth, his critics declared that he represented extreme individualism, decadence and historical decline. Despite disagreement within the various factions over Scriabin (even those who rejected Scriabin’s significance as an Orphic figure), Nietzsche’s orphans were bound by the ‘same intellectual framework’ (p. 102) in their discursive battles to make sense of their cultural world.

The Medtners are the focus of the third chapter, specifically Nikolai and Emilii’s shared views on musical metaphysics and Russo-German musical identity. Engaging from the start, this chapter opens with Anna – Nikolai’s wife – and her recollections of Nikolai’s musical nightmares. Waking in the night from music-related night terrors, she recalled, Nikolai ‘“continued to insist that ‘they’ had entered [the room] and were standing there in the corner, and that [I] had not driven them away”’ (p. 104). Although Nikolai spoke of his inability to achieve unity through music, his goal eventually was to ‘overcome the break of modernity … I still believe that this is my primary calling’. (p. 105). Despite Nikolai’s vision to transform the lived reality through music, both brothers posited ways to overcome a perceived crisis of modernity through a Russian embrace of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century German cultural past. While Nikolai dreamt of melodic unity and emphasized the spiritual commonalities between German and Imperial Russian musical cultures, Emilii’s vision emphasized German cultural achievements in conjunction with a racial interpretation of contemporary Europe, claiming that the ‘foreign’ Jews were polluting the Aryan ‘roots’ connecting together Russian and German culture (p. 128). Even though both brothers posited their own interpretations of a new German-Russian musical identity, Nikolai’s German identity was progressively viewed as being problematic at a time of anti-German sentiment.

Lastly, Sergei Rachmaninoff faced a similar contradiction in his ability to be the next Russian Orpheus. While some saw Rachmaninoff’s popularity with Russian audiences as a bridge between educated elite and the public, many of Nietzsche’s orphans distrusted Rachmaninoff’s music because of his crowd-pleasing popularity and conservative musical idiom. Indeed, many of Nietzsche’s orphans considered Rachmaninoff’s music to contain elements of pessimism, sadness, melancholy and gloominess. Much of the discussion around Rachmaninoff, according to Mitchell, centred on ‘the sort of emotions that Rachmaninoff’s music seemed to awake in contemporary audiences’ and was a reflection of the current anxieties voiced by cultural elites (p. 140). Rather than a positive vision of transcending time and space, the pessimistic and ‘dark’ tones of his music were seen to represent a decadent force on the musical masses.

The final chapter breaks away from the individual case studies to reveal the changing cultural and political climate on the metaphysical worldview. Chapter 5 explores how the Great War inspired in Nietzsche’s orphans the call for spiritual and historical renewal – a holy war between Russian (i.e. spiritual) culture versus the ‘decaying’ and ‘materialistic’ German culture, which was seen as embodied in the types of music constructed by Max Reger, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. However, an Orpheus figure did not appear to save humanity from its individualistic and materialistic ways: Scriabin died in 1915 and split the aesthetic community between being ‘Christ-like’ or ‘satanic’ (pp. 184–5), the Medtners’ Russo-German identities were problematic at time of Germanophobic sentiment, and Rachmaninoff was seen to be individualistic and musically pessimistic. In essence, all three composers were seen as inauthentic to the Russian cause. In place of a conclusion, Mitchell examines the ‘reverberations’ of late Imperial musical thought into the Soviet period through an epilogue. Mitchell identifies three avenues – utopianism, memory and disillusion – through which musical metaphysics traversed the 1917 revolutionary divide. While the metaphysical view filtered seamlessly into the Soviet calls for communal education, social emancipation and collective action, others fled both before and after 1917 as émigrés or became cynical with the worldview altogether. Despite the conceptual traces of musical metaphysics were present in and outside the Soviet Union, Mitchell claims that ‘it had failed as a theurgic worldview destined to transform reality in the near future’ (p. 222). Ultimately, this book comes with a particular warning for future readers: Mitchell claims that the reinterpretation of Russian composers is still a space in which ‘Russian identity is actively being negotiated in the present’ (p. 225). In the current escalation of nationalist sentiment, the cautionary lesson is that nuanced reinterpretation of the past can often and easily be airbrushed from mainstream historical narratives. Just like Nietzsche’s orphans themselves, many fell victim to the radicalized visions of social transformation they once tried to define and implement.

Overall, this research is exceptional in its close reading of primary source material, from personal correspondence and diary entries to published books, newspapers and periodicals. Most striking are the musical extracts and compositional sketches, woven into the main text, that provide a visual expression of pre-revolutionary metaphysical thought. While the choice of focusing on individual composers could have risked being overly focused on particular core examples (i.e. Scriabin or Rachmaninoff), this is not the case. Each chapter is carefully crafted and neatly balances the specific and detailed personal case studies against a complex political, cultural and historical landscape. There are thematic overlaps with this approach, however, such as the discursive battles over which ‘emotions’ appear in particular music(s) and how the views of the cultural intelligentsia, in their strivings for unity, Orpheus and musical time, permeated their judgements concerning historical progress or decline.

Mitchell’s study also opens up endless possibilities for future engagement with her source material and overarching narrative. One potential avenue is how much of this metaphysical worldview was couched in a materialist understanding of music. For instance, in Chapter 2, the music critic Boris Popov, discussing Scriabin’s ethnicity, claimed that the ‘genius of Chopin has found a worthy disciple …. And through that connection, through that consciousness of a higher unity, the consciousness of a national unity, a blood unity, grows and strengthens’ (p. 92). Given that medical practitioners and cultural specialists of this period scrutinized individuals’ psychological and biological constitutions, I wonder how important a ‘blood’ (read: biological) unity fused through a ‘metaphysical’ understanding of unity.Footnote ⁴ The Medtner chapter is telling in this sense; the calls by critic Grigorii Prokof’ev to examine Nikolai’s ‘creative heritage’, a failure to balance his ‘“Slavic” and “German” temperaments’ and the hope that Nikolai embraced his ‘Slavic … traits’ (p. 133) are all potential signs of positivist and pseudo-scientific reasoning. A further avenue would be to explore how Ludwig van Beethoven fits into the search for Orpheus model after the Bolshevik revolution, especially given his German heritage. As Soviet-music scholars Amy Nelson and Pauline Fairclough have examined, discussions about Beethoven as a god-like and heroic figure were a central theme in musicological work during the 1920s.Footnote ⁵ With Scriabin gone, and too early for Shostakovich, Beethoven was overwhelmingly seen as a superhuman figure; indeed, he was sometimes referred to as a ‘god’ and also ‘related to us’.Footnote ⁶ In other words, an Orphic figure that was seen transform the world may have discursively continued through Beethoven, even if this was solely perceived as a spiritual union with the Soviet masses. Therefore, to what extent was the Medtners’ visions of a communion with German cultural heritage fully realized in the Soviet period? These are all potential avenues for scholarly study emanating from Mitchell’s research.

Without a doubt, Nietzsche’s Orphans is a phenomenal accomplishment, extremely well researched, and a shining ‘orphic’ model for historical scholarship moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Most importantly, it is engaging throughout and expertly grounded within the wide-ranging secondary literature of the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods. Mitchell’s research is timely and important; this is cultural history at its best, drawing upon various fields of intellectual thought to explore how composers and their music were (re)interpreted in the debates concerning Russia’s path to modernity. Through this unique contribution to the field, Mitchell revives the important contribution musicology can make to the core scholarship of Slavic studies, and she has exposed musicology to new and exciting scholarly paths. Special commendation should be given to the lyrical way in which the various historical sources are woven together to create an all-sided and balanced narrative, which is also cohesively mixed with detailed historical contextualization and selected musical analysis. Although Mitchell’s ‘metaphysical’ lens could be further extended by the view that the medical sciences (or, at least, a medicalized intellectual framework) could help to explain how music was seen to transform the very fabric of society, this admittedly would have been beyond the scope of the book’s intentions.

Still, Nietzsche’s Orphans represents a milestone in examining cultural life in the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution, bringing to life the conflicting visions about music’s ability to transform the individual and wider society back to spiritual, emotional and sensory health. As the early twentieth century unfolded, the lived reality for the many was instead mired by the complete opposite – widespread hatred, ethnic violence and social discord. Tragically, such extreme violence was discursively and historically grounded in the aesthetic, social and moral judgements of those who sought to overcome it.