Studies of diplomacy in the immediate postwar period naturally tend to sketch the contours of the coming Cold War, centering on the US and the USSR as the principal antagonists. In his thoroughly researched study, Alexander Golovlev takes a refreshingly different angle, relegating the Anglo-American world to the background and focusing instead on the continental European dipole of France and the USSR. He convincingly argues that a consideration of musical diplomacies demands this focus. While jazz diplomacy was on the horizon, in the period of the allied occupation of Austria (1945–55), musical diplomacy was chiefly a matter of orchestral music, and the high-brow, aesthetically conservative Austrian listening public did not consider Great Britain or the US to be countries with music worth listening to, while France and the Soviet Union—which is to say, Russia—were recognized as possessing musical legacy, even if no musical legacy was seen to be on par with Austria’s own. As Golovlev writes in the conclusion, Austrians understood the “Continental European Allies as ‘the’ true musical powers among the Big Four” (172). Since Austria was seeking to establish its own non-German identity at this time, and “music seemed to be naturally summoned to embody the Austrian self,” Golovlev’s investigation of how “listeners and critics … participated in the construction of canons of selfness and otherness” in conversation with the musical diplomacies of the USSR and France promises a compelling tale (7).

It is also an enormous undertaking, for Golovlev will need to tell us the story of not only one state engaged in nation-building but three, as France grapples with its recent Vichy past and the USSR is in the midst of defining a socialist-realist canon (a canon which, Golovlev intriguingly notes, will appeal to conservative Austrian tastes more than the types of “formalism” the Soviets would purge [35]). In a relatively slim volume, Golovlev will lay out the basic history of the occupation, establishment of zones, and most critically, the development of print and audio media and the background of Austrian musical journalism in each (chapter 1); explore the histories of the diplomatic organizations of the USSR and France, sketching biographies of French diplomats and untangling the byzantine structures of Soviet cultural politics (in chapters 2 and 3); and then work through reviews and discussions of guest tours from each country (chapters 4 and 5). In doing this, Golovlev marshals a truly dizzying array of archival materials, digging through newspaper and magazine reports, radio archives, and concert posters. The tables of Soviet and French guest tours that Golovlev compiles represent an astonishing accomplishment, and these alone make the book a valuable source for anyone interested in understanding the musical diplomacy in Austria at the time (119, 143–46).

But all of this leaves little time for a deep consideration of the findings. Between some reflection in the introduction and conclusion, the book’s five chapters heavily favor data over argument. Golovlev justifies this by noting the massive lacunae in the field, and he does go a long way toward filling many. Still, it would have been helpful to have a more thorough consideration of some of the sources he draws upon. This is most obvious in the Soviet case, in which Golovlev notes that the reports in Soviet organs cannot be taken at face value, and that because the allies generally did not report on Soviet cultural events, there is much uncertainty about reported levels of attendance at concerts, for instance. However, the weakness of the data is merely noted, with little attempt to consider alternative approaches to it. An additional minor gripe: when we are given direct quotations, they are all silently translated (presumably by Golovlev, another significant accomplishment since the sources are in three languages). Given the amount of archival work Golovlev has done, it would have been helpful to have the quotations printed somewhere in the original. This may have been an editorial decision, of course, but however it was decided, it is regrettable. Finally, the story Golovlev tells will mainly be one of continental France and Russia, and the fact that we are dealing with a waning colonial empire and a Soviet Union seeking to define a multinational self could easily be forgotten. Golovlev does address this (for instance on 164 on French colonialism), noting that both are only lightly represented in the musical visits, and thus get less attention. However, deeper consideration of multinational identities and colonial pasts would have been merited in a study so concerned with national identity.

Nonetheless, by bringing together information from a vast number of sources, Golovlev offers a valuable resource for understanding not only French and Soviet musical diplomacy but also Austrian classical music reception and concert life in general between 1945 and 1955, in which regard chapters 4 and 5 are especially valuable, and this book will be a useful aide to anyone working on this period.