Richard Wagner landed in Imperial Russia in the summer of 1837, disembarking from his voyage by sea in a northwestern suburb of Riga. As he recalled from the vantage of the 1860s, the Russia he encountered was nothing like he had expected:

So Wagner lived for nearly two years as director of Riga’s German theatre. Residing in one of Russia’s busiest ports and as a subject of Nicholas I, he was surrounded by Germans and experienced nothing more of Russian culture than ‘Russian salad, salt salmon from the Dwina, or fresh Russian caviare’.Footnote ²

Wagner’s time in Riga does not figure in the volume edited by Stephen Muir and Anastasia Belina-Johnson, and neither does the Russia in which he lived: the intensely multicultural, multinational empire in which a Leipzig native might have felt instantly at home.Footnote ³ Rather, his encounters with Russia detailed in this book began in 1863, with his tour through St Petersburg and Moscow. And the Russia treated on its pages is a distinctly Russian Russia, peopled by individuals speaking Russian, and presumably identifying as Russian as well. The same holds true for the other spaces travelled in the authors’ chapters. Their nineteenth-century Prague and Brno are distinctly Czech locales, rather than cities inhabited also by substantial numbers of Germans. Their Warsaw is the Polish Warszawa; the Jewish Varshe makes no appearance.

On the selection of material for their collection and the range of historical spaces covered, the editors are brief and a little vague. The book, they write, constitutes an ‘attempt to establish Wagner’s place in a part of Europe that generally receives less attention than in other studies of the composer’ (p. xxxiii). But what exactly is that ‘part of Europe’ they hold their book to represent? Muir and Belina-Johnson refer simply to ‘Russia and Eastern European countries’ (p. xxxiii). But in his fascinating foreword to the volume, Richard Taruskin seems to wonder about this very question. ‘The Eastern Europe presented herein’, he observes, ‘is partial and perhaps unrepresentative, consisting of three nations selected as if at random, with each constituent represented, moreover, by an assortment of strange bedfellows’ (p. xxxi). In fact, it is not only the book’s main characters but also their ‘nations’ or ‘countries’ that might seem to make for ‘strange bedfellows’. We might recall, for instance, Milan Kundera’s famous essay of 1984, where he noted that ‘in spite of their linguistic kinship, the Czechs and the Russians have never shared a common world: neither a common history nor a common culture’.Footnote ⁴ In the present volume, the Kraków-based musicologist Magdalena Dziadek unwittingly echoes Kundera’s remarks when she writes of ‘the general tendency in the nineteenth century for Poland to isolate itself from other Central European cultures’ – including both the Russian (widely regarded as ‘barbaric’ or ‘Asiatic’) and the Czech (p. 160).

Indeed, with respect to Europe’s nineteenth-century history of empires and national imaginings, there is little that might sensibly unite ‘Russia, Poland, and the Czech Lands’ into a coherent whole. Their territories were ruled by Romanovs to the north and east and by Habsburgs to the west and south. Their religious communities were variously Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish. Of course, the majority languages in all these locales have Slavic roots. But that, as the historian Larry Wolff demonstrated in his classic and devastating critique from 1994, is precisely how generations of writers from Europe’s ‘West’ – from the eighteenth century down through the twentieth – have constructed reductive or wholly fictional images of ‘Eastern Europe’ in their scholarship and literary works. ‘The Slavs’, Wolff writes, have played an ‘essential role … in relating the ancient and contemporary aspects of Eastern Europe. The Slavs were reported as one barbarian people among many in the ancient sources, but they were a verifiably extensive language group in the contemporary world, linking different lands of Eastern Europe’ into an imaginary, uncivilized mélange.Footnote ⁵ In light of this, if one reads this collection as a contribution to our understanding of the long nineteenth century in Europe’s easterly domains – that is, in the way that most of its authors likely intended their own contributions to be read – then Taruskin’s assessment of its ‘partial and perhaps unrepresentative’ sampling from those spaces might seem charitable indeed.

There is, however, another way in which we might read this book, one that allows for a different kind of coherence to emerge. Muir and Belina-Johnson give no indication that this is what they intend, but I think their book might more profitably be read as a response to the entwined forces of music historiography and geopolitics in the second half of the twentieth century. In pondering this, I again think of Kundera, who followed his argument about Czechs and Russians by describing what he regarded as the root of the ‘tragedy’ of the post-war world he inhabited:

After Yalta, the ‘Slavic world’, previously coherent only in the minds of observers in the ‘West’, was indeed united politically under Communism and geographically behind the Iron Curtain. Only with that turn of events did its spaces became host to broadly shared experiences, to shared histories and historiographies, and in particular to shared traditions of untellable stories and inaccessible archives. This complex of common experiences that prevailed between 1945 and 1991 is justification enough, I think, for the assemblage of the present book. The volume consists in the main of stories that were recently untellable, and it draws considerably from archives and sources generally accessible only in the past quarter-century. Read in this way, the book’s contribution to musicology and the humanities is significant, even invaluable.

Elsewhere in his forward, Taruskin notes that aside from Vladimir Marchenkov’s discussion of Soviet-era texts by the philosopher Aleksey Losev, the volume’s essays ‘do not really isolate any peculiarly Eastern European Wagnerian discourse’ (p. xxxi). True enough. But as its authors reveal, there is plenty of interesting material to be found in still-unfamiliar sources. In their preface, the editors emphasize disparities between the reception of Wagner as a composer and as a literary figure, and also between later negotiations of his legacy by composers and by writers. But there is in fact a kind of nebulous influence documented in many of the book’s chapters, uniting their disparate topics and locales like a proverbial red thread. Time and again, the collection reveals that an individual’s encounter with Wagner or his work – hearing his music, reading his prose, studying his scores or seeing him stand on the podium – inspired that individual to work faster, harder or in a more focused manner than he had foreseen just days before. (All of the central figures considered in the collection are male.) When Wagner swept through Prague and Imperial Russia in 1863, when his works were rediscovered in Warsaw and Moscow amidst the Khrushchev ‘Thaw’ of the 1950s, untold numbers of readers and listeners took sides in debate about the merits of his ideas. Yet however deeply their ambivalence might run, nearly all who encountered him were deeply moved by what they sensed of the power of Wagner’s personality – by the audaciousness of his musical gestures, by the assuredness with which he declared his views, by the ways in which he seemed to model a vision of the artist as someone untiring and unafraid.

Of the composer Sergey Taneyev, Belina-Johnson writes that ‘Wagner’s music did not simply interest [him]; it quite literally led to the changing of his life’ (p. 1). Immediately after hearing the Ring in Moscow in 1889, he resolved to quit his job as director of the city’s prestigious conservatory so as to dedicate himself entirely to the creation of art, and to the completion of his opera Oresteia in particular. When Antonín Dvořák first saw Wagner conduct in Prague in 1863, as Jan Smaczny tells us, his response ‘verged on the ecstatic’. The composer recalled: ‘I was perfectly crazy about him, and recollect following him as he walked along the streets to get a chance now and again of seeing the great little man’s face’ (p. 97). The young Leoš Janáček, though a ‘fanatical nationalist’ who ‘refused to set foot in Brno’s German-language theatre’ (Michael Ewans, p. 119), was so moved by his study of Tristan und Isolde that he determined at once to try his hand at composing an opera of his own. Even Rimsky-Korsakov, who ‘questioned with his son the very future of opera itself after Wagner’ (p. 38), turns out to have found the impetus to complete his Kashchey bessmertnïy (1902) while immersing himself in the score of Siegfried. As his wife Nadezhda reported to her son, ‘Papa has recently been studying Siegfried, playing the piano reduction and comparing it with the full score, and has been giving Wagner a strong ticking off for his impermissible harmonies and his unrefined writing. … But he can forgive Wagner anything because there is much good, even genius [in his music]’ (p. 38). The bracketed insertion is Stephen Muir’s. But Nadezhda’s Russian – No Vagneru vse mozhno prostit’ radi togo khoroshego i dazhe genial’nogo, chto yest’ u nego – might in fact be translated more directly: ‘But Wagner can be forgiven for everything on account of the good and even brilliant qualities he possesses’.Footnote ⁷

In all of these cases, Wagner’s influence is arguably traced more clearly in the realm of life choices than on the pages of scores. Across Dvořák’s oeuvre, Smaczny notes, allusions to Wagner’s musical language is ‘sporadic’ (p. 97). Belina-Johnson, Muir and Ewans point to possible Wagnerisms in works by Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Janáček, but those traces are audible chiefly in the realms of scoring or local harmonic colour, and moreover isolated within one or a mere handful of works. None of these historical figures really strove to compose as Wagner did – and in that respect, as Taruskin suggests, these ‘Eastern’ European artists were no different from their ‘Western’ contemporaries. And yet, there are other stories told here that are unique to the spaces traversed in its chapters, stories that trace not nineteenth-century histories but their twentieth-century epilogues. Rebecca Mitchell provides a tantalizing and deeply engaging glimpse of how the Wagner craze among Russian intellectuals ran headlong into anti-German sentiment and politics during the period of the Great War and the Russian Revolution. Marchenkov notes intriguingly that Losev’s 1968 study of Wagner was in fact derived from an unpublished essay of 1918–19, and that it might, therefore, be read as ‘a return’ or echo in the Brezhnev era ‘of early twentieth-century Russian symbolism’ (p. 72).

And then there is the contribution by Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, a philologist from Poznán. To me, his essay highlights most vividly the tremendous value of the volume’s project in its local refiguring of commonplace accounts of Wagner’s impact on national imaginings. Okulicz-Kozaryn’s subject is the Polish author Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907), focusing especially on Wyspiański’s reception of the epic poem Król Duch (The King Spirit, 1847) by the Romantic writer Juliusz Słowacki. Where Wagner figures in this story is surprising. As Dziadek tells us, Wagner’s works were not performed in Poland until around the turn of the twentieth century (p. 161), and as Okulicz-Kozaryn notes, it was Słowacki’s fantastical, mythical poetry that ‘predated (and simultaneously prepared the ground for) the “nascent cult of Wagner”’ in the 1890s (p. 138). But the influence worked in both directions: Wagner’s music, once it became known, inspired in turn a new generation of Poles to discover or reconsider Słowacki’s mid-century writings. In Wyspiański’s case, interest in Słowacki’s Polish Romanticism fed his passion for Wagner, and his experience of Wagner’s music dramas fuelled his national imaginings. In 1897, he penned an opera libretto in which the Vistula river, like Wagner’s Rhine, ‘becomes the custodian of the most precious of national treasures’, and he dreamt of its performance to music ‘reflecting the river’s flowing waters, conveyed through fairy tongues of water nymphs’ (p. 149). Later he composed a drama that ‘describes the history of eleventh-century Poland’, which he intended to be performed ‘to the accompaniment of music from Lohengrin’ (p. 151). At the end of his life, he imagined a complex of buildings on Kraków’s Wawel hill, a complex that would embody – in classic Wagnerian fashion – his conviction that ‘the freedom associated with [Polish] independence was first to be restored in art, and only then in the real world’. It was to consist of churches, a home for the Polish parliament, a museum and an academy of arts, which Wyspiański called his ‘Valhalla’ (pp. 155–6).

For its stories like this, elaborated on the basis of extensive research in sources recently unobtainable by Anglo-American scholars or inaccessible to historians anywhere, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in Wagner’s place in the cultural histories of Kraków, Warsaw, Brno, Prague, Moscow or St Petersburg. It is also an excellent testament to the value of musicological collaboration across the Cold War division of Eastern Europe from Western, a division that scholars like Belina-Johnson and Muir are admirably working to erase.