Don’t Sing it on a Feast Day: the reception and performance of Western sacred music in Soviet Russia, 1917-1953
Abstract Despite official hostility to religion and ambivalence towards Western bourgeois culture, the Soviet Union9s major orchestras and choirs retained a high number of Western sacred works in their concert repertoire. In this article, I examine the apparent incongruity of this aspect of Soviet concert practice, with specific focus on the two most important Soviet choirs in Moscow and Leningrad: the Leningrad Capella, and the Moscow-based Russian Choir of the USSR. I argue that the process of cultural appropriation in the Soviet Union embraced a sufficiently broad conception of Western musical culture for this repertoire to be considered not only safe, but of central canonic importance. With an appropriate ideological varnish, and even textual alteration, a careful selection of Western sacred music could be rendered “Soviet” enough to remain core repertoire, albeit subject to fast-changing currents in cultural politics throughout the period 1917–53.
Liszt's Musical Monuments
The music topic of "apotheosis" is examined in the context of Liszt9s artistic biography. While the effect of the final apotheosis is familiar as a standard procedure in his symphonic poems, a prominent
 critical strand suggests that the overwhelming effect of the apotheosis may merely conceal a fundamental vacuity. Nietzsche in particular develops an incisive critique of this kind of monumentality, which
 he links with a historiographic model of what he calls "monumental history." Nietzsche9s historical model is probed against an episode from Liszt9s career, in which the apotheosis topic first entered his
 orchestral music: the Cantata for the inauguration of the Bonn Beethoven monument (1845). In this cantata, Liszt chooses a quotation from Beethoven9s "Archduke" Trio for the apotheosis. In this way, the
 cantata pits a musical kind of monumentality against the physical Beethoven movement, not dissimilar from attempts by Schumann and Jean Paul to theorize nineteenth-century monumentality. Moreover, with
 this "secular sanctus" Liszt forges an artistic link between the dead composer and himself. This episode, by means of which Liszt succeeded in consolidating his fame as Beethoven9s rightful heir, turns
 out to be crucial for his subsequent career when he settled in Weimar as a self-consciously great composer (and wrote his symphonic poems). The events surrounding Liszt9s engagement in the Beethoven monument
 are used as an exemplar of a notion of nineteenth-century musical monumentality that thrives on the interplay between the musical structure, the events amid which the performance took place, and the biographical
 background of the (genius-)composer.
Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind
Acknowledgments 1: Reading, Writing, and Boredom 2: Vacuity, Satiety, and the Active Life: Eighteenth-Century Men 3: The Consciousness of the Dull: Eighteenth-Century Women, Boredom, and Narrative 4: "Self is a Tiresome Subject": Personal Records of Eighteenth-Century Women Interlude: The Problem of the Interesting 5: "A Dull Book is Easily Renounced": How the Interesting Turns Boring 6: The Normalization of Boredom: Nineteenth-Century Women and Their Fictions 7: Society and Its Discontents: Cultural Contexts of Nineteenth-Century Boredom 8: The Ethics of Boredom: Modernism and Questions of Value 9: Cultural Miasma: Postmodern Enlargements of Boredom