Refl ection of the scientifi c-critical position of R. Genika in his letters to N. Findeisen
Background. The present article is devoted to the consideration of the critical activity of R. Genika, one of the most prominent creative personalities in the musical life of Kharkov during the period of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the founder of the Kharkov professional music school. The present study is based on the material of the correspondence between R. Genika and his long-term mentor N. Findeisen – the chief editor of the Russian Musical Newspaper, the publisher of historical essays. The system of R. Genika’s critical views, his assessment of the intonation situation of the musical era represented by him have been analyzed; we have stated his critical position toward the creative work of composers of the past and present. Formulation of the problem. In the musical life of Kharkov, the period of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Rostislav Vladimirovich Genika (1859–1942?) was one of the brightest creative personalities. His activities were distinguished by the scale and versatility, and the creative achievements of this outstanding musician in the spheres of this kind of activities are an invaluable contribution to the national musical art. Through the prism of the achievements of R. Genika as one of the founders of the Kharkov professional music school, not only the panorama of the concert life of Kharkov during the considered period is revealed, but also the weighty and relevant scientifi c, organizational, pedagogical, artistic and creative directions regarding the complex of problems associated with history and perspectives of the musical art of Kharkov as one of the leading centers of musical life, the fi rst capital of Ukraine. The object of the research. The creative heritage of R. Genika, a universally gifted person is covered in the existing publications mainly in the information and source fi eld. R. Genika’s research and musical-publicistic activities were not fully covered. Only recently, the author of the present article has got an access to the archived materials which made it possible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the role and importance of the personality of this outstanding Kharkov musician in the context of the musical art of the region and Ukraine as a whole. All of this combined to form the subject of the comprehensive review and the relevance of this article. The material of the study was the archival letters of R. Genika to N. Findeisen. The goal is to point out the position of R. Genika in the selection of the material for his research by highlighting and analyzing some letters from this correspondence. Methodology. The creative work of any music critic and reviewer, a music writer who is interested in the history of music, in particular, pianism and piano art, is assessed primarily by the material to which he/she refers. Here the source of conclusions about the direction of the search of R. Genika in all these areas can be his correspondence with a prominent fi gure of the Imperial Russian Musical Society (IRMS), one of the leading musical writers and critics of Russia of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, Nikolai Fyodorovich Findeisen (1868–1928). The correspondence with N. Findeisen testifi es to the process of R. Genika’s work on a number of his key scientifi c researches. The author of this study was able to find in the archives these short letters, where the requests of the Kharkov musician to this venerable musicologist and critic about the literature and music notes he needed for his work could be found. And the very list of requests made by R. Genika makes it possible to systematize the range of his creative interests. For example, in one of the letters R. Genika asks N. Findeisen to send him books about F. Liszt. The detailed article about F. Liszt was included into the second volume of the essays on “The History of Music” – the main capital work on which R. Genika had been working for almost all his life. The focus of this study is rather popularizing, addressed to various categories of listeners, primarily, to educated “good listeners” who want to get acquainted closer with the styles and circumstances of the life and creative work of the leading representatives of the world music art. In the fi eld of musicological studies R. Genika was, above all, a historian. This profi le of his research activities was the closest to the tendency that can be defi ned as a popularization or educational one. In his historical research he had clear preferences. This is evidenced by a number of his rather subjective statements about contemporary composers, to whom he preferred the classics of the older generation. R. Genika, as a historian, was well aware of the retrospective necessary for historical musicological studies, and therefore avoided writing in an estimate about authors contemporary to him. He, as a high-class musician, does not consider it possible to express his personal subjective judgments in his historical concept, and so he omits the section on “modern music” in his historical essays. Results. In the two-volume essays on “The History of Music” there are other thoughts that reveal the course of the scientist’s work on various parts of his book. Extremely interesting, besides the already mentioned above R. Genika’s attitude to the “contemporaries”, is his steady interest in the tradition, which he himself called the “Romanesque”. He treated his national school with a natural reverence, considering it to be underestimated in foreign, fi rst of all, German “histories of music”. Such a position is extremely indicative of his work as a music historian. It is the “national”, original, bright and unique that attracts his attention in the styles of the national schools of Europe of that time – the Scandinavian, the Czech, the Polish and, especially great, in his opinion, the Russian. He ends his essays on “The History of Music” (the main text) with the chapter on P. Tchaikovsky, and the modern authors of other schools are covered in review supplement articles. The question of national schools for that period was quite open and controversial even within the framework of generally accepted classifi cations. At that time, the schools of the classical type were considered key, and “nationalist teachings” (“national schools”) were considered “supplementary”, secondary and insignifi cant in the general processes of the world musical history. Here there is a thought, indicative of the very process of the new periodization of the essays on “The History of Music”, which, according to R. Genika, should have differed from the existing German samples. Conclusion. R. Genika’s letters to N. Findeisen make it possible to follow the course of the process of writing the capital essays on “The History of Music”. The very fact that the Kharkov musicologist turned to the global problems of the world music history testifi es to the importance of the creative fi gure of R. Genika in the context of musical and historical research of the last decade of the 19th century – the fi rst two decades of the 20th century. R. Genika was among the fi rst domestic music historians to create his own concept of periodization and artistic evaluation of the most important phenomena of the European musical history, which is the proof of the encyclopedic and universal nature of his many-sided musician talent. These qualities manifest themselves in all directions and the results of his activities, prompting the modern musicologistresearcher to systematize R. Genika’s critical heritage in a special way.