Letters: Bojan Bujic on the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra’s decision to remove the Russian composer’s work from its programme
Furthermore, the finale of the overture, with the Marseillaise being triumphantly overpowered by the Russian national anthem, might have had a specific meaning in the Russian imperial context of the time, whereas the basic opposition between the “bad” French anthem and the “good” Russian one is now but a hollow symbol of Russian triumphalism, ill-suited to our times.
In comparison with the intense musical nationalism of the St Petersburg school of composers, Tchaikovsky was indeed an internationalist, though within Russia he could be as exclusively great-Russian as the rest of them. In summer 1865, staying at the country estate at Kamenka near Kyiv, he started collecting Ukrainian folk songs, intending to use them in his compositions, but soon gave up, finding them to have been “corrupted” by “western” influence.
Theodor Adorno may have had a point that ethnic nationalism in music poisons it both socially and aesthetically, and in that regard the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra was right to remove The 1812 Overture from its programme. As one of the pieces replacing it, John Williams’s The Cowboy Overture sends a wrong message of a different kind.
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