To understand Nikolai Obukhov’s musical aesthetics, I will look back to the roots of Russian Symbolism. In the period of the final years of Imperial Russia, coined the “Silver Age” of Russian culture, music was at the center of the discourse amongst cultural elites and considered to be much more than mere entertainment.
In a time of political and social instability, with the turn of the 20th century stirring expectations of resolution, educated Russians conceptualized music as a unifying force, a means through which modern society would overcome its materialistic and individualistic impulses, and would be able to achieve a new communal reality. Russian symbolist writers Viacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, and Andrei Bely, were key agents in conceptualizing this metaphysical perspective of music rooted in bothGerman idealist philosophy, inspired especially by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) which began circulating in the Russian press around 1900, and also in Christian theology, a tradition in which Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) was the most influential thinker.
Deriving from a dualistic understanding of existence, in his first book The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche evoked the figure of Dionysius as the metaphorical representation of the true essence of things (Schopenhauer’s Will) - the fundamental unity underlying life that preceded the phenomenal world (Schopenhauer’s Representation - what we can perceive). With the dissolution of this “primordial unity” into the graspable material structure of reality, through a process of logical division and rationalization, humanity lost a deeper connection with the full spectrum of existence and fell into decadence. Compared to other arts, experiencing the intrinsic temporality and non-materiality of music was the most effective way for humanity to transcend mundane reality, and restore this lost spiritual connection.
The pure Dionysian impulse would overwhelm an individual mind if expressed in its full force, but its embodiment in a musical composition made it comprehensible to the human mind. As an art form, music could thus present primordial unity within a form that allowed the listener to comprehend it without his or her destruction as an individual: the Apollonian power reshaped the underlying Dionysian spirit into a formal structure that could be grasped by the limited individual mind.1
For this Russian “aesthetic community”, as Rebeca Mitchell designates, a group of poets, artists, philosophers and musicians, the vast majority of which belonged to high society, music embodied an important symbolic role, into which society could channel its hopes, dreams, and idealistic visions of not only political and social transformation but of spiritual progress as well, in line with Christian moral beliefs. For this reason, there were a lot of expectations associated with the singular act of performance, approximating it almost to a religious practice. Amongst the mystics, this vision of redemption through art culminated in the anticipation of a musical mystery – an “artistic-liturgical act through which contemporary reality might be transformed”.2
The idea of a performative act with a collective transformative power was also for Richard Wagner a theory of the total work of art, or in German, the Gesamtkunstwerk, a theory that at the beginning of the 20th century was disseminated and influential in modernist currents throughout Europe. Departing from Greek tragedy, Wagner believed that by synthetizing all individual arts (poetry, visual effects, architectural settings, dance, and music) in one performance, it would be possible to regenerate culture, and to restore the public and social function of art."The poetry and visual action play a role of equal importance as mediators between the noumena (of music and the will) and the phenomena (of drama and experience)."3
In Russia this concept was particularly appealing to the mystics, and it resonated with Alexander Scriabin, who in 1903 started to envision a highly ambitious project, Mysterium, which would expand Wagner's concept of synthesis by embracing all different senses, “through the use of colored lights, music, scents and even tastes”.4 Greatly influenced by this aesthetic current, Nikolai Obukhov also created his own mystery: Le Livre de Vie.
In the context of art as a totalizing force, all the fundamental elements of a performance thus carry their own symbolic meaning and a deliberate purpose. The principles of such a performance can be used as a framework for my own approach to the performance of piano solo works. How this mystical performative concept contrasts with the traditional Western classical concert format is what I intend to explore in this research.