Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié

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Table of Contents
Introduction:
End Games and Funeral Games
By Klara Moricz
Chapter 1
Arthur Lourie: A Biographical Sketch
By Olesya Bobrik, translated by Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison
Chapter 2:
Turania Revisited, with Lourie My Guide
By Richard Taruskin
Chapter 3:
Koussevitzky's Ghostwriter
By Simon Morrison
Chapter 4:
Retrieving What Time Destroys: The Palimpsest of Lourie's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great
Appendix A: Excerpt from Scene 1, Gossip
Appendix B: Scene 3, Les Adieux
By Klara Moricz
Chapter 5:
Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourie's Post-Petersburg Worlds
By Caryl Emerson
Epilogue:
The Silver Age and Tinseltown
By Simon Morrison

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Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourié left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourié serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourié himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourié attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourié's own. Yet even if Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourié's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourié, and the world, saw disappear.

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Music and Letters

Elegantly organized and written, and thoroughly researched, this volume is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on twentiethcentury music and twentieth-century Russian culture in general, as well as to the areas of music criticism and aesthetics

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