Russian Music at Home and Abroad

Some of the perpetual follies of Russian music study-anxiety about Chaikovsky’s sexuality and unwarranted speculation about Stravinsky’s, the continued currency of Shostakovich’s faked memoirs, the pretense that Prokofieff’s fine music excuses the inhumanity of the texts he willingly set during his Soviet years-are revisited under the aegis of the triad of transcendental values advanced by the Greeks: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Some parallel cases from outside the realm of Russian music are considered as well. The upshot: onlythe True is acceptable as a binding if unreachable goal for scholarship.