The Phenomenon of the Musical in Russian Musicology in the 1950s and 1960s: Concerning the Issue of Genre Definition
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Abstract
The author of the article illuminates the process of legitimization of the scholarly term “musical” in Russian
musicological literature. The direct connection between the aforementioned process and the social-cultural
tendencies of the time of “Khrushchev’s Thaw” becomes apparent in a number of facts. Those include tours in
the USSR of stage productions of such widely known samples of the specified genres (Fredrick Loewe’s “My Fair
Lady,” 1960), discussions regarding the progressive innovations in Soviet musical theater with the participation
of Nikita Bogoslovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich (including references to the theatrical production and the movie
adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s “West-Side Story”), etc. The article examines the various modes of definitions of
the musical introduced by authoritative Russian musicologists (M. Yankovsky, B. Steinpress and I. Yampolsky) on
the pages of encyclopedic editions from the 1960s. Special note must be made of the “retrospective” directedness
of the formulations of B. Steinpress and I. Yampolsky geared for the most part on musical works from the first
half of the 20th century (Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and Kurt Weill). Equally
“promising” is the directedness of the genre definition of M. Yankovsky, which considers to a certain degree the
artistic achievements of the post-war decade (Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter and Fredrick Loewe).
Keywords: musical, musical theater, musical genre, Fredrick Loewe, Leonard Bernstein, Nikita Bogoslovsky,
Dmitri Shostakovich.
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