Rothschild’s Violin and a Russian Tune

Abstract

Based on Anton Chekhov’s symbolic story Rothschild’s Violin (Skripka Rotshilda, 1894), this article focuses on the generic, functional, ethnic, and expressive transformation of the Melody, which is one of the protagonists of the story, alongside the Violin itself. The tune, a lament, is picked up by Rothschild, a poor Jewish provincial flutist, from the dying Yakov Ivanov, a Russian coffin-maker and fiddler. It is a precious gift to the young man who, upon performing it, grows to be in high demand among the prominent town folk. The plot of Rothschild’s Violin is entirely fictional, but its details are typical of a late nineteenth-century Russian province. Very typical too, and even universal for all cultures and times, is the phenomenon of a melody that changes its master, ethnic relationship, genre, and social function. This example is examined here from the perspective of my proposed construct, which defines a complex phenomenon of vernacularity in music, and presents a methodology of analysis of the various changes undergone by many tunes throughout the history of their existence. This construct differentiates between two sub-kinds of vernacular that encompass the broader concepts of folk and popular music: the phylo-vernacular (referring to phylogenesis) and the onto-vernacular (referring to ontogenesis). The article seeks to show how the phylo-vernacular and the onto-vernacular can each transform into the other, and how landless communities, such as Romanies and Ashkenazi diaspora Jews, adopt and adapt to the local repertoires, uniquely combining phylo- and onto-vernacular features.