Internationalism, Regionalism and Glazunov's Raymonda

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The year before I Lombardi, Glinka had shown his fellow-Russians how to portray the mysterious East. Slowly his example was to filter through into the rest of Europe; and by the time of Aida the East was comfortably within Verdi's reach - but not yet. There is little to distinguish the idiom of Asians from that of the Crusaders apart from choppy rhythms, tonic pedals and an emphasis on the Neapolitan sixth - devices which, typically, recur in Aida as 'orientalisms', though of course enhanced by a far more subtle and sophisticated technique.1

TO EXPOSE THE ABSENCE of oriental colour in Verdi's I lombardi, Julian Budden invokes the foil of Ruslan and Lyudmila. What Budden means to …