The Life and Artistry of Maria Olenina-d'Alheim

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

In this era of the Three Tenors, who rake in millions at the box office
through singing a hackneyed museum repertoire, it is refreshing to
encounter a passionate idealist who believed in art for its own sake.
That was Russian soprano Maria Olenina-d’Alheim (1869–1970), a great
musician who was also a trenchant critic of the commercialization of
art. At considerable personal sacrifice, she turned her back on the star
system, exorbitant performance fees, large concert halls, high ticket
prices, expensive tours, and self-serving advertisements.

As Alexander Tumanov shows in this insightful biography,
Olenina-d’Alheim played a pivotal role in introducing the works of the
so-called “mighty handful” at a time when they were virtually
unknown outside Russia. Her interpretations of Mussorgsky in particular
were electrifying and contributed to the composer being seen, like
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, as the epitome of the Russian character. With
her husband, the French writer Pierre d’Alheim, Olenina-d’Alheim
also founded the highly influential House of Song (1908–18) in France
and Russia. It inaugurated the lecture–recital, which has since become
a mainstay of the chamber performance tradition.

Tumanov, who met Olenina-d’Alheim in Moscow in 1963, punctuates the
narrative with quotations from interviews, memoirs, and correspondence
with many of the leading musicians, composers, writers, and critics of
her day. The book is also generously illustrated.

But Tumanov is clearly troubled by her rejection of monetary gain as a
motivating force, regarding it as naive and self-defeating.
Nevertheless, it was truthful, and one need look no further than recent
books like Norman Lebrecht’s Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros,
Managers, and Corporate Politics to realize that the debate continues.