ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the experience that faced composer and ethnomusicologist Emilis Melngailis (1874-1954) during Latvia’s wartime occupation by the USSR (1940-1941), by Nazi Germany (1941-1944), and again by the USSR (beginning 1944). Drawing extensively on archival materials, the chapter highlights Melngailis’s pre-war engagements as a collector of Jewish and Latvian folk song in order to document the impact of unpredictably shifting political allegiances and a pervasive climate of extreme violence upon the production and dissemination musical work and musicological knowledge during the war years. It closes by considering the legacy of wartime occupation upon the reconstruction of Latvian musicology in the USSR, including Melngailis’s celebrated yet deeply fraught place within it.
