What such details indicate is a deeply idiosyncratic attitude to conventional language. This has sometimes been put down to a lack of technical expertise on Glinka’s part; but a better explanation might be that, in the search for an individual native manner with no specifically native conventions to support him, he was forced to adopt a pragmatic, opportunistic approach to whatever materials came to hand. Being both brilliantly talented and, it seems, shameless, he consequently made discoveries about quite simple music that nobody else had made. The Persian chorus is a good example of his invention of an idiom out of entirely commonplace materials. The borrowed melody itself is by any standards unremarkable; its obvious features are a downbeat start and a feminine ending on every phrase, combined with a lullingly repetitive rhythm and bland, unvarying harmony tending, though, toward the relative minor key (C-sharp minor here in the key of E major)—an effect that somehow suggests vaguely improper consequences (Ratmir, one of the rival suitors, is being lured into Naina’s castle by young girls).
Perhaps, though, the single most notable example of Glinka’s fearlessness in the treatment of convention is his orchestration. His actual orchestra is normal, apart from a few exotic extras (such as the glass harmonica that tinkles away seductively in Chernomor’s garden as his flower maidens tempt Lyudmila with magical food), and the onstage wind band, whose precise constitution Glinka in fact fails to specify.12 What is far from normal is Glinka’s style of orchestration. In essence the theatre orchestra he inherited was a fairly stereotyped affair; the Italian composers of his day used it almost exclusively as functional support for the singers—string-based, with the occasional woodwind solo, plus stage instruments as required. French opera was more adventurous, partly under the influence of the band music that had held sway during the revolution. But the chief models in 1840 for an uninhibited treatment of the orchestra as a total resource were Beethoven, especially his “Choral” Symphony, and Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique, with its extravagant wind scoring and elaborate instructions for the brass and percussion instruments, Glinka in point of fact cannot yet have known.13 Here, too, Glinka’s own procedures suggest a pragmatic approach. Given the distinct sections of the standard orchestra—the strings (bowed and plucked), the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion—why not treat them as a set of equal possibilities, especially in an opera of strange encounters and evil magic? Why limit oneself to the blend and balance of the classical orchestra? Why not invent sonorities to go with the bizarre characters and fantastic incidents that serve in place of a coherent or plausible narrative? So, for Chernomor’s entrance, Glinka chooses the harsh, unblended sounds of the stage wind band, alternating with the glitter of high woodwinds, bells, and pizzicato strings. The “Turkish” dancers enter to a rich texture of low strings answered by full orchestra dominated, once again, by wind instruments. The “Arab” dance is in fact a waltz scored initially for strings in triple octaves, a sumptuous sonority much exploited later by Tchaikovsky but which seems to have been Glinka’s invention. Countless other details show Glinka using the orchestra as an imaginative resource scarcely less versatile than melody, harmony, or rhythm. Bayan’s gusli—the Russian peasant zither—is represented by piano and harp, a brilliantly successful effect (and probably the first use of the piano as an orchestral instrument rather than as a soloist with orchestra). The suitor Ratmir, a Khazar prince from the northeastern Caucasus, is accompanied in his aria by a cor anglais, whose sultry tones suggest some kind of Middle Eastern shawm. Page after page is dominated by wind instruments, solo or in groups, in defiance of the classical convention of string-based sonorities. When the strings are fully employed, they are often doing strange things, as in the spectacular coda of the lezghinka, the last of the Oriental dances, where the alternation of natural harmonics (harmonics played on the open strings) with rapid woodwind scales creates an effect of a frenzied improvisation by a rustic band barely in control.
Ruslan opened at the Bolshoi Theatre in St. Petersburg on 27 November 1842 (the sixth anniversary of the premiere of A Life for the Tsar), to a mixed reception. “Some there are,” one critic wrote,
who find in Mr. Glinka’s opera a lot that will guarantee the composer immortality in a hundred years’ time; others, not wanting to wait so long, are bestowing on him a wreath of immortality here and now; a third group unreservedly call the piece a failure and find nothing in the least remarkable in it; a fourth group—the coolest—maintain that there is much merit in the opera, but also many defects, and that the excess of lyricism in the music and complete lack of dramatic movement in the libretto are a great hindrance to its success, rendering it even tedious to the majority taste—which, however, is quite unjust. In a word, opinions of Ruslan and Lyudmila vary widely; but everyone who saw the opera agrees that M. I. Glinka is a highly gifted composer.14
The first-night audience was certainly cool; but this was as much as anything due to a weak cast, including an inexperienced understudy as Ratmir—musically (with Lyudmila) the biggest part in the opera, despite its title. At the final curtain, Glinka “turned to General Dubelt in the director’s box and said, ‘They seem to be hissing. Shall I take a curtain call?’ ‘Certainly, go ahead,’ replied the General. ‘Christ suffered more than you.’ ”15 Later performances, though, went better, and the opera stayed in repertory in St. Petersburg, then Moscow, until 1848, after which it was not heard complete anywhere in Russia during Glinka’s lifetime.
He never again attempted an opera. Perhaps he was disheartened by the fate of the two he had written; but more likely he was unable to muster the necessary creative energy. Often in poor health, he travelled a good deal, composed only spasmodically; and the works he managed to complete were almost always in response to chance impressions and devised in a manner that studiously avoided the complexities of large-scale working. At one point he started a symphony based on Gogol’s Taras Bulba. He sketched parts of the exposition of a first movement in C minor, “but since I didn’t have the energy or the desire at the time to work my way out of the German rut in the development, I dropped the whole thing.”16 A few songs and piano pieces survive to remind us of the easy talent of the salon master; and with them, a handful of short orchestral pieces, two of which, in particular, were to have an impact on Russian music far beyond their undoubted but self-limited virtues. These two works, Kamarinskaya and Recuerdos de Castilla (later expanded into the Souvenir d’une nuit d’été à Madrid), were both composed in 1848 in Warsaw, where Glinka was stranded for several months without a passport. Both are entirely based on folk tunes: Kamarinskaya on a well-known Russian dance tune of that name elaborated in combination with a wedding song, “Izza gor, gor vïsokikh” (From behind the mountains, the high mountains); the Souvenir on four tunes Glinka had picked up on a visit to Spain three years earlier. Neither work develops its material in any conventional way. Their brilliance is entirely due to the composer’s coloristic genius and his flair for a kind of musical montage which, like many of his orchestral sounds, was essentially his own invention. Almost casually he seems to have discovered a method of composing with folk tunes that would provide a technical manual for later, no doubt greater, composers. The curiously cinematic musical footage of the Souvenir might have been (may actually have been) in Debussy’s mind as he composed his Ibéria some sixty years later. And the constantly varied orchestral and harmonic colorings of Kamarinskaya would in due course prompt Tchaikovsky to the hyperbolic judgment that
merely in passing, not in the least setting out to compose something surpassing on a simple theme, a playful trifle—this man (out of nothing) gives us a short work in which every bar is the product of great creative power. Almost fifty years have passed since then; many Russian symphonic works have been written; it is possible to state that there exists a pure Russian symphonic school. And what is the result? All of it is in the Kamarinskaya, in the same way as the whole oak is in the acorn! And long will Russian composers borrow from this rich source, for much time and much s
trength is needed in order to drain all of its richness.17
CHAPTER 3
The Lawyer-Critic
It was in the nature of St. Petersburg intellectual life that it took shape through groups of like-minded doers and thinkers: what the French called cénacles—literary or artistic circles. The tendency was far from unique to Russia, but it flourished there particularly, no doubt, because of the heavy censorship under Nicholas I, which forced writers and artists to keep their most adventurous ideas under lock and key, behind closed doors.
For musicians, though, the situation was a little different. For them the discussion of ideas had never been central to their activity as artists, and certainly not to their practical function as performers; then, as now, they would talk technique, or else avoid the subject altogether. But for Russian musicians in the 1840s and ’50s technique was something of a nonsubject, since their knowledge of it was sketchy and they had no institutional context in which to acquire or share it. Balakirev’s pianistic brilliance seems to have been a natural flair, like the ability to hit a ball with good timing or shoot straight at a moving target. It went in his case with an exceptional musical memory and an acute aural sense (what musicians call a good ear). He was a marvellous improviser at the piano, and an instinctive judge of musical good form, in both the literal and the metaphorical senses. But he had little theoretical knowledge and hardly any language in which to explain his judgments. He could only demonstrate. And this would prove a crucial feature of his relations with the other musicians who gradually came into his orbit in his first years in St. Petersburg.
Among these musicians, Vladimir Stasov was an altogether distinct case. A Petersburger by birth, he had been an early pupil at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, which he had entered at the age of twelve in 1836, a year or so after the school’s foundation. In spite of its name, this was not strictly a school of law, but a feeder school for the highly centralized imperial civil service, which was virtually the only civilian institution in Russia that provided employment for members of the dvoryanin class, to which the Stasov family, like the Glinkas, belonged. One might suppose that a school of this kind would be run along strictly pragmatic lines, with a view to producing methodical, unimaginative, above all subservient administrators and bureaucrats. But this was not entirely the case. The school’s founder, Prince Peter of Oldenburg (a nephew of Nicholas I), was a passionate music lover and insisted that every pupil study an instrument and participate in timetabled musicmaking that, in intensity and possibly even quality, would hardly disgrace a modern specialist school. The headmaster, Semyon Poshman, was himself an amateur musician. The best foreign teachers were engaged. Stasov studied the piano with the great German pianist-composer Adolf Henselt, and it seems probable—to judge from his later correspondence with Balakirev—that he also learned a certain amount of theory, either from Henselt or from the school’s music teacher, a Finn by the name of Karel, who papered the walls of the music room with portraits of the great composers, and who possessed a small but well-ordered library of music books, including histories and theoretical treatises, to which he allowed his pupils access.
Stasov had no more ambition to become a professional musician than he had to become a civil servant. He was rather like a boy in an English cathedral-choir school, absorbing music and acquiring a solid education out of a need that was not his. The Stasovs tended more toward the visual arts. Vladimir’s father, Vasily Stasov, was the most famous Russian architect of his day—designer of the Preobrazhensky and Izmaylovsky cathedrals in St. Petersburg, and restorer of the eighteenth-century palace on the Fontanka that housed the School of Jurisprudence. Vladimir had himself wanted to go to the Academy of Arts, but never afterward regretted his parents’ decision in favor of the law school. He became and remained almost pathologically hostile to the teaching of the fine arts, a cast of mind little challenged on the Fontanka, where painting and sculpture were barely even mentioned and art teaching was limited to a few slapdash drawing classes. In any case, Stasov was not much of a practitioner; his bent was more toward history and criticism. Above all he was a voracious reader. As a schoolboy he was already reading widely in recent critical literature on art and music as well as in literature itself, both Russian and foreign. Some of this reading was simply the normal educated mental furniture of the day, if not necessarily that of the average fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. Vladimir and his friends of course read Pushkin and wept at his death; they pored over the Lermontov poems in the monthly Otechestvennïye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland); and they devoured Gogol’s Dead Souls when it came out in 1842 and went about talking Gogolese to one another. Vladimir himself, a good linguist from childhood, read Hugo and Dumas (père), also probably Shakespeare, in French, Hoffmann and Jean Paul in German, Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper in Russian translation.
Perhaps more significant than his acquaintance with these fashionable literary heroes of the early nineteenth century was his growing enthusiasm for the critical literature about their work. This was something more than the mere casual interest in the arts that prompts modern educated man to turn to the reviews section of the daily newspaper. Stasov was growing up in a new age of critical exegesis on a grand scale, whose leading exponents were starting to exert an influence far beyond the subject matter they took as their starting point. In Paris, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was evolving what he called critiques et portraits littéraires, extended articles that fused biography and criticism into integrated, pamphlet-sized studies of individual authors or major historical figures. Heinrich Heine was reporting at length for German readers on music and art in Paris. In St. Petersburg, Vissarion Belinsky was beginning, in the mid-thirties, the long series of articles and reviews that would transform the whole philosophical perception of the relation between literature and society. Stasov was certainly reading Heine’s reviews in the volumes of Der Salon (which were banned in Russia) by the early 1840s. Heine’s writing about the arts is that of a literatus, an observant, sharp-witted wordsmith, capable of hitting off the feeling and atmosphere of a painting or a symphony without posturing or aestheticizing, but also without any pretense at technical expertise. Or rather, he understands technical details as an astute observer understands them, as an aspect of the surface through which he experiences the image or the sound. “In no other picture in the Salon,” he writes about Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, “has the colour sunk in so much as in Delacroix’s July Revolution. Nevertheless, this very absence of varnish and of shining surface, together with the smoke and dust which envelop the figures like a grey cobweb, these sun-dried colours which seem to thirst for a drop of water, all this seems to stamp the picture with truthfulness, reality, originality.”1 And on music criticism: “Nothing is more inadequate than the theory of Music. Undeniably it has laws, laws mathematically determined. These laws, however, are not music, but the conditions thereof; just as the art of design and the theory of colours, or even the palette and the pencil, are not painting but the means necessary thereto. The essence of music is revelation; it permits of no analysis, and true musical criticism is an experimental science.”2
Stasov was struck, he later recalled, by the depth and clarity of Heine’s perceptions, even though “he understood little about the technique of art and had absolutely nothing in common with specialist critics.”3 This was one important aspect of the new criticism: its ability to bridge the chasm, so rarely crossed in the past, between art as métier and art as signification. All the same, there remained something of the dilettante about Heine as a critic. When all was said and done, he was expatiating on something that, as he tacitly admitted, he only partially understood. With Belinsky the case was completely different. Belinsky was a writer writing about writers. Though not himself a creative artist—neither poet, novelist, nor playwright—he understood the nature of their materials, and was brilliantly equipped to carry out the particular hermeneutical program that he himself devised and that required the close analysis of,
in particular, stories, novels, and poems in terms of their concealed psychological, social, and political meanings. We are so used today to the idea of the novel as a simulacrum of our life and times and the book review as an exposé of that relationship that it can be hard to imagine a time when such things were the exception rather than the rule. Art as social commentary was essentially a by-product of romanticism, and criticism of it in those terms followed hard on its heels. In music one might compare a Handel opera about ancient Rome with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, which twists an old convention into sharp social satire. Beethoven’s obvious sense that music could—perhaps should—be at least partly understood as psychological narrative was picked up by E. T. A. Hoffmann, himself a composer, in reviews that drew a clear distinction between process and connotation. But for Belinsky even this much interpretation would have seemed not much better than idle speculation. For him a work of art was not only a reflection of the world into which it was born, but had a positive duty to seek to make that world a better, more humane place. Of course Belinsky’s world, the St. Petersburg of the 1830s and ’40s (he died in 1848, a few days before his thirty-seventh birthday), was a grim, distressing place even by the not very high standards of contemporary Europe, and it was the sheer awfulness, inhumanity, unfreedom, and brute authoritarianism of Russia under Nicholas I that drove Belinsky to his essentially moralistic, didactic understanding of art as an encrypted mechanism for social and political change. Stasov tells us that Belinsky’s monthly articles in Notes of the Fatherland did more for his and his fellow pupils’ education than all their classes, courses, written work, and exams put together. “The huge influence of Belinsky,” he concludes, “was by no means confined to the literary aspect; he nurtured character, he hacked away, at a stroke, the patriarchal prejudices with which the whole of Russia had hitherto lived their lives.”4
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 4
