THE
RUSSIAN OPERA

BY
ROSA
NEWMARCH

WITH SIXTEEN
ILLUSTRATIONS
HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED
ARUNDEL PLACE HAYMARKET
LONDON S.W. MCMXIV

THE ANCHOR PRESS, LTD., TIPTREE, ESSEX.

TO
FEODOR IVANOVICH SHALIAPIN
IN MEMORY OF OUR OLD FRIEND
VLADIMIR VASSILIEVICH STASSOV

PREFACE

BETWEEN January 19th, 1900, and April 4th, 1905, I read before the Musical Association of London five papers dealing with the Development of National Opera in Russia, covering a period from the first performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1836, to the production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tsar’s Bride, in 1899. These lectures were illustrated by the following artists: the late Mrs. Henry J. Wood, Miss Grainger Kerr, Mr. Seth Hughes, Mr. Robert Maitland; Sir (Mr.) Henry J. Wood and Mr. Richard Epstein at the piano. While using these lectures as the scaffolding of my present book, I have added a considerable amount of new material, amassed during ten years unremitting research into my subject. The additions concern chiefly the earlier phases of Russian music, and the operas that have appeared since 1900. The volume also contains some account of the foundation of the nationalist school of composers under the leadership of Balakirev. It has been my privilege to meet and converse with most of the members of this circle. I give also a few details about the literary champion of “the Invincible Band,” Vladimir Stassov, under whose guidance I first studied the history of Russian music. With all modesty I believe I may claim to have been a pioneer worker in this field. When in 1895 I published my translation (from the French edition of M. Habets) of Stassov’s book on Borodin, and followed it up in 1897 by a series of articles—the fruits of my first visit to Russia—in that short-lived weekly The Musician, the literature of the subject was by no means copious, even in Russia itself; while the daily increasing public in Western Europe who were anxious to learn something about the remarkable galaxy of composers newly arisen in the east, based their knowledge and opinions almost entirely upon César Cui’s pamphlet La Musique en Russie, an interesting, but in many respects misleading, statement of the phenomenon; or upon the views propagated by Rubinstein and his followers, wherefrom they learnt that the Russians, though musically gifted, were only represented by incapable amateurs.

Happily for its own enjoyment, the world has grown wiser. The last few years have witnessed the vindication of Moussorgsky’s genius in France and England; a consummation devoutly wished, but hardly anticipated, by those who had been convinced from the beginning of the nobility and sincerity of spirit and motive which entitles his two finished operas to be regarded as masterpieces. During Sir Joseph Beecham’s season of Russian Opera at Drury Lane last year, Rimsky-Korsakov’s early music-drama Ivan the Terrible (“The Maid of Pskov”) made a profound impression, with Shaliapin in the part of the tyrant Tsar. In the forthcoming season it is Borodin’s turn to be introduced to the British public, and I confidently predict the success of his lyric opera Prince Igor. So, one by one, these Russians, “eaters of tallow candles, Polar bears, too long consumers of foreign products, are admitted in their turn in the character of producers.”[1]

In view of the extended interest now felt in Russian opera, drama and ballet, it has been thought worth while to offer to the public this outline of the development of a genuine national opera, from the history of which we have much to learn in this country, both as regards the things to be attempted and those to be shunned. Too much technical analysis has been intentionally avoided in this volume. The musician can supply this deficiency by the study of the scores mentioned in the book, which, dating from Glinka’s time, have nearly all been published and are therefore accessible to the student; the average opera-goer will be glad to gain a general view of the subject, unencumbered by the monotonous terminology of musical analysis.

CONTENTS

THE
RUSSIAN
OPERA

THE RUSSIAN OPERA

CHAPTER I
THE DAWN OF MUSIC IN RUSSIA

THE early history of the development of the national music, like that of most popular movements in Russia, has its aspects of oppression and conflict with authority. On the one hand we see a strong natural impulse moving irresistibly towards fulfilment; on the other, a policy of repression amounting at moments to active persecution. That the close of the nineteenth century has witnessed the triumph of Russian music at home and abroad proves how strong was the innate capacity of this people, and how deep their love of this art, since otherwise they could never have finally overcome every hindrance to its development. That from primitive times the Slavs were easily inspired and moved by music, and that they practised it in very early phases of their civilisation, their early historians are all agreed. In the legend of “Sadko, the Rich Merchant” (one of the byline of the Novgorodian Cycle) the hero, a kind of Russian Orpheus, who suffers the fate of Jonah, makes the Sea-king dance to the sound of his gusslee, and only stays his hand when the wild gyrations of the marine deity have created such a storm on earth that all the ships on the ocean above are in danger of being wrecked. In the “Epic of the Army of Igor,” when the minstrel Boyan sings, he draws “the grey wolf over the fields, and the blue-black eagle from the clouds.” In peace and war, music was the joy of the primitive Slavs. In the sixth century the Wends told the Emperor in Constantinople that music was their greatest pleasure, and that on their travels they never carried arms but musical instruments which they made themselves. Procopius, the Byzantine historian, describing a night attack made by the Greeks, A.D. 592, upon the camp of the Slavs, says that the latter were so completely absorbed in the delights of singing that they had forgotten to take any precautionary measures, and were oblivious of the enemy’s approach. Early in their history, the Russian Slavs used a considerable number of musical instruments: the gusslee, a kind of horizontal harp, furnished with seven or eight strings, and the svirel, a reed pipe (chalumet), being the most primitive. Soon, however, we read of the goudok, a species of fiddle with three strings, played with a bow; the dombra, an instrument of the guitar family, the forerunner of the now fashionable balalaïka, the strings of which were vibrated with the fingers; and the bandoura, or kobza, of the Malo-Russians, which had from eight to twenty strings. Among the primitive wind instruments were the sourna, a shrill pipe of Eastern origin, and the doudka, the bagpipe, or cornemuse. The drum, the tambourine, and the cymbals were the instruments of percussion chiefly in use.

Berezovsky makes a convenient division of the history of Russian music into four great periods. The first, within its limits, was purely national. It included all the most ancient folksongs and byline, or metrical legends; it saw the rise and fall of the Skomorokhi, the minstrels who were both the composers and preservers of these old epics and songs. This period reached its highest development in the reign of Vladimir, “The Red Sun,” first Christian prince of Russia, about A.D. 988. The second period, which Berezovsky describes as already falling away from the purely national ideal, dates from the establishment of Christianity in Russia, at the close of the tenth century, when the folk music lost much of its independence and fell under Byzantine influence. Russian music entered upon its third period about the middle of the eighteenth century; national songs now regained some of their former importance, but its progress was checked because the tastes of Western Europe were already paramount in the country. Italian music had reached the capital and long held the field. The first twenty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a passionate revival of interest in the national music, and when, in 1836, Glinka created A Life for the Tsar, he inaugurated a fourth period in the history of national art, the limits of which have yet to be ultimately defined.

Of the first, the primitive period in Russian music, there are few records beyond the allusions to the love of minstrelsy which we find in the earliest known songs and legends of the Russian Slavs. When we reach the second period, at which the national music entered upon a struggle with the spiritual authorities, we begin to realise from the intolerance of the clerical attitude how deeply the art must have already laid hold upon the spirit of the people. Whether from a desire to be faithful to oriental asceticism, and to the austere spirit which animated the Church during the first centuries which followed the birth of Christ, or because of the need to keep a nation so recently converted, and still so deeply impregnated with paganism, fenced off from all contaminating influences, the Church soon waged relentless war upon every description of profane recreation. The Orthodox clergy were not only opposed to music, but to every form of secular art. Moreover the folksongs were of pagan origin; therefore, just as the priests of to-day still look askance at the songs and legends of the Brittany peasants which perpetuate the memory of heathen customs, so the Byzantine monks of the eleventh century, and onwards, denounced the national songs of Russia as being hostile to the spirit of Christianity. Songs, dances, and spectacular amusements were all condemned. Even at the weddings of the Tsars, as late as the seventeenth century, dancing and singing were rigorously excluded, only fanfares of trumpets, with the music of flutes and drums, and fireworks, being permitted. Professor Milioukhov, in his “Sketch for a History of Russian Culture,” quotes one of the austere moralists of mediæval times who condemns mirth as a snare of the evil one; “laughter does not edify or save us; on the contrary it is the ruin of edification. Laughter displeases the Holy Spirit and drives out virtue, because it makes men forget death and eternal punishment. Lord, put mirth away from me; give me rather tears and lamentations.” So persistent and effectual was the repression of all secular enjoyments that one monkish chronicler was able to remark with evident satisfaction that, for the time being, “there was silence in all the land of Russia.”

Under these conditions the primitive music had little chance of development. Driven from the centres of dawning civilisation, it took refuge in forest settlements and remote villages. With it fled the bards and the mummers, the gleemen—those “merry lads” as the Russians called them—so dear to the hearts of the people. These musicians were originally of two classes: minstrels and gusslee players (harpists), such as the famous Skald, Bayan; and the Skomorokhi, or mummers, who sang and juggled for the diversion of the people. In course of time we find allusions to several subdivisions in the band of Skomorokhi, all of which may now be said to have their modern equivalents in Russia. There was the Skomorokh-pievets, or singer of the mythical or heroic songs, who afterwards became absorbed into the ranks of the poets with the rise of a school of poetry at the close of the sixteenth century; the Skomorokh-goudets, who played for dancing, and was afterwards transformed into the orchestral player, exchanging his gusslee or dombra for some more modern western instrument; the Skomorokh-plyassoun, the dancer, now incorporated in the corps-de-ballet; and the Skomorokh-gloumosslovets, the buffoon or entertainer, who eventually became merged in the actor.

Monkish persecution could not entirely stamp out the love of music in the land. To attain that end it would have been necessary to uproot the very soul of the nation. Despite the fulminations of the clergy, the nobles still secretly cherished and patronised their singers, who beguiled the tedium of the long winters in their poteshni palati. These dependents of the aristocracy were the first actors known to the Russians. At the same time such fanatical teaching could not fail to alter in some degree the temper of a people wholly uneducated and prone to superstition. The status of the minstrels gradually declined. They ceased to be “welcome guests” in hut and hall, and the Skomorokhi degenerated into companies of roving thieves, numbering often from fifty to a hundred, who compelled the peasants to supply them with food, as they moved from place to place, driven onward by their clerical denunciators. By way of compromise, the gleemen now appear to have invented a curious class of song which they called “spiritual,” in which pagan and Christian sentiments were mingled in a strange and unedifying jumble. The pure delight of singing having been condemned as a sin, and practised more or less sub rosa, the standard of songs became very much corrupted. The degeneracy of music and kindred forms of recreation was most probably the outcome of this intolerant persecution. But though they had helped to bring about this state of affairs, there was no doubt something to be said for the attitude of the clergy, if we may believe the testimony of western travellers in Russia in the sixteenth century. The minstrels in the service of the richer nobles deteriorated as a class, and claimed their right to give entertainments in towns and villages, which were often of scandalous coarseness and profanity. The same may be said of the puppet-shows (Koukolnaya teatr), of somewhat later date, the abominable performances of which shocked the traveller Adam Olearius when he accompanied the ambassador sent by Frederick Duke of Holstein to the Great Duke of Muscovy in 1634 and 1636. The long struggle between spiritual authority and the popular craving for secular recreation continued until the reign of Alexis Mikhaïlovich (1645-1676).

In a measure the Church was successful in turning the thoughts of the people from worldly amusements to the spiritual drama enacted within her doors. During these long dark centuries, when Russia had neither universities nor schools, nor any legitimate means of recreation, the people found a dramatic sensation in the elaborate and impressive ritual of the Orthodox Church. Patouillet, in his book “Le Théâtre de Mœurs Russes,” says: “the iconostasis, decorated with paintings, erected between the altar and the faithful, resembles, with its three doors, an antique proscenium. The ‘imperial’ door, reserved for the officiating priest, and formerly for the Emperor, recalls by its name, if not by its destination, the ‘royal’ entrance of the Greek theatre. Thus there is, as it were, a double scene being enacted, one which takes place before the eyes of the congregation, the other hidden from them during certain portions of the ritual, particularly at the moment of the ‘Holy Mysteries’ (the Consecration of the elements). These alternations of publicity and mystery; the celebrant reappearing and disappearing; the deacon, who goes in and out at the side doors and stands upon the Ambon, like a kind of λογεἱον, to declare the divine word to the assembled Christians, dialoguing sometimes with them, sometimes with the officiating priest; the double choir of singers, arranged even in this day on each side of the iconostasis, and finally the attitude of the faithful themselves—rather that of a crowd of spectators than of participants—all these details formed a spectacle full of dramatic interest in times of simple faith.”

On certain religious festivals, allegorical representations, such as the Washing of the Feet and the Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, were enacted in public places. The early marriage service of the Orthodox Church, with its pompous religious ceremonial and social customs, such as the pretended lamentations of the bride, and the choruses of the young girls, held distinctly dramatic elements. In these ecclesiastical ceremonies and social usages may be traced the first germs of the Russian drama.

In Western Russia we find the school drama (Shkolnaya-drama) established in the ecclesiastical Academy of Kiev as early as the close of the fifteenth century. The students used to recite the events of the Nativity in public places and illustrate their words by the help of the Vertep, a kind of portable retable on which were arranged figures representing the Birth of Christ. The Passion of Our Lord was represented in the same way, and the recital was interspersed with choral singing, and not infrequently with interludes of a secular or comic nature. This form of drama had found its way into Russia from Poland. In 1588 Giles Fletcher, Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Russia, gives an account of a representation in Moscow, which reminds us of the Scoppio del Carro, the Easter ceremony at Florence, when a mechanical dove carrying the “Pazzi fire,” lit from the sacred flint brought back from the Holy Sepulchre, is set rushing along a wire from the altar to the car, hung about with fireworks, which stands outside the great West Door of the Duomo. When the bird comes in contact with the car the pyrotechnical display is ignited, and if all goes without a hitch the vintage and harvest will prosper.

Says Fletcher: “The weeke before the Nativitie of Christ every bishop in his cathedral church setteth forth a shew of the three children in the oven.[2] Where the Angell is made to come flying from the roof of the church, with great admiration of the lookers-on, and many terrible flashes of fire are made with rosen and gun-powder by the Chaldeans (as they call them), that run about the town all the twelve days, disguised in their plaiers coats, and make much good sport for the honour of the bishop’s pageant. At the Mosko, the emperour himselfe and the empress never faile to be at it, though it be but the same matter plaid every yeere, without any new invention at all.”

Dr. Giles Fletcher was a member of the family so well-known in the history of English literature; he was the uncle of John Fletcher, the dramatist, and the father of Phineas Fletcher, the author of the poem “The Purple Island.” How naïve and almost barbarous must this Russian mystery play have seemed to the Englishman who had probably witnessed some of the innumerable comedies, tragi-comedies, farces, and tragedies which were then enacted at home in the universities, the Inns of Court, and elsewhere; and who may very likely already have frequented the theatre in Blackfriars or Shoreditch, and seen the plays of Marlowe and Greene, although as yet hardly anything of Shakespeare!

Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), who first sent for printers from Germany and published the earliest Russian book (containing the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles) in 1564, did nothing towards the secular education of his Court or of the people. Nor was there much progress in this respect in the reign of Boris Godounov (1598-1605). Secular dramatic art continued to be discouraged by the Church, without any patronage being accorded to it in high places until the reign of Alexis Mikhaïlovich. This prince, who may justly be called the founder of a national theatre in Russia, showed a real interest in the fine arts. He summoned a few musicians to Moscow, who taught the Russians the use of instruments hitherto unused by them. This encouragement of music at his Court provoked a final outburst of clerical intolerance. In 1649, by order of the Patriarch Joseph, all the musical instruments in the city of Moscow were confiscated and burnt in the open market place. Those belonging to the Tsar’s private band were spared, perhaps from a fear of offending their royal patron, but more probably because their owners, being Germans, were welcome to go to perdition in their own way.

When we come to the middle of the seventeenth century and the advent of the enlightened Alexis Mikhaïlovich, the history of Russian drama, so closely associated with that of its opera, assumes a more definite outline. This prince married Natalia Naryshkin, the adopted daughter of the Boyard Artamon Matveiev. Matveiev’s wife was of Scottish origin—her maiden name was Hamilton—so that the outlook of this household was probably somewhat cosmopolitan. The Tsaritsa Natalia was early interested in the theatre; partly perhaps because she had heard of it from her adopted parents, but most probably her taste was stimulated by witnessing one of the performances which were given from time to time among the foreigners in the German quarter of Moscow. Lord Carlisle, in his “Relation of Three Embassies from His Majesty Charles II. to the Great Duke of Moscovy,” makes mention of one of these performances in 1664. He says: “Our Musique-master composed a Handsome Comedie in Prose, which was acted in our house.”

Travelled nobles and ambassadors also told of the great enjoyment derived from the theatre in Western Europe. Likhatchev, who was sent to Florence in 1658, wrote with naïve enthusiasm of an opera which he had seen there; but he seems to have been more impressed by the scenic effects, which included a moving sea filled with fish, and a vanishing palace, than by the music which accompanied these wonders. Potemkin, who represented the Tsar at the Court of the Grand Monarque, saw Molière’s company in “Amphitryon” in 1668, and doubtless communicated his impressions to his sovereign. But before this date, as early as 1660, Alexis Mikhaïlovich had given orders to an Englishman in his service to engage for him “Master Glassblowers, Master Engravers and Master Makers of comedies.” It was long, however, before Russia actually attained to the possession of this last class of workers. Finally, incited by his wife’s tastes, by the representations of his more polished nobles, and not a little by personal inclinations, Alexis issued an Oukaz, on May 15th, 1672, ordering Count Von-Staden to recruit in Courland all kinds “of good master workmen, together with very excellent skilled trumpeters, and masters who would know how to organise plays.” Unfortunately the reputation of Russia as a dwelling-place was not attractive. Doubtless the inhabitants of Eastern Europe still spoke with bated breath of the insane cruelties of Ivan the Terrible which had taken place a hundred years earlier. At any rate the Courlanders showed no great anxiety to take service under the Tsar, and Staden returned from his mission to Riga and other towns, in December, 1672, with only “one trumpeter” and “four musicians.” Nevertheless the Oukaz itself is an important landmark in the cultural evolution of Russia, marking, according to Tikhonraviev, the end of her long term of secular isolation as regards the drama. These five imported musicians formed the nucleus of what was to expand one day into the orchestra of the Imperial Opera.

Alexis Mikhaïlovich was evidently impatient to see some kind of drama enacted at his Court; for in June of the same year, without waiting for “the masters who would know how to organise plays,” he determined to celebrate the birthday of his son Peter—later to be known as Peter the Great—with a theatrical performance. The Tsar therefore commissioned Yagan (otherwise Johann) Gottfried Gregory, one of the protestant pastors residing in the German quarter of Moscow, to write a play, or “act” as it is described in the Tsar’s edict, dealing with the Biblical subject of Esther. As a temporary theatre, a room was specially arranged at Preobrajensky, a village on the outskirts of Moscow which now forms part of the city. Red and green hangings, carpets and tapestries of various sorts were lent from the Tsar’s household to decorate the walls and the seats of honour; the bulk of the audience, however, had to content themselves with bare wooden benches. The scenery was painted by a Dutchman named Peter Inglis, who received the pompous title of “Master-Perspective-Maker.” The Boyard Matveiev, the Tsaritsa’s adoptive father, took an active interest in the organisation of this primitive theatre, and was appointed about this time, “Director of the Tsar’s Entertainments,” being in fact the forerunner of the later “Intendant” or Director of the Imperial Opera. Pastor Gregory, aided by one or two teachers in the German school, wrote the text of a “tragi-comedy” entitled The Acts of Artaxerxes. Gregory, who had been educated at the University of Jena, probably selected just such a subject as he had been accustomed to see presented in German theatres in his early youth. Although he had long resided in Moscow he does not seem to have acquired complete command of the Russian language, which was then far from being the subtle and beautiful medium of expression which it has since become. The tragi-comedy was written in a strange mixture of Russian and German, and we read that he had the assistance of two translators from the Chancellery of Ambassadors. A company numbering sixty-four untrained actors was placed at his service; they were drawn from among the children of foreign residents and from the better class of tradesfolk. Music evidently played an important part in the performance; the orchestra consisting of Germans, and of servants from Matveiev’s household who played on “organs, viols and other instruments.” The organist of the German church, Simon Gutovsky, was among the musicians. A chorus also took part in the play, consisting of the choir of the Court Chapel, described as “the Imperial Singing-Deacons.”

The actual performance of The Acts of Artaxerxes took place on October 17th, 1672 (O.S.), and is said to have lasted ten hours, making demands upon the endurance of the audience which puts Wagnerian enthusiasts completely to shame. The Tsar watched the spectacle with unflagging attention and afterwards generously rewarded those who had taken part in the performance. The attitude of the clergy had so far changed that the Tsar’s chaplain, the Protopope Savinov, undertook to set at rest his master’s last scruples of conscience by pointing to the example of the Greek emperors and other potentates.

Gaining courage, and also a growing taste for this somewhat severe form of recreation, Alexis went on to establish a more permanent theatrical company. In the following year (1673) Pastor Gregory was commanded to instruct twenty-six young men, some drawn from the clerks of the Chancellery of State, others from the lower orders of the merchants or tradespeople, who were henceforth to be known as “the Comedians of His Majesty the Tsar.” At first the audience consisted only of the favoured intimate circle of the Tsar, and apparently no ladies were present; but after a time the Tsaritsa and the Tsarevnas were permitted to witness the performance from the seclusion of a Royal Box protected by a substantial grille. The theatre was soon transferred from Preobrajensky to the Poteshny Dvorets in the Kremlin.

The Acts of Artaxerxes was followed by a series of pieces, nearly all of a highly edifying nature, written or arranged by Gregory and others: Tobias, The Chaste Joseph, Adam and Eve, Orpheus and Eurydice (with couplets and choruses) and How Judith cut off the head of Holofernes. The libretto of the last-named play is still in existence, and gives us some idea of the patient endurance of primitive theatre-goers in Russia. It is in seven acts, subdivided into twenty-nine scenes, with a prologue and an interlude between the third and fourth acts; the characters number sixty-three; all the female parts were acted by youths. The libretto is constructed more or less on the plan of the German comedies of the period, but what gives the piece a special importance in the history of Russian opera is the fact that it contains arias and choruses linked with the action of the piece, such as the Song of the Kings, in which they bewail their sad fate when taken captive by Holofernes, a soldier’s Drinking Song, a Love-Song sung by Vagav at Judith’s feast, and a Jewish Song of Victory, the words of which are paraphrased from Biblical sources. The author is supposed, without much foundation in fact, to have been Simeon Polotsky, of whom we shall hear later. The piece was probably translated from German sources. A custom was then started, which prevailed for a considerable time in Russia, of confiding the translation of plays to the clerks in the Chancellery of the Ambassadors, which department answered in some measure to our Foreign Office. The composer of the music is unknown, but Cheshikin, in his “History of Russian Opera,” considers himself fully justified in describing it as the first Russian opera. Two hundred years later Serov composed a popular opera on the subject of Judith, an account of which will be found on page 150.

All the Russian operas of the eighteenth century follow this style of drama, or comedy, with some musical numbers interpolated; it is the type of opera which is known in Germany as the Singspiel. As Judith represents the prototype of many succeeding Russian operas, a few details concerning it will not be out of place here. The work is preserved in manuscript in the Imperial Public Library. It is evident that the dramatic action was strongly supported by the music; for instance, to quote only one scenic direction in the piece, “Seloum beats the drum and cries aloud,” alarm is here expressed by the aid of trumpets and drums. The action develops very slowly, and the heroine does not appear until the fourth act. In Act I. Nebuchadnezzar and his great men take counsel about the invasion of Judea; the king summons Holofernes and appoints him leader of his army. In Act II. the sufferings of the Jews are depicted; and the embassy to Holofernes from the Asiatic kings. Act III. is concerned with the speech which the God-fearing man Achior delivers in honour of Israel, in the presence of Holofernes; and with the wrath of the leader who orders the punishment of Achior. Act IV. contains a conversation between Judith and her handmaiden Arboya about the miserable plight of Judea. In Act V. occurs the Lament of Israel: Judith persuades the people not to capitulate to Holofernes and prays God to come to their rescue. Act VI., Judith’s Farewell to the Jewish Elders, and her departure for the camp of Holofernes; she slays Holofernes and the Jews return to Bethulia. The whole work concludes with Israel’s Song of Victory. Side by side with these dramatic scenes are interpolated comic interludes in the characteristic German style of the seventeenth century. The language contains many Germanisms and South Russian locutions, as though the translator had been a Malo-Russian. The piece is certainly tedious and contains much sententious moralising, with a reflection of sentiment which seems to belong peculiarly to the Orthodox Church. The pious tone of the work was indispensable at that period, and it was not until the Tsar’s patronage of the drama became more assured that Pastor Gregory ventured on the production of a secular play founded on a distant echo of Marlowe’s “Tamerlane the Great” (1586), written on the same lines as Judith, and containing also musical numbers.

Besides pieces of the nature of the Singspiel, Patouillet tells us that there were ballets at the Court of Alexis Mikhaïlovich. School dramas were in vogue at the Ecclesiastical Academy (of Zaikonospasskaya), for which Simeon Polotsky, and later on Daniel Touptalo (afterwards canonised as Saint Dimitri of Rostov), wrote sacred plays. Polotsky, educated at the Academy of Kiev, joined the Ecclesiastical School of Moscow, in 1660, as professor of Latin. He adapted, or wrote, St. Alexis, Nebuchadnezzar, The Golden Calf, and the Three Children who were not consumed in the Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son. The last-named play was undoubtedly performed before the Court, and was reprinted in 1685 with a number of plates showing the costumes of the actors and spectators.

Dimitri of Rostov, who was also a student at Kiev, composed a series of Mystery Plays with rhymed verse. The Prodigal Son, by Simeon Polotsky, says Patouillet, “had interludes which have not been preserved, and in Dimitri of Rostov’s Nativity, the scene of the Adoration of the Shepherds was long in favour on account of a certain naïve folk-style of diction” None of these plays can be claimed as literature, but they are interesting as marking the transition from sacred to secular drama, and in some of them there was a faint reflection of contemporary manners. But this was not a spontaneous or popular movement; it was merely a Court ordinance. The clerks and artisans who were trained as actors often took part in these spectacles against the wish of their parents, who were only partly reconciled by the Tsar’s example to seeing their sons adopt what they had long been taught to regard as a disorderly and irreligious career. Because the movement had no roots in the life of the people it could not flourish healthily. When Alexis died in 1670, the “Chamber of Comedians” was closed, Matveiev was exiled, and there was a reaction in favour of asceticism.

But the impetus had been given, and henceforth the drama was never to be entirely banished from Russian life. Some of the westernised Boyards now maintained private theatres—just as their ancestors had maintained the bards and the companies of Skomorokhi—in which were played pieces based upon current events or upon folk legends; while the School Drama long continued to be given within the walls of the Ecclesiastical Academy of Zaikonospasskaya. Thus the foundations of Russian dramatic art, including also the first steps towards the opera and the ballet, were laid before the last decade of the seventeenth century.

The advent of Peter the Great to the throne was not on the whole favourable to music. The fine arts made no special appeal to the utilitarian mind of this monarch. Music had now ceased to be regarded as one of the seven deadly sins, but suffered almost a worse fate, since in the inrush of novel cosmopolitan ideas and customs the national songs seem for a time to have been completely forgotten. With the drama things advanced more quickly. Peter the Great, who conceived his mission in life to be the more or less forcible union of Russia with Western Europe, realised the importance of the theatre as a subordinate means to this end. During his travels abroad he had observed the influence exercised by the drama upon the social life of other countries. In 1697 he was present at a performance of the ballet “Cupidon,” at Amsterdam, and in Vienna and London he heard Italian opera, which was just coming into vogue in this country, and waxed enthusiastic over the singing of our prima donna Cross. During his sojourn in Vienna he took part himself, attired in the costume of a Friesland peasant, in a pastoral pageant (Wirthschaft) given at the Court. Thus the idea of reorganising the “Comedians’ Chamber” founded by his father was suggested to him. As Alexis had formerly sent Von-Staden to find foreign actors for Russia, so Peter now employed a Slovak, named Splavsky, a captain in the Russian army, on a similar mission. The Boyard Golovin was also charged with the erection of a suitable building near to the Kremlin. After two journeys, Splavsky succeeded in bringing back to Russia a German troupe collected by an entrepreneur in Dantzig, Johann Christian Kunst. At first the actors were as unwilling to come as were those of a previous generation, having heard bad accounts of the country from a certain Scottish adventurer, Gordon, who had been connected with a puppet-show, and who seems to have been a bad character and to have been punished with the knout for murder. Finally, in April, 1702, Kunst signed a contract by which his principal comedians undertook for the yearly sum of about 4,200 roubles in the present currency “to make it their duty like faithful servants to entertain and cheer His Majesty the Tsar by all sorts of inventions and diversions, and to this end to keep always sober, vigilant and in readiness.” Kunst’s company consisted of himself, designated “Director of the Comedians of His Majesty the Tsar,” his wife Anna, and seven actors. Hardly had he settled in Moscow before he complained that Splavsky had hastened his departure from Germany before he had had time or opportunity to engage good comedians skilled in “singing-plays.” The actors played in German, but a certain number of clerks in the Chancellery of the Embassies were sent to Kunst to be taught the repertory in Russian. It was not until 1703 that the first public theatre in Russia, a wooden building, was erected near the Kremlin in Moscow. Meanwhile the plays were given at the residence of General Franz Lefort, in the German quarter of the city. Here, on the occasion of the state entry of Peter into Moscow, Kunst performed Alexander and Darius, followed by The Cruelty of Nero, a comedy in seven acts, Le Médecin malgré lui, and Mahomet and Zulima, a comedy interspersed with songs and dances. The new theatre was a genuine attempt on the part of the Tsar Peter to bring this form of entertainment within reach of a larger public than the privileged circle invited to witness the plays given at the Court of Alexis. For the country and period, the installation was on quite a sumptuous scale. There were seats at four prices: ten, six, five and three kopecks. In 1704 there were two performances in the week which usually lasted about five hours, from five to ten p.m. Peter the Great gave orders in 1705 that the pieces should be given alternately in Russian and German, and that at the performance of the plays “the musicians were to play on divers instruments.” Russians of all ranks, and foreigners, were bidden to attend “as they pleased, quite freely, having nothing to fear.” On the days of performance the gates leading into the Kremlin, the Kitaï-gorod and the Bieli-gorod were left open till a later hour in order to facilitate the passage of theatre-goers. From the outset Kunst demanded facilities for the mounting of opera, and also an orchestra. Seven musicians were engaged by special contract in Hamburg and an agent was commissioned “to purchase little boys in Berlin with oboes and pipes.” By this time a few Russian magnates had started private bands in imitation of those maintained by some of the nobility in Germany. Prince Gregory Oginsky contributed four musicians from his private band for the royal service in Moscow. To the director of the musicians from Hamburg, Sienkhext, twelve Russian singers were handed over to be taught the oboe. We learn nothing as to the organisation of a company of singers, because in all probability, in accordance with the custom of those days, the actors were also expected to be singers.

In the comedy of Scipio Africanus, and The Fall of Sophonisba, The Numidian Queen, an adaptation from Loenstein’s tragedy Sophonisba (1666), short airs and other incidental music formed part of the play. Music also played a subordinate part in an adaptation of Cicconini’s tragic opera Il tradimento per l’honore, overo il vendicatore pentito (Bologna, 1664), and in an adaptation of Molière’s Don Juan. These and other pieces from the repertory of the day were culled from various European sources, but almost invariably passed into the Russian through the intermediary of the German language. The work continued to be carried on in the Chancellery of the Embassies, where alone could be found men with some knowledge of foreign tongues. The translations were perfunctory and inaccurate, and there is no literary vitality whatever in the productions of this period, unless it is found in the interludes of a somewhat coarse humour which found more favour with the uncultivated public than did the pieces themselves. Simeon Smirnov was the first Russian who wrote farcical interludes of this kind, which were almost as rough and scandalous as the plays of the Skomorokhi of earlier centuries. It cannot be proved that in the time of Peter the Great an opera in the sense of a drama in which music preponderated was ever put upon the stage, but it is an undoubted fact, according to Cheshikin, that there exists the manuscript of a libretto for an opera on the subject of Daphne. It seems to be the echo of what had taken place in Florence at least a hundred years previously, when translations of the book of “Daphne,” composed by Caccini and Peri in 1594, gradually made their way into various parts of Europe. In 1635 we hear of its being given in Warsaw in the original Italian, and two or three years later it was translated into Polish, running through three editions; from one of these it was put into Russian early in the eighteenth century by an anonymous author. The manuscript of the translation exists in the Imperial Public Library, under one of the usual voluminous titles of the period, Daphnis pursued by the love of Apollo is changed into a laurel bush, or the Act of Apollo and the fair Daphne; how Apollo conquered the evil snake Python and was himself overcome by little Cupid. It bears the signature of one Dimitri Ilyinski, graduate of the Slaviano-Latin Academy of Moscow, who appears to have been merely the copyist, not the author, and the date “St. Petersburg, 1715.” The pupils of this Academy kept alive for some time the traditions of the “School Drama” side by side with the official theatre subsidised by the state. The plays continued to consist chiefly of Biblical episodes, and were usually so framed as to be a defence of the Orthodox Church. They were given periodically and were bare of all reference to contemporary life. Side by side with these we may place the allegorical and panegyrical plays performed by the medical students of the great hospital in Moscow. Crude as were the productions of these two institutions they represent, however, the more spontaneous movement of the national life rather than the purely imported literary wares of the official theatre.

Kunst died in 1703, and was succeeded by Otto Fürst, whose Russian name was Artemiem. He was a fair Russian scholar, and in a short time the company became accustomed to playing in the vernacular. But it cannot be said that this tentative national theatre was truly a success. It was a hothouse plant, tended and kept alive by royal favour, and when the Tsar removed his Court to St. Petersburg it gradually failed more and more to hold the attention of the public. The theatre in the Red Square was demolished before 1707. Fürst’s company, however, continued to give performances at Preobrajensky, the residence of the Tsarevna Natalia Alexseievna, youngest sister of Peter the Great, and later on at the palace of the Tsaritsa Prascovya Feodorovna at Ismailov. The private theatre of this palace was never closed during the life of the widowed Tsaritsa, who died in 1723. Her eldest daughter, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, was fond of all sorts of gaiety; while her second daughter, the Duchess of Courland, afterwards the Empress Anne of Russia, who often visited her mother at Ismailov, was also a lover of the theatre. The ladies in waiting joined Fürst’s pupils in the performance of plays, while the Duchess of Mecklenburg frequently acted as stage manager. The entrance was free, and although the places were chiefly reserved for the courtiers, the public seems to have been admitted somewhat indiscriminately, if we can believe the account of the page in waiting, Bergholds, who says that once his tobacco was stolen from his pocket and that two of his companions complained of losing their silk handkerchiefs.

About 1770 a theatrical company, consisting entirely of native actors and actresses, was established in St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Tsarevna Natalia Alexseievna, who herself wrote two plays for them to perform. This princess did all in her power to second the efforts of Peter the Great to popularise the drama. In 1720 the Tsar sent Yagoujinsky to Vienna to raise a company of actors who could speak Czech, thinking that they would learn Russian more quickly than the Germans, but the mission was not successful. In 1723 a German company, under the direction of Mann, visited the new capital and gave performances in their own tongue. They were patronised by the Empress Catherine I. At that time the Duke of Holstein, who afterwards married the Tsarevna Anne, was visiting St. Petersburg, and the Court seem to have frequently attended the theatre; but there is no definite record of Mann’s company giving performances of opera. A new theatre was inaugurated in St. Petersburg in 1725, the year of Peter the Great’s death.

CHAPTER II
RUSSIAN OPERA PRIOR TO GLINKA

THE history of Russian music enters upon a new period with the succession of the Empress Anne. The national melodies now began to be timidly cultivated, but the inauguration of a native school of music was still a very remote prospect, because the influence of Western Europe was now becoming paramount in Russian society. Italian music had just reached the capital, and there, as in England, it held the field against all rivals for many years to come.

Soon after her coronation, in 1732, the pleasure-loving Empress Anne organised private theatricals in her Winter Palace and wrote to Bishop Theofane Prokovich, asking him to supply her with three church singers. The piece given was a “school drama” entitled The Act of Joseph, and in its mounting and composition, a famous pupil of the Slaviano-Latin Academy took part, Vassily Cyrillovich Trediakovsky, poet and grammarian, and one of the first creators of the literary language of Russia. The rest of the actors consisted of the singers lent by the Bishop and of pupils selected from the Cadet Corps, among them Peter and Carl, sons of Anne’s favourite, Biron. Some of the actors’ parts are still in existence, with descriptions of their costumes, and details as to the requirements of the piece, which seem to show that the entire Biblical story of Joseph was presented, and that some allegorical personages such as Chastity, Splendour, Humility, and Envy, were introduced into the play. Splendour was attired in a red cloth garment, slashed and trimmed with silver braid; Chastity was in white without ornaments, crowned with a laurel wreath and carrying a sheaf of lilies. Besides Jacob, Joseph, and his Brethren, there were parts for King Pharaoh and two of his senators, Wise Men, slaves, attendants, and an executioner, who, we read, was clad in a short tunic of red linen and wore a yellow cap with a feather.

These old-fashioned, edifying plays soon bored the Empress Anne. Italian actors appeared at the Court and gave amusing comedies, occasionally containing musical interludes. The Empress employed Trediakovsky to translate the pieces that were played before her; for she was no Italian scholar. The new form of entertainment was so much to her liking that she determined to establish a permanent Italian company in St. Petersburg, and was the first to open a theatre in Russia exclusively for opera. This brings upon the scene a personality inseparably linked with the history of Russian opera: Francesco Araja, who is the first palpable embodiment of operatic music in Russia, for all his predecessors who composed for the plays of Kunst and Fürst have remained anonymous.

Araja was born at Naples in 1700. His first opera, Berenice, was given at the Court of Tuscany in 1730; his second, Amore per Regnante, was produced soon afterwards in Rome. This seemed to have attracted the attention of the Russian ambassador to Italy, and in 1735 the composer was invited to St. Petersburg as director of the new Italian opera company. The performances took place in the Winter Palace during the winter, and in the summer in the Theatre of the Summer Garden. It is possible that Araja’s first season opened with a performance of one of his own works with Russian text. Trediakovsky’s translation of La Forza dell’Amore e dell’Odio is described as “a drama for music performed at the New Theatre, by command of Her Imperial Highness Anna Johannovna, Autocrat of all the Russias. Published in St. Petersburg by the Imperial Academy of Science.” It is not impossible that this comparatively unimportant work actually led to Trediakovsky’s great literary innovation: the replacing of syllabic verse by tonic accent. It is significant that his book on this subject came out in the same year, and Cheshikin thinks that the study of the Italian opera of the eighteenth century, with its correct versification, may have suggested to him the theories which he sets forth in it. The same opera was given two years later in Italian under the title of Abizare. Other operas by Araja given in the Russian language are Seleucus (1744), Mithriadates (1747), Eudocia Crowned, or Theodosia II. (1751), and Dido Forsaken, the libretto by Metastasio (1758); the last named was given in Moscow the following year, and was apparently the first of Araja’s works to be heard in the old capital.

The Empress Elizabeth succeeded her cousin Anne in 1741, and Araja continued to be Court Capellmeister. Like Peter the Great, Elizabeth was anxious to popularise the drama in Russia. She showed a taste for Gallic art, and established a company which gave French comedies and tragedies alternately with Araja’s opera company. Elizabeth urged her ladies in waiting to attend every performance, and occasionally announced that the upper classes among the merchants might be present on certain nights “provided they were properly dressed.”[3]

Russian opera made a decided step in advance when in 1751 Araja composed music to a purely Russian text. The subject, La Clemenza di Tito, which Mozart subsequently treated in 1791, had nothing in common with the national life, but the libretto was the work of F. G. Volkov, and the effect was quite homogeneous, for all the singers sang in the vernacular instead of some using the Russian and some the Italian language as was formerly done. This tasteless custom did not wholly die out until well into the nineteenth century, but it became less and less general. Thus in 1755 we hear of Araja’s Cephalus and Procius being confided entirely to singers of Russian birth. The book of this opera was by Soumarakov, based on materials borrowed from the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid. The work is said to have been published in 1764, and is claimed by some to be the earliest piece of music printed in Russia. J. B. Jurgenson, head of the famous firm of music publishers in Moscow, who has diligently collected the Russian musical publications of the eighteenth century, states that he has never found any of Araja’s operas printed with music type. The fact that music was printed in Russia before the reign of Catherine II. still needs verification. The scenery of Cephalus was painted by Valeriani, who bore one of the high sounding titles which it was customary to bestow at the Court of Russia—being distinguished as “First Historical Painter, Professor of Perspective (scene painting) and Theatrical Engineer at the Imperial Court of Russia.” Among the singers who took part in the performance were Elizabeth Bielogradsky, daughter of a famous lute player, Count Razoumovsky, and Gravrilo Martsenkovich, known as Gravriloushko. The success of the opera was brilliant, and the Empress presented the composer with a fine sable coat as a mark of her gratification. In 1755, Araja, having amassed considerable wealth, returned to Italy and spent the remaining years of his life at Bologna.

Music under the Empress Elizabeth became a fashionable craze. Every great landowner started his private band or choir. About this time, the influence of the Empress’s favourite, Razoumovsky, made itself felt in favour of Russian melodies. By this time, too, a few talented native musicians had been trained either in the Court Chapel or in some of the private orchestras established by the aristocracy; but the influx of foreigners into Russia threatened to swamp the frail craft of native talent which had just been launched with pride upon the social sea. The majority of these foreigners were mediocrities who found it easier to impose upon the unsophisticated Russians than to make a living in their own country; but the names of Sarti, Paisiello, and Cimarosa stand out as glorious exceptions among this crowd of third and fourth rate composers.

To Feodor Grigorievich Volkov, whose name has been already mentioned as the author of the first genuine Russian libretto, has been also accorded the honour of producing the first Russian opera boasting some pretensions to the national style. Volkov was born at Kostroma, in 1729, the son of a merchant. On his father’s death and his mother’s re-marriage his home was transferred to Yaroslav. Here he received his early education from a German pastor in the service of Biron, Duke of Courland, then in banishment at Yaroslav. During a visit to St. Petersburg in 1746, Volkov was so captivated by his first impressions of Italian opera that he determined to start a theatrical company of his own in Yaroslav. He gathered together a few enthusiastic amateurs and began by giving performances in his own home. The attempt was so successful that the fame of his entertainments reached the Empress Elisabeth, and the young actors were summoned to her Court in 1752, where they gave a private performance of a “comedy” with musical interludes entitled The Sinner’s Repentance, by Dimitri, metropolitan of Rostov. One result of this production was that the Empress resolved to continue the education of two members of the company, one of whom, Ivan Dmitrievsky, became the most famous Russian actor of his day. In 1759 Volkov was sent to Moscow to establish a “Court theatre” there. The festivities with which the coronation of Catherine II. was celebrated in the old capital included a sumptuous masquerade entitled Minerva Triumphant, arranged by Volkov, in which choral music played a part. While engaged in organising the procession, Volkov caught a severe chill from which he never recovered, and died in April 1763. He was an amateur of music and made use of it in the entertainments which he produced; but there seem to be grave doubts as to whether he was capable of composing music to the first Russian comic opera, Taniousha or The Fortunate Meeting, said to have been produced in November 1756. Gorbounov thinks it highly improbable that such an opera ever existed,[4] because Volkov’s biographer, Rodislavsky, had no better foundation for assuming its composition and production than some old handbills belonging to the actor Nossov, which seem to have existed only in the imagination of their collector. The assertion that Taniousha was the first Russian national opera must therefore be accepted with reserve.

Evstignei Platovich Fomin was born August 5th 1741 (O.S.), in St. Petersburg. He was a pupil of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and in view of his promising musical talent was sent to study in Italy, where he entered for a time the Academy of Music at Bologna, and made rapid progress. He began his musical career in Moscow in 1770, but appears to have migrated to St. Petersburg before the death of Catherine II. He was commissioned to compose the music for a libretto from the pen of the Empress herself, entitled Boeslavich, the Novgorodian Hero. Catherine not being quite confident as to Fomin’s powers submitted the score to Martini. The result appears to have been satisfactory. In 1797 Fomin was employed at the Imperial Theatres as musical coach and répétiteur; he was also expected to teach singing to the younger artists of both sexes in the Schools, and to accompany in the orchestra for the French and Italian operas. For these duties he received an annual sum of 720 roubles. Fomin died in St. Petersburg in April, 1800. He wrote a considerable number of operas, including Aniouta (1772), the libretto by M. V. Popov; The Good Maiden (Dobraya Devka), libretto by Matinsky (1777); Regeneration (Pereiojdenia), (1777)[5]; in January 1779 his Wizard-Miller (Melnik-Koldoun) an opera in three acts, the libretto by Ablessimov, was produced for the first time, and proved one of the most successful operas of the eighteenth century; a one-act opera, the book by Nikolaiev, entitled The Tutor Professor, or Love’s Persuasive Eloquence, was given in Moscow; and in 1786 Boeslavich, in five acts, the text by Catherine II., was mounted at the Hermitage Palace; The Wizard, The Fortune Teller and The Matchmaker, in three acts, dates from 1791. In 1800 appeared two operas, The Americans, the libretto by Kloushin, and Chlorida and Milon, the words of which were furnished by the well-known writer Kapnist. As far as is known, Fomin composed ten operas and also wrote music to a melodrama entitled Orpheus.[6] It is probable, however, that Fomin really produced many more musical works for the stage, for it has been proved that he occasionally took an assumed name for fear of his work proving a failure. Of his voluminous output only three works need be discussed here.

Aniouta owed some of its success to Popov’s libretto, which was a mild protest against the feudal aristocracy. The peasant Miron sings in the first act some naïve verses in which he bewails the hard fate of the peasant; “Ah, how tired I am,” he says. “Why are we peasants not nobles? Then, we might crunch sugar all day long, lie warm a’top of the stove and ride in our carriages.” If we put aside the idea that Volkov’s Taniousha was the first opera written by a Russian composer, then this honour must be rendered to Fomin’s Aniouta.

Contemporary proof of the immense success of The Miller (Melnik-Koldoun) is not wanting. The Dramatic Dictionary for 1787 informs us that it was played twenty-seven nights running and that the theatre was always full. Not only were the Russians pleased with it, but it interested the foreigners at Court. The most obvious proof of its popularity may be found in the numerous inferior imitations which followed in its wake.

The libretto of The Miller, like that of Aniouta, was tinged by a cautious liberalism. Here it is not a peasant, but a peasant proprietor, who “tills and toils and from the peasants collects the rent” who plays the principal rôle. The part of the Miller was admirably acted by Kroutitsky (1754-83), who, after the first performance, was called to the Empress’s box and presented with a gold watch. But undoubtedly Fomin’s music helped the success of the opera. The work has been reissued with an interesting preface by P. Karatagyn (Jurgenson, Moscow), so that it is easily accessible to those who are interested in the early history of Russian opera. The music is somewhat amateurish and lacking in technical resource. Fomin does not venture upon a chorus, although there are occasionally couplets with choral refrains; lyric follows lyric, and the duets are really alternating solos with a few phrases in thirds at the close of the verses. But the public in Russia in the eighteenth century was not very critical, and took delight in the novel sensation of hearing folk-songs on the stage. In the second act the heroine Aniouta sings a pretty melody based on a familiar folk-tune which awakened great enthusiasm among the audience. The songs and their words stand so close to the original folk-tunes that no doubt they carried away all the occupants of the pit and the cheap places; while, for the more exacting portion of the audience, the rôle of the Miller was written in the conventional style of the opera buffa. This judicious combination pleased all tastes.

We find far greater evidences of technical capacity in Fomin’s opera The Americans, composed some thirteen years later. In the second act there is a fairly developed love-duet between Gusman and Zimara; the quartets and choruses, though brief, are freer and more expressive; there is greater variety of modulation, and altogether the work shows some reflection of Mozart’s influence, and faintly foreshadows a more modern school to come. The libretto is extremely naïve, the Americans being in reality the indigenous inhabitants, the Red Indians; but there is nothing in the music allotted to them which differentiates them from the Spanish characters in the opera. The advance, however, in the music as compared with that of his earlier operas proves that Fomin must have possessed real and vital talent. Yet it is by The Miller that he will live in the memory of the Russian people, thanks to his use of the folk-tunes. To quote from Karatagyn’s preface to this work: “Fomin has indisputably the right to be called our first national composer. Before the production of The Miller, opera in Russia had been entirely in the hands of travelling Italian maestri. Galuppi, Sarti, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Salieri, Martini, and others ruled despotically over the Court orchestra and singers. Only Italian music was allowed to have an existence and Russian composers could not make their way at all except under the patronage of the Italians.” This sometimes led to tragic results, as in the case of Berezovsky, whose efforts to free himself from the tutelage of Sarti cost him the patronage of the great Potemkin and drove him to a pitch of despair which ended in suicide. Too much weight, however, must not be attached to this resentment against the Italian influence, so loudly expressed in Russia and elsewhere. The Italians only reigned supreme in the lands of their musical conquest so long as there existed no national composer strong enough to compete with them. Fomin’s success clearly proves that as soon as a native musician appeared upon the scene who could give the people of their own, in a style that was not too elevated for their immature tastes, he had not to complain of any lack of enthusiasm.

It is to be regretted that none of his contemporaries thought it worth while to write his biography, but at that time Russian literature was purely aristocratic, and Fomin, though somewhat of a hero, was of the people—a serf.

Contemporary history is equally silent as regards Michael Matinsky, who died in the second decade of the nineteenth century. He, too, was a serf, born on the estate of Count Yagjinsky and sent by his master to study music in Italy. He composed several operas, the most successful of which was The Gostinny Dvor in St. Petersburg, a work that eventually travelled to Moscow. In his youth Matinsky is said to have played in Count Razoumovsky’s private band. In addition to his musical activity he held the post of professor of geometry in the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg.

Vassily Paskievich was chamber-musician to the Empress Catherine II. In 1763 he was engaged, first as violinist, and then as composer, at the theatres in St. Petersburg; he also conducted the orchestra at the state balls. Some of his songs, which are sentimental, but pleasingly national in colour, are still popular in Russia. He is said to have written seven operas in all. The first of these, Love brings Trouble, was produced at the Hermitage Theatre in 1772. Some years later he was commissioned to set to music a libretto written by the Empress Catherine herself. The subject of this opera is taken from the tale of Tsarevich Feveï, a panegyric upon the good son of a Siberian king who was patriotic and brave—in fact possessed of all the virtues. In her choice of subject the Empress seems to have been influenced by her indulgent affection for her favourite grandchild, the future Alexander I. Prince Feveï does nothing to distinguish himself, but most of the characters in the opera go into ecstasies over his charms and qualities, and it is obvious that in this libretto Catherine wished to pay a flattering compliment to her grandson. There are moments in the music which must have appealed to the Russian public, especially an aria “Ah, thou, my little father,” sung in the style of an old village dame. Other numbers in the opera have the same rather sickly-sweet flavour that prevails in Paskievich’s songs. The redeeming feature of the opera was probably its Kalmuc element, which must have imparted a certain humour and oriental character to both words and music. In one place the text runs something like this: “Among the Kalmuc folk we eat kaimak, souliak, tourmak, smoke tabac(co) and drink koumiss,” and the ring of these unfamiliar words may have afforded some diversion to the audiences of those days.[7]

But however dull the subject of Feveï may appear to modern opera-goers, that of Paskievich’s third opera, Fedoul and Her Children, must surely take the prize for ineptitude even among Russian operas of the eighteenth century. Fedoul, a widow, announces to her fifteen grown-up children her intention of getting married again to a young widower; at first the family not unnaturally grumble at the prospect of a step-father, but having been scandalised by the marriage with the prince in the first act, they solemnly sing his praises in the finale of the last.

In co-operation with Sarti and Canobbio, Paskievich composed the music to another book by the Empress Catherine, entitled The Early Reign of Oleg, produced at the Hermitage Theatre, St. Petersburg, September, 1794. Paskievich’s share of this work seems to have been the choruses, which give a touch of national sentiment to the opera. Here he uses themes that have now become familiar to us in the works of later Russian musicians, such as the Slavsia in honour of the Tsar, and the Little Russian theme “The Crane” (Jouravel), which Tchaikovsky employed in his Second Symphony. The orchestral accompaniments sometimes consist of variations upon the theme, a form much favoured by Russian musicians of a more modern school. Other operas by Paskievich are The Two Antons (1804) and The Miser (1811). Paskievich had not as strong a talent as Fomin, but we must give him credit, if not for originating, at least for carrying still further the use of the folksong in Russian opera.

In a book which is intended to give a general survey of the history of Russian opera to English readers, it is hardly necessary to enter into details about such composers as Vanjour, Bulant, Briks, A. Plestcheiev, Nicholas Pomorsky, the German, Hermann Raupach, Canobbio, Kerzelli, Troinni, Staubinger, and other musicians, Russian and foreign, who played more or less useful minor parts in the musical life of St. Petersburg and Moscow during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Three Italians and two Russians, however, besides those already mentioned, stand out more prominently from the ranks and deserve to be mentioned here.

Vincente Martin (Martin y Solar), of Spanish descent, born about 1754, migrated in his boyhood to Italy, where he was known as lo Spagnulo. He wrote an opera, Iphigenia in Aulis, for the carnival in Florence in 1781, and having won some reputation as a composer in Italy, went to Vienna in 1785. Here his success was immense, so much so that his opera Una Cosa Rara was a serious rival to Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.” A year later Mozart paid Martin the compliment of introducing a fragment of Una Cosa Rara into the finale of the second act of “Don Juan.” Martin went to St. Petersburg in 1788, at the invitation of the Italian opera company. During his stay in Russia eight of his operas were given in the vernacular, including Dianino, an opera d’occasion, the text by Catherine the Great; La Cosa Rara, translated by Dmitrievsky; Fedoul and her Children, in which he co-operated with the native composer Paskievich; A Village Festival, the libretto by V. Maikov, and a comic opera in one act, Good Luke, or Here’s my day, the words by Kobyakov. The fact that he wrote so frequently to Russian texts entitles him to a place in the history of Russian opera. Martin was held in great honour in the capital, and the Emperor Paul I. made him a Privy Councillor. This did not prevent him, however, from suffering from the fickleness of fashion, for in 1808 the Italians were replaced by a French opera company and Martin lost his occupation. He continued, however, to live in Russia, teaching at the Smolny monastery and in the aristocratic families of St. Petersburg, where he died in May, 1810.

Among the foreigners who visited Russia in the time of Catherine the Great, none was more distinguished than Guiseppe Sarti. Born at Faenza in December, 1729, celebrated as a composer of opera by the time he was twenty-four, he was appointed in 1753 Director of the Italian opera, and Court Capellmeister to Frederick V. of Denmark. He lived in Copenhagen, with one interval of three years, until the summer of 1775, when he returned to Italy and subsequently became Maestro di Capella of the cathedral of Milan. Here he spent nine years of extraordinary activity composing fifteen operas, besides cantatas, masses and motets. In 1784 Catherine the Great tempted him to visit St. Petersburg, and constituted him her Court-composer. His opera Armida was received with great enthusiasm in the Russian capital in 1786. It was sung in Italian, for it was not until 1790 that Sarti took part in the composition of an opera written to a Russian libretto. This was the Early Rule of Oleg, the book from the pen of the Empress herself, in which he co-operated with Paskievich. He also composed a Te Deum in celebration of the fall of Ochakov before the army of Potemkin; this was for double chorus, its triumphal effect being enhanced by drums and salvos of artillery; a procedure which no doubt set a precedent for Tchaikovsky when he came to write his occasional Overture “1812.” Many honours fell to Sarti’s lot during the eighteen years he lived in Russia, among others the membership of the Academy of Science. The intrigues of the Italian singer Todi obliged him to retire for a time to a country estate belonging to Potemkin in the Ukraine; but he was eventually reinstated in Catherine’s good graces. After the Empress’s death he determined to return to Italy, but stayed for a time in Berlin, where he died in 1802.

Giovanni Paesiello (1741-1816) was another famous Italian whom Catherine invited to St. Petersburg in 1776, where he remained as “Inspector of the Italian operas both serious and buffa” until 1784. Not one of the series of operas which he wrote during his sojourn in St. Petersburg was composed to a Russian libretto or sung in the Russian tongue. His Barber of Seville, written during the time when he was living in St. Petersburg, afterwards became so popular with the Italians that when Rossini ventured to make use of the same subject the public regarded it as a kind of sacrilege. Paesiello’s influence on Russian opera was practically nil.

The generous offers of Catherine the Great drew Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785) to St. Petersburg in 1765. One can but admire the spirit of these eighteenth-century Italian musicians—many of them being well advanced in years—who were willing to leave the sunny skies of Italy for the “Boreal clime” of St. Petersburg. Galuppi acted as the Director of the Imperial Court Chapel for three years, and was the first foreigner to compose music to a text in the ecclesiastical Slavonic, and to introduce the motet (the Russian name for which is “concert”) into the service of the Orthodox Church. His operas, Il Ré Pastore, Didone, and Iphigenia in Taurida, the last named being composed expressly for the St. Petersburg opera, were all given during his sojourn in the capital, but there is no record to prove that any one of these works was sung in Russian.

Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky[8] (1745-1777) studied at the School of Divinity at Kiev, whence, having a remarkably fine voice, he passed into the Imperial Court Chapel. In 1765 he was sent at the Government expense to study under the famous Padre Martini at Bologna. His studies were brilliant, and he returned to St. Petersburg full of hope and ambition, only to find himself unequal to coping with the intrigues of the Italian musicians at Court. Discouraged and disappointed, his mind gave way, and he committed suicide at the age of thirty-two. He left a few sacred compositions (a capella) which showed the highest promise. While in Italy he composed an opera to an Italian libretto entitled Demofonti which was performed with success at Bologna and Livorno.

Dmitri Stepanovich Bortniansky, born in 1751, also began his career as a chorister in the Court Choir, where he attracted the attention of Galuppi, who considered his talents well worth cultivation. When Galuppi returned to Italy in 1768, Bortniansky was permitted to join him the following year in Venice, where he remained until 1779. He was then recalled to Russia and filled various important posts connected with the Imperial Court Choir. He is now best known as a composer of sacred music, some of his compositions being still used in the services of the Orthodox Church. Although somewhat mellifluous and decidedly Italianised in feeling, his church music is not lacking in beauty. He wrote four operas, two to Italian and two to French texts. The titles of the Italian operas are as follows: Alcide, Azioni teatrale postea in musica da Demetrio Bortnianski, 1778, in Venezia; and Quinto Fabio, drama per musica rappresentata nel ducal teatro di Modena, il carnavale dell’anno 1779. The French comic opera Le Faucon was composed for the entertainment of the Tsarevich Paul Petrovich and his Court at Gatchina (1786); while Le Fils Rival was produced at the private theatre at Pavlovsk in 1787, also for the Tsarevich Paul and his wife Maria Feodorovna.

Throughout the preceding chapters I have used the word “opera” as a convenient general term for the works reviewed in them; but although a few such works composed by Italians, or under strong Italian influences, might be accurately described as melodic opera, the nearer they approach to this type the less they contain of the Russian national style. For the most part, however, these productions of the eighteenth century were in the nature of vaudevilles: plays with couplets and other incidental music inserted, in which, as Cheshikin points out, the verses were often rather spoken than sung; consequently the form was more declamatory than melodic. Serov, in a sweeping criticism of the music of this period, says that it was for the most part commissioned from the pack of needy Italians who hung about the Court in the various capacities of maîtres d’hôtel, wig-makers, costumiers, and confectioners. This, as we have seen, is somewhat exaggerated, since Italy sent some of her best men to the Court of Catherine II. But even admitting that a large proportion of the musicians who visited Russia were less than second-rate, yet beneath this tawdry and superficial foreign disguise the pulse of national music beat faintly and irregularly. If some purely Italian tunes joined to Russian words made their way into various spheres of society, and came to be accepted by the unobservant as genuine national melodies, on the other hand some true folk-songs found their way into semi-Italian operas and awoke the popular enthusiasm, as we have witnessed in the works of Fomin and Paskievich. In one respect the attitude of the Russian public in the eighteenth century towards imported opera differed from our own. All that was most successful in Western Europe was brought in course of time to St. Petersburg, but a far larger proportion of the foreign operas were translated into the vernacular than was the case in this country.

With regard to the location of opera, the first “opera house” was erected by the Empress Anne in St. Petersburg, but was not used exclusively for opera, French plays and other forms of entertainment being also given there. The building was burnt down in 1749, and the theatrical performances were continued temporarily in the Empress’s state apartment. A new, stone-built opera house was opened in St. Petersburg in 1750, after the accession of the Empress Elizabeth. It was situated near the Anichkov Palace. Catherine the Great added another stone theatre to the capital in 1774, which was known as “The Great Theatre.” After damage from fire it was reconstructed and reopened in 1836.[9] Rebuilt again in 1880, it became the home of the Conservatoire and the office of the Imperial Musical Society. Besides these buildings, the Hermitage Theatre, within the walls of the Winter Palace, was often used in the time of Catherine the Great.

In Moscow the Italian entrepreneur Locatelli began to solicit the privilege of building a new theatre in 1750. Six years later he was accorded the necessary permission, and the building was opened in January, 1759. But Locatelli was not very successful, and his tenure only lasted three years. Titov managed the Moscow theatre from 1766 to the death of Catherine in 1796. After this the direction passed into the hands of Prince Ouroussov, who in association with a Jew named Medoks[10] proceeded to build a new and luxurious theatre in Petrovsky Street. Prince Ouroussov soon retired, leaving Medoks sole manager. The season began with comic operas such as The Miller by Fomin. In 1805 the Petrovsky theatre shared the fate of so many Russian buildings and was destroyed by fire.

Alexander I. succeeded the unfortunate Paul Petrovich, done to death in the Mikhaïlovsky Palace during the night of March 23rd, 1801. With his advent, social sentiment in Russia began to undergo a complete revolution. The Napoleonic wars in Western Europe, in which the Russian troops took part, culminating in the French invasion of 1812, awoke all the latent patriotism of the nation. The craze for everything foreign, so marked under the rule of Catherine II., now gave place to ultra-patriotic enthusiasm. This reaction, strongly reflected in the literature of the time, was not without its influence on musical taste. In Russia, music and literature have always been closely allied, and the works of the great poet Poushkin, of the fabulist Krylov, and the patriotic historian Karamzin, gave a strong impulse and a new tone to the art. At the same time a wave of romanticism passed over Russia. This was partly the echo of Byron’s popularity, then at its height in England and abroad; and partly the outcome of the annexation of the old kingdom of Georgia, in 1801, which turned the attention of Young Russia to the magic beauty and glamour of the Caucasus.

There was now much discussion about national music, and a great deal was done to encourage its progress; but during the first quarter of the nineteenth century composers had but a superficial idea of the meaning of a national school, and were satisfied that a Russian subject and a selection of popular tunes constituted the only formula necessary for the production of a native opera.

During his short reign the Emperor Paul had not contributed to the advancement of music, but in spite of somewhat unfavourable conditions, an Italian opera company under the management of Astarito[11] visited St. Petersburg in 1797. Among their number was a talented young Italian, Catterino Cavos, whose name is inseparably connected with the musical history of Russia. Born at Venice in 1776, the son of the musical director of the celebrated “Fenice” Theatre, it is said that at fourteen Cavos was the chosen candidate for the post of organist of St. Mark’s Cathedral, but relinquished his chance in favour of a poor musician. The story is in accordance with what we read of his magnanimity in later life. His gifts were remarkable, and in 1799 he was appointed Court Capellmeister. In 1803 he became conductor of the Italian, Russian and French opera companies. Part of his duties consisted in composing for all three institutions. Light opera and ballet, given by the French company, was then all the fashion in St. Petersburg. Cavos quickly realised the direction and scope of the public taste, and soon began to write operas to romantic and legendary subjects borrowed from Russian history and folk-lore, and endeavoured to give his music a decided touch of national colour. In May, 1804, he made an immense success with his Roussalka of the Dneiper, in which he had the co-operation of Davidov. The following year he dispensed with all assistance and produced a four-act opera to a Russian text called The Invisible Prince, which found great favour with the public. Henceforth, through over thirty years of unresting creative activity, Cavos continued to work this popular vein. His operas have practically all sunk into oblivion, but the catalogue of their titles is still of some interest to students of Russian opera, because several of his subjects have since been treated and re-vitalised by a more recent generation of native composers. His chief works, given chronologically, are as follows: Ilya the Hero, the libretto by Krilov (1806); The Three Hunchback Brothers (1808); The Cossack Poet (1812); The Peasants, or the Unexpected Meeting (1814); Ivan Sousanin (1815); The Ruins of Babylon (1818); Dobrinya Nikitich (1810); and The Bird of Fire (1822)—the last two in co-operation with Antonolini; Svietlana, text by Joukovsky (1822); The Youth of Joan III. (1822); The Mountains of Piedmont, or The Devil’s Bridge (1825); Miroslava, or the Funeral Pyre (1827).

The foregoing list does not include any works which Cavos wrote to French or Italian texts, amounting to nearly thirty in all. In Ilya the Hero Cavos made his first attempt to produce a national epic opera. Founded on the Legend of Ilya Mouromets, from the Cycle of Kiev, the opera is not lacking in spirit, and evoked great enthusiasm in its day, especially one martial aria, “Victory, victory, Russian hero!” Cavos was fortunate in having secured as librettist a very capable writer, Prince Shakovsky, who also supplied the text for Ivan Sousanin, the most successful of all Cavos’s national operas; although we shall see in the next chapter how completely it was supplanted in the popular favour by Glinka’s work dealing with the same subject.

In the spring of 1840 Cavos’s health began to fail, and he received leave of absence from his many arduous but lucrative official posts. He became, however, rapidly much worse and had to abandon the idea of a journey. He died in St. Petersburg on April 28th (O.S.). His loss was deeply felt by the Russian artists, to whom, unlike many of his Italian predecessors, he had always shown generous sympathy; they paid him a last tribute of respect by singing Cherubini’s Requiem at his funeral.

The Russian musician Youry Arnold, who was well acquainted with Cavos in the later years of his life, describes him at sixty as a robust and energetic man, who was at his piano by 9 a.m., rehearsing the soloists till 1 p.m., when he took the orchestral rehearsals. If by any chance these ended a little sooner than he expected, he would occupy himself again with the soloists. At 5 p.m. he made his report to the Director of the Imperial Theatres, and then went home to dine. But he never failed to appear at the Opera House punctually at 7 o’clock. On evenings when there was no performance he devoted extra time to his soloists. He worked thus conscientiously and indefatigably year after year. He was not, however, indifferent to the pleasures of the table and was something of a gourmet. Even in the far-distant north he managed to obtain consignments of his favourite “vino nero.” “He told me more than once,” said Arnold, “that except with tea, he had never in the whole course of his life swallowed a mouthful of water: ‘Perchè cosa snaturalle, insoffribile e nocevole!’”

Cavos was an admirable and painstaking conductor, and his long régime must have greatly contributed to the discipline and good organisation of the opera, both as regards orchestra and singers. His own works, as might be expected from a musician whose whole life was spent in studying the scores of other composers, were not highly original. He wrote well, and with knowledge, for the voice, and his orchestration was adequate for that period, but his music lacks homogeneity, and reminiscences of Mozart, Cherubini and Méhul mingle with echoes of the Russian folk-songs in the pages of his operas. But the public of his day were on the whole well satisfied with Russian travesties of Italian and Viennese vaudevilles. It is true that new sentiments were beginning to rouse the social conscience, but the public was still a long way from desiring idealistic truth, let alone realism, in its music and literature. In spite of the one electrical thrill which Glinka administered to the public in A Life for the Tsar, opera was destined to be regarded for many years to come as a pleasing and not too exacting form of recreation. The libretto of Cavos’s Ivan Sousanin shows what society demanded from opera even as late as 1815; for here this tragedy of unquestioning loyalty to an ideal is made to end quite happily. At the moment when the Poles were about to slay him in the forest, Sousanin is rescued by a Russian boyard and his followers, and the hero, robust and jovial, lives to moralise over the footlights in the following couplets, in which he takes leave of the audience:

Now let the cruel foe beware,
And tremble all his days;
But let each loyal Russian heart
Rejoice in songs of praise.

At the same time it must be admitted that in this opera Cavos sometimes gives an echo of the genuine national spirit. The types of Sousanin and his young son Alexis, and of Masha and her husband, Matthew, are so clearly outlined, says Cheshikin, that Glinka had only to give them more relief and finish. The well-constructed overture, the duet between Masha and Alexis, and the folk-chorus “Oh, do not rave wild storm-wind” are all far in advance of anything to be found in the Russian operas of the eighteenth century.

Among those who were carried along by the tide of national feeling which rose steadily in Russia from 1812 onward was the gifted amateur Alexis Nicholaevich Verstovsky. Born in 1799, near Tambov, the son of a country gentleman, Verstovsky was educated at the Institute of Engineers, St. Petersburg, where he took pianoforte lessons from John Field, and later on from Steibelt. He also learnt some theory from Brandt and Steiner; singing from an operatic artist named Tarquini; and violin from Böhm and Maurer. Verstovsky composed his first vaudeville at nineteen and its success encouraged him to continue on the same lines. In 1823 he was appointed Director of the Moscow Opera, where he produced a whole series of operettas and vaudevilles, many of which were settings of texts translated from the French. After a time he became ambitious of writing a serious opera, and in May 1828, he produced his Pan Tvardovsky, the libretto by Zagoskin and Aksakov, well known literary men of the day. The book is founded on an old Polish or Malo-Russian legend, the hero being a kind of Slavonic Faust. The music was influenced by Méhul and Weber, but Verstovsky introduced a gipsy chorus which in itself won immediate popularity for the opera. Its success, though brilliant, was short-lived.

Pan Tvardovsky was followed by Vadim, or the Twenty Sleeping Maidens, based on a poem by Joukovsky, but the work is more of the nature of incidental music to a play than pure opera.

Askold’s Tomb, Verstovsky’s third opera, by which he attained his greatest fame, will be discussed separately.

Homesickness (Toska po rodine), the scene laid in Spain, was a poor work produced for the benefit night of the famous Russian bass O. A. Petrov, the precursor of Shaliapin.

The Boundary Hills, or the Waking Dream, stands nearest in order of merit to Askold’s Tomb. The scene is laid in mythical times, and the characters are supernatural beings, such as Domovoi (the House Spirit), Vodyanoi (the Water Sprite) and Liessnoi (the Wood Spirit). The music breathes something of the spirit of Russian folk-song, and a Slumber Song, a Triumphal March, and a very effectively mounted Russian Dance, which the composer subsequently added to the score, were the favourite numbers in this opera.

Verstovsky’s last opera Gromoboi was based upon the first part of Joukovsky’s poem “The Twenty Sleeping Maidens.” An oriental dance (Valakhsky Tanets) from this work was played at one of the concerts of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, and Serov speaks of it as being quite Eastern in colour, original and attractive as regards melody but poorly harmonised and orchestrated as compared with the Lezginka from Glinka’s Russlan and Liudmilla, the lively character of the dance being very similar.

A few of the composers mentioned in the previous chapter were still working in Russia at the same time as Verstovsky. Of those whose compositions belong more particularly to the first forty years of the nineteenth century, the following are most worthy of notice:

Joseph Antonovich Kozlovsky (1757-1831), of Polish birth, began life as a soldier in Prince Potemsky’s army. The prince’s attention having been called to the young man’s musical talents, he appointed him director of his private band in St. Petersburg. Kozlovsky afterwards entered the orchestra of the Imperial Opera. He wrote music to Oserov’s tragedy Œdipus in Athens (1804); to Fingal (1805), Deborah, libretto by Shakovsky (1810), Œdipus Rex (1811), and to Kapnist’s translation of Racine’s Esther (1816).

Ludwig Maurer (1789-1878), a famous German violinist, played in the orchestra at Riga in his early days, and after touring abroad and in Russia settled in St. Petersburg about 1820, where he was appointed leader of the orchestra at the French theatre in 1835. Ten years later he returned to Germany and gave many concerts in Western Europe; but in 1851 he went back to St. Petersburg as Inspector-General of all the State theatrical orchestras. Maurer is best known by his instrumental compositions, especially his Concertos for four violins and orchestra, but he wrote music for several popular vaudevilles with Russian text, and co-operated occasionally with Verstovsky and Alabiev.

The brothers Alexis and Sergius Titov were types of the distinguished amateurs who played such an important part in the musical life of Russia during the first half of the last century. Alexis (d. 1827) was the father of that Nicholas Titov often called “the ancestor of Russian song.” He served in the Cavalry Guards and rose to the rank of Major-General. An admirable violinist, he was also a voluminous composer. Stassov gives a list of at least fourteen operas, melodramas, and other musical works for the stage, many of which were written to French words. His younger brother Sergius (b. 1770) is supposed to have supplied music to The Forced Marriage, text by Plestcheiev (1789), La Veillée des Paysans (1809), Credulity (1812), and, in co-operation with Bluhm, Christmas Festivals of Old (1813). It is probable that he had a hand in the long list of works attributed to his brother Alexis, and most of the Russian musical historians seem puzzled to decide how to apportion to each of the brothers his due share of creative activity.

A composer belonging to this period is known by name even beyond the Russian frontiers, owing to the great popularity of one of his songs, “The Nightingale.” Alexander Alexandrovich Alabiev was born at Moscow, August 4th, 1787[12] (O.S.). He entered the military service and, becoming acquainted with Verstovsky, co-operated in several of his vaudevilles. For some breach of discipline Alabiev was exiled for a time to Tobolsk. Inspired by the success of Cavos’s semi-national operas, Alabiev attempted a Russian fairy opera entitled A Moonlight Night or the Domovoï. The opera was produced in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but did not long hold a place in the repertory of either theatre. He next attempted music to scenes from Poushkin’s poem The Prisoner in the Caucasus, a naïve work in which the influence of Bellini obscures the faint national and Eastern colour which the atmosphere of the work imperatively demands. Alabiev, after his return from Siberia, settled in Moscow, where he died February 22nd, 1851 (O.S.).

CHAPTER III
MICHAEL IVANOVICH GLINKA

IN the preceding chapters I have shown how long and persistently Russian society groped its way towards an ideal expression of nationalism in music. Gifted foreigners, such as Cavos, had tried to catch some faint echo of the folk-song and reproduce it disguised in Italian accents; talented, but poorly equipped, Russian musicians had exploited the music of the people with a certain measure of success, but without sufficient conviction or genius to form the solid basis of a national school. Yet all these strivings and aspirations, these mistaken enthusiasms and immature presentiments, were not wasted. Possibly the sacrifice of many talents is needed before the manifestation of one genius can be fulfilled. When the yearning after a musical Messiah had acquired sufficient force, the right man appeared in the person of Michael Ivanovich Glinka. With his advent we reach the first great climax in the history of Russian music.

It is in accordance with the latent mysticism and the ardour smouldering under the semi-oriental indolence of the Russian temperament that so many of their great men—especially their musicians—seem to have arrived at the consciousness of their vocation through a kind of process of conversion. Moussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, to mention but one or two examples, all awoke suddenly from a condition of mental sloth or frivolity to the conviction of their artistic mission; and some of them were prepared to sacrifice social position and an assured livelihood for the sake of a new, ideal career. Glinka was no exception. He, too, heard his divine call and followed it. Lounging in the theatres and concert rooms of Italy, listening to Italian singers and fancying himself “deeply moved” by Bellini’s operas, suddenly it flashed upon Glinka, a cultivated amateur, that this was not what he needed to stimulate his inspiration. This race, this art, were alien to him and could never take the place of his own people. This swift sense of remoteness, this sudden change of thought and ideal, constituted the psychological moment in the history of Russian music. Glinka’s first impulse was merely to write a better Russian opera than his predecessors; but this impulse held the germ of the whole evolution of the new Russian School as we know it to-day.

It is rather remarkable that outside the Russian language so little has been written about this germinal genius, who summed up the ardent desires of many generations and begat a great school of national music. The following details of his childhood and early youth are taken from his Autobiographical Notes and now appear for the first time in an English translation.

“I was born on June 2nd (May 20th, O.S.), 1804, in the glow of the summer dawn at the village of Novospasskoï, which belonged to my father, Ivan Nicolaevich Glinka, a retired army captain.... Shortly after my birth, my mother, Eugenia Andreievna (née Glinka), was obliged to leave my early bringing up to my grandmother who, having taken possession of me, had me transferred to her own room. Here in company with her, a foster mother, and my nurse, I spent the first three or four years of my life, rarely seeing anything of my parents. I was a child of delicate constitution and of nervous tendencies. My grandmother was in her declining years, and almost always ailing, consequently the temperature of her room in which I lived was never less than 20 Réaumur.... In spite of this, I was not allowed to take off my pelisse, and night and day I was given tea with cream and quantities of sugar in it, and also cracknels and fancy bread of all kinds. I seldom went into the fresh air, and then only in hot weather. There is no doubt that this early upbringing had a great influence on my physical development and explains my unconquerable affection for warm climates....

“My grandmother spoilt me to an incredible degree and never denied me anything I wanted. In spite of this I was a gentle and well-behaved child, and only indulged in passing fits of peevishness—as indeed I still do when disturbed at one of my favourite occupations. One of my chief amusements was to lie flat on the floor and draw churches and trees with a bit of chalk. I was piously inclined, and church ceremonies, especially at the great festivals, filled me heart and soul with the liveliest poetic enthusiasm. Having learnt to read at a remarkably early age, I often moved my grandmother and her elderly friends to tears by reading the Scriptures aloud to them. My musical proclivities showed themselves at that time in a perfect passion for the sound of bells; I drank in these harsh sounds, and soon learnt how to imitate them rather cleverly by means of two copper bowls. When I was ill they used to give me a little hand-bell to keep me amused.

“On the death of my grandmother, my way of living underwent some changes. My mother spoilt me rather less, and tried to accustom me to the fresh air; but her efforts in this direction were not very successful.... My musical sense still remained undeveloped and crude. In my eighth year (1812), when we were delivered from the French invasion, I listened with all my old delight to the ringing of the bells, distinguishing the peals of the different churches, and imitating them on my copper bowls.

“Being entirely surrounded by women, and having for playmates only my sister, who was a year younger than myself, and my nurse’s little daughter, I was never like other boys of my age; moreover the passion for study, especially of geography and drawing—and in the latter I had begun to make sensible progress—drew me away from childish pastimes, and I was, from the first, of a quiet and gentle disposition.

“At my father’s house we often received many relatives and guests; this was usually the case on his name-day, or when someone came to stay whom he wished to entertain with special honours. On these occasions he would send for the musicians belonging to my maternal uncle, who lived eight versts away. They often remained with us for several days, and when the dances were over and the guests departed, they used to play all sorts of pieces. I remember once (it was in 1814, or 1815, when I was about ten) they played a quartet by Cruselli; this music produced in me an inconceivably new and rapturous effect; after hearing it I remained all day long in a state of feverish excitement, lost in inexplicably sweet dreamy emotions, and the next day at my drawing lesson I was quite absent-minded. My distracted condition increased as the lesson proceeded, and my teacher, remarking that I was drawing very carelessly, scolded me repeatedly, until finally guessing what was the matter with me, said that I now thought of nothing but music. ‘What’s to be done?’ I answered: ‘music is the soul of me!’

“In truth at that time I loved music passionately. My uncle’s orchestra was the source of the liveliest delight to me. When they played dances, such as écossaises, quadrilles and valses, I used to snatch up a violin or piccolo and join in with them, simply alternating between tonic and dominant. My father was often annoyed with me because I did not dance, and deserted our guests; but at the first opportunity I slipped back again among the musicians. During supper they generally played Russian folk-songs arranged for two flutes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons; this poignantly tender, but for me perfectly satisfactory, combination delighted me (I could hardly endure shrill sounds, even the lower notes of the horn when they were not played loud), and perhaps these songs, heard in my childhood, were the first cause of my preference in later years for Russian folk-melodies. About this time we had a governess from St. Petersburg called Barbara Klemmer. She was a girl about twenty, very tall, strict and exacting. She taught us Russian, French, German, geography and music.... Although our music lessons, which included reading from notes and the rudiments of the piano, were rather mechanical, yet I made rapid progress with her, and shortly after she came one of the first violins from my uncle’s band was employed to teach me the fiddle. Unfortunately he himself did not play quite in tune and held his bow very stiffly, a bad habit which he passed on to me.

“Although I loved music almost unconsciously, yet I remember that at that time I preferred those pieces which were most accessible to my immature musical intelligence. I enjoyed the orchestra most of all, and next to the Russian songs, my favourite items in their repertory were: the Overtures to ‘Ma Tante Aurore,’ by Boieldieu, to ‘Lodoïska,’ by Rodolph Kreutzer, and to ‘Les Deux Aveugles,’ by Méhul. The last two I liked playing on the piano, as well as some of Steibelt’s sonatas, especially ‘The Storm,’ which I played rather neatly.”

I have quoted verbatim from Glinka’s record of his childish impressions, because they undoubtedly influenced his whole after career, and the nature of his genius was conditioned by them. Like most of the leading representatives of Russian music, Glinka was born and spent the early years of his life in the country, where he assimilated subconsciously the purer elements of the national music which had already begun to be vulgarized, if not completely obliterated, in the great cities. Saved from the multitudinous distractions of town life, the love of the folk-music took root in his heart and grew undisturbed. Had he been brought up in one of the capitals, taken early, as Russian children often were, and still are, to the opera and to concerts, his outlook would have been widened at the expense of his individuality. Later on, as we shall see, he was led away from the tracks of nationality by his enthusiasm for Italian opera; but the strong affections of his childhood guided him back instinctively to that way of art in which he could best turn his gifts to account. It has been said that Glinka remained always somewhat narrow in his ideas and activities; but it was precisely this exclusiveness and concentration that could best serve Russia at the time when he appeared. In his letters and Autobiographical Notes, he often adopts the tone of a genius misunderstood, and hints that an unkind Providence enjoyed putting obstacles in his path. It is true that in later life, after the production of his second opera, Russlan and Liudmilla, he had some grounds for complaining of the fickleness and mental indolence of the Russian public. But his murmurings against destiny must be discounted by the fact that Glinka, the spoilt and delicate child, grew up into Glinka, the idolised and hypochondriacal man. On the whole his life was certainly favourable to his artistic development.

Stassov, in his fine monograph upon the composer, lays stress on this view of Glinka’s career. The history of art, he argues, contains only too many instances of perverted talent; even strongly gifted natures have succumbed to the ill-judged advice of friends, or to the mistaken promptings of their own nature, so that they have wasted valuable years in the manufacture of works which reached to a certain standard of academic excellence, and even beauty, before they realised their true individual vocation and their supreme powers. Glinka was fortunate in his parents, who never actually opposed his inclinations; and perhaps he was equally lucky in his teachers, for if they were not of the very highest class they did not at any rate interfere with his natural tendencies, nor impose upon him severe restrictions of routine and method. Another happy circumstance in his early life, so Stassov thinks, was his almost wholly feminine environment. Glinka’s temperament was dual; on the one hand he possessed a rich imagination, both receptive and creative, and was capable of passionate feeling; in the other side of his nature we find an element of excessive sensibility, a something rather passive and morbidly sentimental. Women had power to soothe and at the same time to stimulate his temperament. Somewhere in his memoirs, Glinka, speaking of his early manhood, says: “At that time I did not care for the society of my own sex, preferring that of women and girls who appreciated my musical gifts.” Stassov considers that these words might be applied to the whole of Glinka’s life, for he always seemed most at ease in the company of ladies.

In the autumn of 1817, being then thirteen, he was sent to the newly opened school for the sons of the aristocracy, where he remained until 1822. His schooldays appear to have been happy and profitable. He was industrious and popular alike with the masters and pupils. In the drawing class the laborious copying from the flat, with its tedious cross-hatching and stippling then in vogue, soon disgusted him. Mathematics did not greatly interest him. Dancing and fencing were accomplishments in which he never shone. But he acquired languages with a wonderful ease, taking up Latin, French, German, English and Persian. In after years he dropped to some extent Persian and English, but became proficient in Italian and Spanish. Geography and zoology both attracted him. That he loved and observed nature is evident from all his writings; and the one thing in which he resembled other boys was in his affection for birds, rabbits, and other pets. While travelling in the Caucasus in 1823 he tamed and kept wild goats, and sometimes had as many as sixteen caged birds in his room at once, which he would excite to song by playing the violin.

Glinka’s parents spared nothing to give their son a good general education, but the idea that they were dealing with a budding musical genius never occurred to them. As he had shown some aptitude for the piano and violin in childhood, he was allowed to continue both these studies while at school in St. Petersburg. He started lessons with the famous Irish composer and pianist John Field, who, being on the eve of his departure for Moscow, was obliged to hand Glinka over to his pupil Obmana. Afterwards he received some instruction from Zeuner, and eventually worked with Carl Meyer, an excellent pianist and teacher, with whom he made rapid progress. At the school concert in 1822, Glinka was the show pupil and played Hummel’s A minor Concerto, Meyer accompanying him on a second piano. With the violin he made less progress, although he took lessons from Bohm, a distinguished master and virtuoso who had not, however, so Glinka declared, the gift of imparting his own knowledge to others. Bohm would sigh over his pupil’s faulty bowing and remark: “Messieu Klinka, fous ne chouerez chamais du fiolon.”

Glinka’s repertory at nineteen contained nothing more profound than the virtuoso music of Steibelt, Herz, Hummel and Kalkbrenner. Although Beethoven had already endowed the world with his entire series of sonatas, and was then at the zenith of his fame, his music only began to make headway in Russia some ten years later. As time went on, Glinka heard and met most of the great pianists of his day, and his criticisms of their various styles are unconventional and interesting, but would lead us far away from the subject of Russian opera.

Imperfect as his mastery of the violin appears to have been, it was of more importance to his subsequent career than his fluency as a pianist, because during the vacations at home he was now able to take part in earnest in his uncle’s small orchestra. The band generally visited the Glinkas’ estate once a fortnight, and sometimes stayed a whole week. Before the general rehearsal, the son of the house would take each member of the orchestra through his part—with the exception of the leaders—and see that they were all note perfect and played in tune. In this way he learnt a good deal about instrumentation and something about the technique of conducting. Their repertory included overtures by Cherubini, Méhul, and Mozart; and three symphonies, Haydn in B, Mozart in G minor, and Beethoven’s second symphony, in D major, the last named being Glinka’s special favourite.

In St. Petersburg he began to frequent the opera, which was not then so exclusively given over to Italian music as it was a few years later. Méhul’s “Joseph,” Cherubini’s “Water-Carriers,” Isouard’s “Gioconda” and Boieldieu’s “Le Bonnet Rouge” were among the works which he heard and admired in the early ’twenties.

In 1824 Glinka entered the Government service as a clerk in the Ministry of Ways and Communications. Here he found several amateurs as enthusiastic as himself, and was soon launched in a social circle where his musical gifts were greatly appreciated and he ran the risk of degenerating into a spoilt dilettante. From the beginning to the end of his career Glinka remained an amateur in that higher sense of the word which implies that he merely wrote what he liked and was exempt from the necessity of composing to order for the sake of a livelihood.

He himself has related the circumstances of his first creative impulse. In the spring of 1822, when he was about nineteen, he made the acquaintance of a young lady “of fascinating appearance, who played the harp and had also a beautiful voice. This voice was not to be compared to any musical instrument; it was just a resonant silvery soprano, and she sang naturally and with extraordinary charm. Her attractive qualities and her kindness to me (she called me her nephew and I called her aunt) stirred my heart and my imagination.” We see the rest of the picture: a Petersburg drawing room with its semi-French decoration, an amiable grandpapa reposing in his armchair, while Glinka played by the hour and the young lady joined in with her silvery soprano. So the first compositions were written—“to do her a service and laid at her feet”—variations upon her favourite theme from Weigel’s “Swiss Family,” an opera then all the vogue, variations for harp and piano on a theme by Mozart and an original Valse in F for piano. Of these only the variations for harp survive.

At twenty Glinka took singing lessons from the Italian Belloli. This led to his first essays in song writing, and after one hopeless failure he succeeded in setting some words by Baratynsky, “Do not needlessly torment me.”

Henceforth Glinka began to be conscious of his powers, and between 1825 and 1830 he was constantly composing. Although the best of relations existed between himself and his father, he does not seem to have shown him anything of his deeper artistic nature, and Glinka’s family accepted his music merely as an agreeable addition to his social qualities. Meanwhile he wrote many of the songs of his first period, and a few isolated dramatic scenas with orchestral accompaniment, including the Chorus on the Death of a Hero, in C minor, and an Aria for baritone, a part of which he used in the finale of the second act of his opera Russlan and Liudmilla. He also learnt Italian and received some instruction in theory from Zamboni. In 1829 he published an album containing most of his early compositions.

From time to time Glinka was incapacitated by an affection of the eyes, and his general health was far from satisfactory. He was possessed of a craving to travel in Spain or Italy, and his father’s refusal to let him go abroad “hurt me,” he says, “to the point of tears.” However, a famous doctor having examined him, reported to his father that the young man had “a whole quadrille of ailments” and ought to be sent to a warm climate for at least three years. Glinka left Russia for Italy in 1830, and remained abroad until the spring of 1834.

During his visit to Italy, Glinka wrote regularly and fully to his family, but unfortunately the correspondence was not deemed worthy of preservation, and the letters were destroyed shortly after his return. If we may judge by the communications to his friends sent later in life from Spain, France and Germany, the destruction of these records of his early impressions is a real loss to musical biography.

The two chief objects of Glinka’s journey abroad were to improve his physical condition and to perfect his musical studies. As regards his health, he was benefited perhaps but not cured. “All his life,” says Stassov, “Glinka was a martyr to doctors and remedies,” and his autobiography is full of details concerning his fainting fits and nervous depression, and his bodily sufferings in general. He had, however, sufficient physical and moral strength to work at times with immense energy.

As regards his musical education, Glinka had now begun to realise that his technical equipment did not keep pace with his creative impulse. He felt the need of that theoretical knowledge which Kirnberg says is to the composer what wings are to a bird. He was by no means so completely ignorant of the theory of his art as many of his critics have insinuated. He had already composed music which was quite on a level with much that was popular in his day, and had won some flattering attentions from musical society in St. Petersburg. We must respect the self-criticism which prompted him to put himself to school again at six-and-twenty. But Italy could not give him that deeper and sounder musical culture of which he was in search. In Milan he began to work under Basili, the Director of the Milan Conservatoire, distinguished for having refused a scholarship to Verdi because he showed no aptitude for music. Basili does not seem to have had la main heureuse with budding genius; Glinka found his methods so dry and pedantic that he soon abandoned his lessons as a waste of time. Nevertheless Italy, then and now the Mecca of all aspiring art students, had much to give to the young Russian. He was deeply impressed by the beauty of his surroundings, but, from the practical side, it was in the art of singing and writing for the voice that Glinka made real progress during his sojourn in the South. He had arrived in Italy in company with Ivanov, who became later on the most famous Russian operatic tenor. Glinka’s father had persuaded the tenor to accompany his son abroad and had succeeded in getting him two years leave of absence from the Imperial Chapel. The opera season 1830-1831 was unusually brilliant at Milan, and the two friends heard Grisi, Pasta, Rubini, Galli and Orlandi. Their greatest experience came at the end of the season, when Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” was mounted for the first time, “Pasta and Rubini singing their very best in order to uphold their favourite maestro.” “We, in our box,” continues Glinka, “shed torrents of tears—tears of emotion and enthusiasm.” But still more important to his appreciation of vocal music was his acquaintance in Naples with Nozzari and Fodor-Mainville. Ivanov studied with both masters, and Glinka was permitted to be present at his lessons. Nozzari had already retired from the stage, but his voice was still in its fullest beauty. His compass was two octaves, from B to B, and his scale so perfect that Glinka says it could only be compared to Field’s scale upon the piano. Under the influence of Italian music, he wrote at this time a few piano pieces and two songs to Russian words. His setting of Koslov’s “Venetian Night” was merely an echo of his surroundings; “The Victor,” music to Joukovsky’s words, showed more promise of originality, and here we find for the first time the use of the plagal cadence which he employed so effectively in A Life for the Tsar.

During the third year of his visit, he felt a conviction that he was moving on the wrong track, and that there was a certain insincerity in all that he was attempting. “It cost me some pains to counterfeit the Italian sentimento brilliante,” he says. “I, a dweller in the North, felt quite differently (from the children of the sunny South); with us, things either make no impression at all, or they sink deep into the soul; it is either a frenzy of joy or bitter tears.” These reflections, joined to an acute fit of homesickness, led to his decision to return to Russia. After a few pleasant days spent in Vienna, he travelled direct to Berlin, where he hoped to make up some of the deficiencies of his Italian visit with the assistance of the well-known theorist Siegfried Dehn.

Dehn saw at once that his pupil was gifted with genius, but impatient of drudgery. He gave himself the trouble to devise a short cut to the essentials of musical theory. In five months he succeeded in giving Glinka a bird’s-eye view of harmony and counterpoint, fugue and instrumentation; the whole course being concentrated into four small exercise books. “There is no doubt,” writes Glinka, “that I owe more to Dehn than to any of my masters. He not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing.”

While studying with Dehn, he still found time for composition, and it is noticeable that what he wrote at this time is by no means Germanised music. Two songs, “The Rustling Oak,” words by Joukovsky, and Delvig’s poem, “Say not that love has fled,” the Variations for piano on Alabiev’s “Nightingale,” and outlines of the melody for the Orphan’s Song “When they slew my mother,” afterwards used in a Life for the Tsar, besides a sketch for one of the chief themes in the overture of the opera, all tend to prove that he was now deeply preoccupied with the expression of national sentiment in music.

In April 1834 his profitable studies with Dehn were cut short by the death of his father, which necessitated his immediate return to Russia. Stassov sums up the results of this period abroad in the words: “Glinka left us a dilettante and returned a maestro.”

CHAPTER IV
GLINKA’S OPERAS

THE idea of composing a national opera now began to take definite shape in Glinka’s mind. In the winter of 1834-1835, the poet Joukovsky was living in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg as tutor to the young Tsarevich, afterwards Alexander II. The weekly gatherings which he held there were frequented by Poushkin, Gogol, Odoievsky, Prince Vyazemsky—in short, by all the higher intelligentsia of the capital. Here Glinka, the fame of whose songs sufficed to procure him the entrée to this select society, was always welcome. When he confided to Joukovsky his wish to create a purely Russian opera, the poet took up the idea with ardour and suggested the subject of Ivan Sousanin, which, as we have seen, had already been treated by Cavos. At first Joukovsky offered to write the text of the work and actually supplied verses for the famous trio in the last act: “Not to me, unhappy one, the storm wind brought his last sign.” But his many occupations made it impossible for him to keep pace with Glinka’s creative activity once his imagination had been fired. Consequently the libretto had to be handed over to Baron Rozen, a Russianised German, secretary to the young Tzarevich. Rozen could hardly have been a whole-hearted patriot; certainly he was no poet. The words of the opera leave much to be desired, but we must make allowances for the fact that Glinka, in his impatience, sometimes expected the librettist to supply words to ready-made music. The opera was first called Ivan Sousanin. Among Glinka’s papers was found the original plan for the work: “Ivan Sousanin, a native tragi-heroic opera, in five acts or sections. Actors: Ivan Sousanin (Bass), the chief character; Antonida, his daughter (Soprano), tender and graceful; Alexis (afterwards Bogdan) Sobinin, her affianced husband (tenor), a brave man; Andrew (afterwards Vanya), an orphan boy of thirteen or fourteen (alto), a simple-hearted character.”

While at work upon the opera in 1835, Glinka married. This, the fulfilment of a long-cherished wish, brought him great happiness. Soon after his marriage he wrote to his mother, “my heart is once more hopeful, I can feel and pray, rejoice and weep—my music is re-awakened; I cannot find words to express my gratitude to Providence for this bliss.” In this beatific state of mind he threw himself into the completion of his task. During the summer he took the two acts of the libretto which were then ready into the country with him. While travelling by carriage he composed the chorus in 5-4 measure: “Spring waters flow o’er the fields,” the idea of which had suddenly occurred to him. Although a nervous man, he seems to have been able to work without having recourse to the strictly guarded padded-room kind of isolation necessary to so many creative geniuses. “Every morning,” he says in his autobiography, “I sat at a table in the big sitting-room of our house at Novospasskoï, which was our favourite apartment; my mother, my sister and my wife—in fact the whole family—were busy there, and the more they laughed and talked and bustled about, the quicker my work went.” All through the winter, which was spent in St. Petersburg, he was busy with the opera. “The scene where Sousanin leads the Poles astray in the forest, I read aloud while composing, and entered so completely into the situation of my hero that I used to feel my hair standing on end and cold shivers down my back.” During Lent, 1836, a trial rehearsal of the first act was given at the house of Prince Youssipov, with the assistance of his private orchestra. Glinka, satisfied with the results, then made some efforts to get his opera put on the stage, but at first he met with blank refusals from the Direction of the Imperial Theatres. His cause was helped by the generous spirit of Cavos, who refused to see in Glinka a rival in the sphere of patriotic opera, and was ready to accept his work. Even then the Director of the Opera, Gedeonov, demanded from Glinka a written undertaking not to claim any fee for the rights of public performance. Glinka, who was not dependent upon music for a livelihood, submitted to this injustice. The rehearsals were then begun under the supervision of Cavos. The Emperor Nicholas I. attended one of the rehearsals at the great Opera House and expressed his satisfaction, and also his willingness to accept the dedication of the opera. It was then that it received the title by which it has since become famous, Glinka having previously changed the name of Ivan Sousanin to that of Death for the Tsar.

The first performance took place on November 27th (O.S.), 1836, in the presence of the Emperor and the Court. “The first act was well received,” wrote Glinka, “the trio being loudly and heartily applauded. The first scene in which the Poles appear (a ballroom in Warsaw) was passed over in complete silence, and I went on the stage deeply wounded by the attitude of the public.” It seems, however, that the silence of the audience proceeded from a certain timidity as to how they ought to receive the appearance of these magnificent, swaggering Poles in the presence of the Emperor, the Polish insurrection of 1830-1831 being still painfully fresh in the public memory. The rest of the opera was performed amid a scene of unparalleled enthusiasm. The acting of the Russian chorus seems to have been even more realistic in those days than it is now. “In the fourth act,” to quote the composer himself, “the representatives of the Polish soldiers in the scene in the forest, fell upon Petrov (the famous bass who created the part of Sousanin) with such fury that they broke his arm, and he was obliged to defend himself from their attacks in good earnest.” After the performance, Glinka was summoned to the Emperor’s box to receive his compliments, and soon afterwards he was presented with a ring, worth 4,000 roubles, and offered the post of Capellmeister to the Imperial Chapel.

Some account of the story of A Life for the Tsar will be of interest to those who have not yet seen the opera, for the passionate idealism of the subject still appeals to every patriotic Russian. The action takes place at one of the most stirring periods of Russian history, the Russo-Polish war of 1633, just after the boy-king Michael Feodorovich—first of the present Romanov line—had been elected to the throne. Glinka himself sketched out the plot, which runs as follows: The Poles, who have been supporting the claims of their own candidate for the Russian throne, form a conspiracy against the life of the young Romanov. A Polish army corps is despatched to Moscow, ostensibly on a peaceful embassy, but in reality to carry out this sinister design. On the march, they enter the hut of a loyal peasant, Ivan Sousanin, and compel his services as a guide. Sousanin, who suspects their treachery, forms a heroic resolve. He secretly sends his adopted son, the orphan Vanya, to warn the Tsar of his danger; while, in order to gain time, he misleads the Poles in the depths of the forest and falls a victim to their vengeance when they discover the trick which has been played upon them.

Whether the story be true or not—and modern historians deny its authenticity[13]—Ivan Sousanin will always remain the typical embodiment of the loyalty of the Russian peasant to his Tsar, a sentiment which has hitherto resisted most of the agitations which have affected the upper and middle classes of Russian society.

The music of A Life for the Tsar was an immense advance on anything that had been previously attempted by a Russian composer. Already the overture—though not one of Glinka’s best symphonic efforts—shows many novel orchestral effects, which grew out of the fundamental material of his music, the folk-songs of Great Russia. Generally speaking, his tendency is to keep his orchestra within modest limits. Although he knew something of the orchestration of Berlioz, it is Beethoven rather than the French musician that Glinka takes as his model. “I do not care,” he says, “to make use of every luxury.” Under this category he places trombones, double bassoons, bass drum, English horn, piccolo and even the harp. To the wind instruments he applies the term “orchestral colour,” while he speaks of the strings as “orchestral motion.” With regard to the strings, he thought that “the more these instruments interlace their parts, the nearer they approach to their natural character and the better they fulfil their part in the orchestra.” It is remarkable that Glinka usually gives free play to the various individual groups of instruments, and that his orchestration is far less conventional and limited than that of most operatic composers of his time. The thematic material of A Life for the Tsar is partly drawn from national sources, not so much directly, as modelled on the folk-song pattern. The crude folk-stuff is treated in a very different way to that which prevailed in the early national operas. Glinka does not interpolate a whole popular song—often harmonised in a very ordinary manner—into his opera, in the naïve style of Fomin in his Aniouta or The Miller. With Glinka the material passes through the melting pot of his genius, and flows out again in the form of a plastic national idiom with which, as he himself expresses it, “his fellow-countrymen could not fail to feel completely at home.” Here are one or two instances in which the folk-song element is recognisable in A Life for the Tsar. In the first act, where Sousanin in his recitative says it is no time to be dreaming of marriage feasts, occurs a phrase which Glinka overheard sung by a cab-driver[14]; the familiar folk-song “Down by Mother Volga,” disguised in binary rhythm, serves as accompaniment to Sousanin’s words in the forest scene “I give ye answer,” and “Thither have I led ye,” where its gloomy character is in keeping with the situation; the recitative sung by Sobinin in the first act, “Greeting, Mother Moscow,” is also based upon a folk-tune. But Glinka has also melodies of his own invention which are profoundly national in character. As Alfred Bruneau remarks: “By means of a harmony or a simple orchestral touch he can give to an air which is apparently as Italian as possible a penetrating perfume of Russian nationality.” An example of this is to be found in Antonida’s aria “I gaze upon the empty fields” (Act I). The treatment of his themes is also in accordance with national tradition; thus in the patriotic chorus in the first Act, “In the storm and threatening tempest,” we have an introduction for male chorus, led by a precentor (Zapievets), a special feature of the folk-singing of Great Russia. Another chorus has a pizzicato accompaniment in imitation of the national instrument, the Balalaika, to the tone of which we have grown fairly familiar in England during the last few years. Many of Glinka’s themes are built upon the mediæval church modes which lie at the foundation of the majority of the national songs.

For instance, the Peasants’ chorus, “We go to our work in the woods,” is written in the hypo-dorian mode; the Song of the Rowers is in the Æolian mode, which is identical with “the natural minor,” which was the favourite tonality of Glinka’s predecessors. The strange beauty of the Slavsia lies in the use of the mixolydian mode, and its simple harmonisation. The introduction to the opera is treated contrapuntally, in the style of the folk-singing with its cantus firmus (zapievkoya) and its imitations (podgolossky).

Glinka wrote the rôle of Sousanin for a bass. He has, indeed, been reproached with giving preference for the bass at the expense of the tenor parts, and other Russian composers have followed his example. But when we bear in mind that Russia produces some of the most wonderful bass voices in the world the preference seems natural enough, and even assumes a certain national significance. Upon Sousanin’s part centres the chief interest of the opera and it is convincingly realised and consistently Russian throughout. His opening phrases, in the Phrygian mode, seem to delineate his individuality in a few clear broad touches. Serov is disposed to claim for Glinka the definite and conscious use of a leitmotif which closely knits the patriotism of his hero with the personality of the Tsar. Towards the close of the first act, Sousanin sings a phrase to the words taken from the old Russian Slavsia or Song of Glory. Making a careful analysis of the score, Serov asserts that traces of this motive may be found in many of Sousanin’s recitatives and arias, tending to the fusion of the musical and poetical ideas. Serov, an enthusiastic Wagnerian student, seems to see leitmotifs in most unsuspected places and is inclined, we think, to exaggerate their presence in A Life for the Tsar. But there are certainly moments in the opera in which Glinka seems to have recourse consciously to this phrase of the Slavsia as befitting the dramatic situation. Thus in the quartet in the third act, “God love the Tsar,” the melody of the Slavsia may be recognised in the harmonic progression of the instrumental basses given in 3-4 instead of 4-4; the treatment here is interesting, because, as Cheshikin points out, it is in the antiphonal style of the Orthodox Church, the vocal quartets singing “God love the Tsar,” while the string quartet replies with “Glory, glory, our Russian Tsar.” Again in another solemn moment in the opera the phrase from the Slavsia stands out still more clearly. When the Poles command Sousanin to lead them instantly to the Tsar’s abode, the hero answers in words which rise far above the ordinary level of the libretto:

“O high and bright our Tsar’s abode,
Protected by the power of God,
All Russia guards it day and night,
While on its walls, in raiment white,
The angels, heaven’s winged sentries, wait
To keep all traitors from the gate.”

These words are sung by Sousanin to a majestic cantilena in a flowing 6-4 measure, while the orchestra accompany in march rhythm with the Slavsia, which, in spite of being somewhat veiled by the change of rhythm and the vocal melody, may be quite easily identified.

Two great scenes are allotted to Sousanin. The first occurs when the Poles insist on his acting as their guide and he resolves to lay down his life for the Tsar. Here the orchestra plays an important part, suggesting the agitations which rend the soul of the hero; now it reflects his super-human courage, and again those inevitable, but passing, fears and regrets without which his deed would lose half its heroism. The alternating rhythms—Sousanin sings in 2-4 and the Poles 3-4—are effectively managed. Sousanin’s second great moment occurs when the Poles, worn out with hunger and fatigue, fall asleep round their camp fire and the peasant-hero, watching for the tardy winter sunrise which will bring death to him and safety to the young Tsar, sings in a mood of intense exaltation the aria “Thou comest Dawn, for the last time mine eyes shall look on thee!” a touching and natural outburst of emotion that never fails to stir a Russian audience to its emotional depths, although some of the national composers have since reached higher levels, judged from a purely musical standpoint.

In A Life for the Tsar Glinka conceived the idea, interesting in itself, of contrasting the characters of the two nations by means of their national music. To this end he devotes the whole of the second act entirely to the Poles. Here it seems to me that he is far less successful than with any other portion of the work. Some critics have supposed that the composer really wished to give an impression of the Poles as a superficial people literally dancing and revelling through life, and possessed of no deeper feelings to be expressed in music. But Glinka was too intelligent a man to take such naïve views of national character. It seems more probable that not being supersaturated with Polish as he was with Russian folk-music, he found it difficult to indicate the personality of the Pole in anything but conventional dance rhythms. This passes well enough in the second act, where the scene is laid at a brilliant festival in the Polish capital, and the ballroom dances which follow constitute the ballet of the opera. But in other parts of the work, as, for instance, when the Polish soldiers burst into Sousanin’s cottage and order him to act as their guide, the strains of a stately polonaise seem distinctly out of place; and again, when they have lost their way in the forest and their situation is extremely precarious, they express their alarm and suspicion in mazurka rhythm. The polonaise, cracoviak, the valse in 6-8 time and the mazurka and finale which form the ballet are somewhat ordinary in character, but presented with a charm and piquancy of orchestration which has made them extremely popular. The representative theme of the Poles, a phrase from the polonaise, hardly suggests the part they play in the opera—their evil designs upon Moscow and the young Michael Feodorovich, about which they sing in the succeeding chorus. But others seem to find this music more impressive, for, says M. Camille Bellaigue, “even when restricted to strictly national forms and formulas, the Russian genius has a tendency to enlarge them. In the polonaise and especially in the sombre and sinister mazurka in A Life for the Tsar Glinka obtains from local rhythms an intimate dramatic emotion.... He raises and generalises, and from the music of a race makes the music of humanity.”

In the last act of A Life for the Tsar Glinka has concentrated the ardent patriotism and the profound human sympathy which is not only a feature of his music but common to the whole school of which he is the prototype. The curtain rises upon a street in Moscow, the people are hurrying to the Kremlin to acclaim the young Tsar, and as they go they sing that beautiful hymn-march “Glory, glory, Holy Russia,” a superb representation of the patriotic ideal. In contrast to the gladness of the crowd, Glinka shows us the unfortunate children of Ivan Sousanin, the lad Vanya, Antonida, and her betrothed, Sobinin. Some of the people stop to ask the cause of their sadness, and in reply they sing the touching trio which describes the fate of Sousanin. Then the scene changes to the Red Square under the walls of the Kremlin, and all individual sentiment is merged in a flood of loftier emotion. The close of the act is the apotheosis of the Tsar and of the spirit of loyalty. Here on the threshold of the Kremlin Michael Feodorovich pauses to salute the dead body of the peasant-hero. Once again the great crowd takes up the Slavsia or Glory motive, and amid the pealing of the bells the opera ends with a triumphant chorus which seems to sum up the whole character of the Russian people. “Every element of national beauty,” says M. Camille Bellaigue, “is pressed into the service here. The people, their ruler and God himself are present. Not one degree in all the sacred hierarchy is lacking; not one feature of the ideal, not one ray from the apotheosis of the fatherland.”

With all its weaknesses and its occasional lapses into Italian phraseology, A Life for the Tsar still remains a patriotic and popular opera, comparable only in these respects with some of the later works which it engendered, or, among contemporary operas, with Weber’s Der Freischütz.

With the unparalleled success of A Life for the Tsar, Glinka reached the meridian of his fame and power. He followed up the opera by some of his finest songs, contained in the collection entitled “Farewell to St. Petersburg,” and by the beautiful incidental music to Koukolnik’s tragedy Prince Kholmsky, of which Tchaikovsky, by no means an indulgent critic of his great predecessor, says: “Glinka here shows himself to be one of the greatest symphonic composers of his day. Many touches in Prince Kholmsky recall the brush of Beethoven. There is the same moderation in the means employed, and in the total absence of all striving after mere external effects; the same sober beauty and clear exposition of ideas that are not laboured but inspired; the same plasticity of form and mould. Finally there is the same inimitable instrumentation, so remote from all that is affected or far-fetched.... Every entr’acte which follows the overture is a little picture drawn by a master-hand. These are symphonic marvels which would suffice a second-rate composer for a whole series of long symphonies.”

The idea of a second national opera began to occupy Glinka’s mind very soon after the production of A Life for the Tsar. It was his intention to ask Poushkin to furnish him with a libretto based upon his epic poem “Russlan and Liudmilla.” The co-operation of Russia’s greatest poet with her leading musical genius should have been productive of great results. Unhappily the plan was frustrated by the tragic death of Poushkin, who was shot in a duel in 1837. Glinka, however, did not renounce the subject to which he had been attracted, and sketched out the plot and even some musical numbers, falling as before into the fatal mistake of expecting his librettist to supply words to music already written. The text for Russlan and Liudmilla was supplied by Bakhtourin, but several of Glinka’s friends added a brick here and there to the structure, with very patchy results. The introduction and finale were sketched out in 1839, but the composer, partly on account of failing health, did not work steadily at the opera until the winter of 1841. The score was actually completed by April 1842, when he submitted it on approval to Gedeonov. This time Glinka met with no difficulties from the Director of the Imperial Opera; the work was accepted at once and the date of the first production fixed in the following November.

The subject of Russlan and Liudmilla, though equally national, has not the poignant human interest that thrills us in A Life for the Tsar. The story belongs to a remote and legendary period in Russian history, and the characters are to a great extent fantastic and mythical. It had none of those qualities which in the first opera made for an immediate popular success in every stratum of Russian society. The days are now long past when the musical world of Russia was split into two hostile camps, the one led by Serov, who pronounced Russlan to be the last aberration of a lamentably warped genius; the other by Stassov, who saw in it the mature expression of Glinka’s inspiration. At the same time Stassov was quite alive to the weaknesses and impossible scenic moments of the libretto, faults which are doubtless the reason why seventy years have not sufficed to win popularity for the work, although the lapse of time has strengthened the conviction of all students of Russian opera as to the actual musical superiority of Russlan and Liudmilla over A Life for the Tsar.

The story of the opera runs as follows:

In days of old—when the Slavs were still Pagans—Prince Svietozar of Kiev had one beautiful daughter, Liudmilla. The maiden had three suitors, the knights-errant Russlan and Farlaf, and the young Tatar prince, Ratmir. Liudmilla’s love was bestowed upon Russlan, and Prince Svietozar prepares to celebrate their marriage. Meanwhile the wicked wizard Chernomor has fallen desperately in love with Liudmilla. At the wedding feast he carries off the bride by means of his magic arts. Prince Svietozar sends the three knights to rescue his daughter and promises to give her to the one who succeeds in the quest. The knights meet with many adventures by the way. Farlaf seeks the help of the sorceress Naina, who agrees to save him from the rivalry of Ratmir, by luring the ardent young Oriental aside from his quest. Russlan takes council with the benevolent wizard Finn, who tells him how to acquire a magic sword with which to deliver his bride from the hands of Chernomor. Russlan saves Liudmilla, but on their homeward journey to Kiev they are intercepted by Farlaf, who casts them both into a magic slumber. Leaving Russlan by the wayside, Farlaf carries the heroine back to her father’s house, where he passes himself off as her deliverer and claims her for his bride. Russlan awakes and arrives in time to denounce his treachery, and the opera ends with the marriage of the true lovers, which was interrupted in the first act.

The overture to Russlan and Liudmilla is a solid piece of work, sketched on broad lines and having a fantastic colouring quite in keeping with the subject of the opera. The opening subject is national in character, being divided into two strains which lend themselves to contrapuntal treatment.

An introduction follows, consisting of a chorus and two solos for Bayan (tenor), the famous bard of old, who is supposed to relate the legend. This introduction is largely built upon a phrase of eight notes, the characteristic utterance of Bayan when he speaks of the “deeds of long ago.” Afterwards this phrase is repeated in the Dorian mode, and the music acquires an archaic character in conformity with the remote period of the action.

The opera itself may be said to begin with a wedding chorus, followed by a cavatina for Liudmilla in which she takes leave of her father. In writing for his primadonne Glinka seems to have found it difficult to avoid the conventional Italian influence, and this solo, in common with most of the music for Liudmilla, lacks vigour and originality. Far more interesting from the musical point of view is the chorus in 5-4 measure, an invocation to Lel, the Slavonic God of Love. At the close of this number a loud clap of thunder is heard and the scene is plunged in darkness, during which the wizard Chernomor carries away the bride. The consternation of the guests is cleverly depicted over a pedal point for horn on E flat which extends for a hundred and fifty bars. Prince Svietozar then bids the knights-errant to go in search of his daughter, and with a short chorus imploring the aid of Perun upon their quest the act comes to an end.

The orchestral prelude to the second act is based upon a broad impetuous theme which afterwards appears as the motive of the Giant’s head in Act III. The first scene represents a hilly region and the cave of the good wizard Finn. The character of Finn, half humorous and half pathetic, with its peculiar combination of benevolence, vacillation, and pessimistic regret, is essentially Russian. Such characters have been made typical in the novels of Tourgeniev and Tolstoy. Finn relates how, in a vain endeavour to win Naina the sorceress, he has changed himself into a shepherd, a fisherman, and a warrior, and finally into a wizard. In this last character he has succeeded in touching her heart. But now alas, they have awakened to the realisation that there is nothing left to them but regret for lost possibilities fled beyond recall. Glinka expresses all these psychological changes in Finn’s famous Ballade which forms the opening number of this act; but admirable as it is, critics have some ground for their reproach that its great length delays the action of the plot. Russlan, having listened to Finn’s love-story, receives from him the sword with which he is to attack the Giant’s Head. In the next scene Farlaf meets the elderly but once beautiful Naina, and the two sing a humorous duet. Farlaf’s chief air, a rondo in opera-bouffe style, is rather ordinary, but Naina’s music is a successful piece of character-painting. The last scene of the second act is one of the most fantastic in this fantastic opera. The stage is enveloped in mist. Russlan enters and sings his aria, of which the opening recitative is the strongest part, the Allegro section, which Glinka has written in sonata-form, being somewhat diffuse. While he is singing, the mist slowly disperses, and the rising moon reveals the lonely steppe and shines upon the bleached bones which strew an ancient battle-field. Russlan now sees with horror the apparition of the Giant’s Head. This in its turn sees Russlan, and threatens the audacious knight who has ventured upon the haunted field. But Russlan overcomes the monster head with the magic sword, as directed by Finn. In order to give weight to the Giant’s voice Glinka has supplemented the part by a small male chorus which sings from within the head.

The prelude to the third act is generally omitted, and is not in fact printed in the pianoforte score of the opera. The opening number, a Persian chorus for female voices, “The Night lies heavy on the fields,” is full of grace and oriental languor. The subject of the chorus is a genuine Persian melody and the variations which form the accompaniment add greatly to the beauty of these pages. The chorus is followed by an aria for Gorislava (soprano), Ratmir’s former love, whom he has deserted for Liudmilla. This air with its clarinet obbligato is one of the most popular solos in the opera. In answer to Gorislava’s appeal, Ratmir appears upon the scene and sings a charming nocturne accompanied by cor anglais. The part of the young oriental lover is usually taken by a woman (contralto). For this number Glinka makes use of a little Tatar air which Ferdinand David afterwards introduced, transposed into the major, in his symphonic poem “Le Désert.” It is a beautiful piece of landscape painting which makes us feel the peculiar sadness of the twilight in Russia as it falls on the vast spaces of the Steppes. A French critic has said that it might have been written by an oriental Handel. The scene described as the seduction of Ratmir consists of a ballet in rococo style entitled “Naina’s magic dance.” Then follows a duet for Gorislava and Ratmir, after which the maidens of the harem surround Ratmir and screen Gorislava from him. Afterwards the enchanted palace created by Naina to ensnare Ratmir suddenly vanishes and we see the open plain once more. The act concludes with a quartet in which Russlan and Finn take part with the two oriental lovers.

The entr’acte preceding the fourth act consists of a march movement (Marcia allegro risoluto). The curtain then rises upon Chernomor’s enchanted garden, where Liudmilla languishes in captivity. An oriental ballet then follows, but this is preceded by the March of the Wizard Chernomor. This quaint march which personifies the invisible monster is full of imagination, although it tells its tale so simply that it takes us back to the fairyland of childhood. The first of the Eastern dances (allegretto quasi andante) is based upon a Turkish song in 6-8 measure. Afterwards follows the Danse Arabesque and finally a Lezginka, an immensely spirited dance built upon another of the Tatar melodies which were given to Glinka by the famous painter Aivazovsky. A chorus of naiads and a chorus of flowers also form part of the ballet, which is considered one of Glinka’s chefs d’œuvre. While the chorus is being sung we see in the distance an aerial combat between Russlan and Chernomor, and throughout the whole of the movement the wizard’s leitmotif is prominent in the music. Russlan, having overcome Chernomor, wakes Liudmilla from the magic sleep into which she has been cast by his spells.

The first scene of the last act takes place in the Steppes, where Ratmir and Gorislava, now reconciled, have pitched their tent. Russlan’s followers break in upon the lovers with the news that Farlaf has treacherously snatched Liudmilla from their master. Then Finn arrives and begs Ratmir to carry to Russlan a magic ring which will restore the princess from her trance. In the second scene the action returns to Prince Svietozar’s palace. Liudmilla is still under a spell, and her father, who believes her to be dead, reproaches Farlaf in a fine piece of recitative (Svietozar’s music throughout the work is consistently archaic in character). Farlaf declares that Liudmilla is not dead and claims her as his reward. Svietozar is reluctantly about to fulfil his promise, when Russlan arrives with the magic ring and denounces the false knight. The funeral march which had accompanied the Prince’s recitative now gives place to the chorus “Love and joy.” Liudmilla in her sleep repeats the melody of the chorus in a kind of dreamy ecstasy. Then Russlan awakens her and the opera concludes with a great chorus of thanksgiving and congratulation. Throughout the finale the characteristics of Russian and Eastern music are combined with brilliant effect.

Russlan and Liudmilla was received with indifference by the public and with pronounced hostility by most of the critics. Undoubtedly the weakness of the libretto had much to do with its early failure; but it is equally true that in this, his second opera, Glinka travelled so far from Italian tradition and carried his use of national colour so much further and with such far greater conviction, that the music became something of an enigma to a public whose enthusiasm was still wholly reserved for the operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini. Looking back from the present condition of Russian opera we can trace the immense influence of Russlan and Liudmilla upon the later generation of composers both as regards opera and ballet. It is impossible not to realise that the fantastic Russian ballets of the present day owe much to Glinka’s first introduction of Eastern dances into Russlan and Liudmilla.

The coldness of the public towards this work, the fruit of his mature conviction, was a keen disappointment to Glinka. He had not the alternative hope of being appreciated abroad, for he had deliberately chosen to appeal to his fellow-countrymen, and when they rejected him he had no heart for further endeavour. His later symphonic works, “Kamarinskaya” and “The Jota Aragonese,” show that his gift had by no means deteriorated. Of the former Tchaikovsky has truly said that Glinka has succeeded in concentrating in one short work what a dozen second-rate talents could only have invented with the whole expenditure of their powers. Possibly Glinka would have had more courage and energy to meet his temporary dethronement from the hearts of his own people had not his health been already seriously impaired. After the production of Russlan he lived chiefly abroad. In his later years he was much attracted to the music of Bach and to the older polyphonic schools of Italy and Germany. Always preoccupied with the idea of nationality in music, he made an elaborate study of Russian church music, but his failing health did not permit him to carry out the plans which he had formed in this connection. In April 1856 he left St. Petersburg for the last time and went to Berlin, where he intended to pursue these studies with the assistance of Dehn. Here he lived very quietly for some months, working twice a week with his old master and going occasionally to the opera to hear the works of Gluck and Mozart. In January 1857 he was taken seriously ill, and passed peacefully away during the night of February 2nd. In the following May his remains were brought from Germany to St. Petersburg and laid in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky monastery near to those of other national poets, Krylov, Baratinsky and Joukovsky.

Glinka was the first inspired interpreter of the Russian nationality in music. During the period which has elapsed since his death the impress of his genius upon that of his fellow countrymen has in no way weakened. For this reason a knowledge of his music is an indispensable introduction to the appreciation of the later school of Russian music; for in his works and in those of Dargomijsky, we shall find the key to all that has since been accomplished.

CHAPTER V
DARGOMIJSKY

GLINKA, in his memoirs, relates how in the autumn of 1834 he met at a musical party in St. Petersburg, “a little man with a shrill treble voice, who, nevertheless, proved a redoubtable virtuoso when he sat down to the piano.” The little man was Alexander Sergeivich Dargomijsky, then about twenty-one years of age, and already much sought after in society as a brilliant pianist and as the composer of agreeable drawing-room songs. Dargomijsky’s diary contains a corresponding entry recording this important meeting of two men who were destined to become central points whence started two distinct currents of tendency influencing the whole future development of Russian music. “Similarity of education and a mutual love of music immediately drew us together,” wrote Dargomijsky, “and this in spite of the fact that Glinka was ten years my senior.” For the remainder of Glinka’s life Dargomijsky was his devoted friend and fellow-worker, but never his unquestioning disciple.

Dargomijsky was born, February 2/14, 1813, at a country estate in the government of Toula, whither his parents had fled from their own home near Smolensk before the French invaders in 1812. It is said that Dargomijsky, the future master of declamation, only began to articulate at five years of age. In 1817 his parents migrated to St. Petersburg. They appear to have taken great interest in the musical education of their son; at six he received his first instruction on the piano, and two years later took up the violin; while at eleven he had already tried his hand at composition. His education being completed, he entered the Government service, from which, however, he retired altogether in 1843. Thanks to his parents’ sympathy with his musical talent, Dargomijsky’s training had been above the average and a long course of singing lessons with an excellent master, Tseibikha, no doubt formed the basis of his subsequent success as a composer of vocal music. But at the time of his first meeting with Glinka, both on account of his ignorance of theory and of the narrowness of his general outlook upon music, he can only be regarded as an amateur. One distinguishing feature of his talent seems to have been in evidence even then, for Glinka, after hearing his first song, written to humorous words, declared that if Dargomijsky would turn his attention to comic opera he would certainly surpass all his predecessors in that line. Contact with Glinka’s personality effected the same beneficial change in Dargomijsky that Rubinstein’s influence brought about in Tchaikovsky some thirty years later; it changed him from a mere dilettante into a serious musician. “Glinka’s example,” he wrote in his autobiography, “who was at that time (1834) taking Prince Usipov’s band through the first rehearsals of his opera A Life for the Tsar, assisted by myself and Capellmeister Johannes, led to my decision to study the theory of music. Glinka handed over to me the five exercise books in which he had worked out Dehn’s theoretical system and I copied them in my own hand, and soon assimilated the so-called mysterious wisdom of harmony and counterpoint, because I had been from childhood practically prepared for this initiation and had occupied myself with the study of orchestration.” These were the only books of theory ever studied by Dargomijsky, but they served to make him realise the possession of gifts hitherto unsuspected. After this course of self-instruction he felt strong enough to try his hand as an operatic composer, and selected a libretto founded on Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris.” Completed and translated into Russian in 1839, the work, entitled Esmeralda, was not accepted by the Direction of the Imperial Opera until 1847, when it was mounted for the first time at Moscow. By this time Dargomijsky had completely outgrown this immature essay. The light and graceful music pleased the Russian public, but the success of this half-forgotten child of his youth gave little satisfaction to the composer himself. He judged the work in the following words: “The music is slight and often trivial—in the style of Halévy and Meyerbeer; but in the more dramatic scenes there are already some traces of that language of force and realism which I have since striven to develop in my Russian music.”

In 1843 Dargomijsky went abroad, and while in Paris made the acquaintance of Auber, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Fétis. The success of Esmeralda encouraged him to offer to the Directors of the Imperial Theatre an opera-ballet entitled The Triumph of Bacchus, which he had originally planned as a cantata; but the work was rejected, and only saw the light some twenty years later, when it was mounted in Moscow. Dargomijsky’s correspondence during his sojourn abroad is extremely interesting, and shows that his views on music were greatly in advance of his time and quite free from the influences of fashion and convention.

In 1853 we gather from a letter addressed to a friend that he was attracted to national music. As a matter of fact the new opera, upon which he had already started in 1848, was based upon a genuine Russian folk-subject—Poushkin’s dramatic poem “The Roussalka” (The Water Sprite). Greatly discouraged by the refusal of the authorities to accept The Triumph of Bacchus, Dargomijsky laid aside The Roussalka until 1853. During this interval most of his finest songs and declamatory ballads were written, as well as those inimitably humorous songs which, perhaps, only a Russian can fully appreciate. But though he matured slowly, his intellectual and artistic development was serious and profound. Writing to Prince Odoevsky about this time, he says: “The more I study the elements of our national music, the more I discover its many-sidedness. Glinka, who so far has been the first to extend the sphere of our Russian music, has, I consider, only touched one phase of it—the lyrical. In The Roussalka I shall endeavour as much as possible to bring out the dramatic and humorous elements of our national music. I shall be glad if I achieve this, even though it may seem a half protest against Glinka.” Here we see Dargomijsky not as the disciple, but as the independent worker, although he undoubtedly kept Russlan and Liudmilla in view as the model for The Roussalka. The work was given for the first time at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1856, but proved too novel in form and treatment to please a public that was still infatuated with Italian opera.

In 1864-1865 Dargomijsky made a second tour in Western Europe, taking with him the scores of The Roussalka and of his three Orchestral Fantasias, “Kazachok” (The Cossack), a “Russian Legend,” and “The Dance of the Mummers” (Skomorokhi). In Leipzig he made the acquaintance of many prominent musicians, who contented themselves with pronouncing his music “sehr neu” and “ganz interessant,” but made no effort to bring it before the public. In Paris he was equally unable to obtain a hearing; but in Belgium—always hospitable to Russian musicians—he gave a concert of his own compositions with considerable success. On his way back to Russia he spent a few days in London and ever after spoke of our capital with enthusiastic admiration.

In 1860 Dargomijsky had been appointed director of the St. Petersburg section of the Imperial Russian Musical Society. This brought him in contact with some of the younger contemporary musicians, and after his return from abroad, in 1865, he became closely associated with Balakirev and his circle and took a leading part in the formation of the new national and progressive school of music. By this time he handled that musical language of “force and realism,” of which we find the first distinct traces in The Roussalka, with ease and convincing eloquence. For his fourth opera he now selected the subject of The Stone Guest (Don Juan); not the version by Da Ponte which had been immortalised by Mozart’s music, but the poem in which the great Russian poet Poushkin had treated this ubiquitous tale. This work occupied the last years of Dargomijsky’s life, and we shall speak of it in detail a little further on. Soon after the composer’s return from abroad his health began to fail and the new opera had constantly to be laid aside. From contemporary accounts it seems evident that he did not shut himself away from the world in order to keep alive the flickering flame of life that was left to him, but that on the contrary he liked to be surrounded by the younger generation, to whom he gave out freely of his own richly gifted nature. The composition of The Stone Guest was a task fulfilled in the presence of his disciples, reminding us of some of the great painters who worked upon their masterpieces before their pupils’ eyes. Dargomijsky died of heart disease in January 1869. On his deathbed he entrusted the unfinished manuscript of The Stone Guest to Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov, instructing the latter to carry out the orchestration of it. The composer fixed three thousand roubles (about £330) as the price of his work, but an obsolete law made it illegal for a native composer to receive more than £160 for an opera. At the suggestion of Vladimir Stassov, the sum was raised by private subscription, and The Stone Guest was performed in 1872. Of its reception by the public something will be said when we come to the analysis of the work.

We may dismiss Esmeralda as being practically of no account in the development of Russian opera; but the history of The Roussalka is important, for this work not only possesses intrinsic qualities that have kept it alive for over half a century, but its whole conception shows that Dargomijsky was already in advance of his time as regards clear-cut musical characterisation and freedom from conventional restraint. In this connection it is interesting to remember that The Roussalka preceded Bizet’s “Carmen” by some ten or twelve years.

As early as 1843 Dargomijsky had thought of The Roussalka as an excellent subject for opera. He avoided Glinka’s methods of entrusting his libretto to several hands. In preparing the book he kept as closely as possible to Poushkin’s poem, and himself carried out the modifications necessary for musical treatment. It is certain that he had begun the work by September 1848. It was completed in 1855.

As we have already seen, he was aware that Glinka was not fully in touch with the national character; there were sides of it which he had entirely ignored in both his operas, because he was temperamentally incapable of reflecting them. Glinka’s humour, as Dargomijsky has truthfully said, was not true to Russian life. His strongest tendency was towards a slightly melancholy lyricism, and when he wished to supply some comic relief he borrowed it from cosmopolitan models. The composer of The Roussalka, on the other hand, deliberately aimed at bringing out the dramatic, realistic, and humorous elements which he observed in his own race. The result was an opera containing a wonderful variety of interest.

Russian folk-lore teems with references to the Roussalki, or water nymphs, who haunt the streams and the still, dark, forest pools, lying in wait for the belated traveller, and of all their innumerable legends none is more racy of the soil than this dramatic poem by Poushkin in which the actual and supernatural worlds are sketched by a master hand. The story of the opera runs as follows:

A young Prince falls in love with Natasha, the Miller’s daughter. He pays her such devoted attention that the father hopes in time to see his child become a princess. Natasha returns the Prince’s passion, and gives him not only her love but her honour. Circumstances afterwards compel the Prince to marry in his own rank. Deserted in the hour of her need, Natasha in despair drowns herself in the mill-stream. Now, in accordance with Slavonic legends, she becomes a Roussalka, seeking always to lure mortals to her watery abode. Misfortune drives the old Miller crazy and the mill falls into ruins. Between the second act, in which the Prince’s nuptials are celebrated, and the third, a few years are supposed to elapse. Meanwhile the Prince is not happy in his married life, and is moreover perpetually haunted by the remembrance of his first love and by remorse for her tragic fate. He spends hours near the ruined mill dreaming of the past. One day a little Roussalka child appears to him and tells him that she is his daughter, and that she dwells with her mother among the water-sprites. All his old passion is reawakened. He stands on the brink of the water in doubt as to whether to respond to the calls of Natasha and the child, or whether to flee from their malign influence. Even while he hesitates, the crazy Miller appears upon the scene and fulfils dramatic justice by flinging the betrayer of his daughter into the stream. Here we have the elements of an exceedingly dramatic libretto which offers fine opportunities to a psychological musician of Dargomijsky’s type. The scene in which the Prince, with caressing grace and tenderness, tries to prepare Natasha for the news of his coming marriage; her desolation when she hears that they must part; her bitter disenchantment on learning the truth, and her cry of anguish as she tries to make him realise the full tragedy of her situation—all these emotions, coming in swift succession, are followed by the music with astonishing force and flexibility. Very effective, too, is the scene of the wedding festivities in which the wailing note of the Roussalka is heard every time the false lover attempts to kiss his bride—the suggestion of an invisible presence which throws all the guests into consternation. As an example of Dargomijsky’s humour, nothing is better than the recitative of the professional marriage-maker, “Why so silent pretty lassies,” and the answering chorus of the young girls (in Act II.). As might be expected with a realistic temperament like Dargomijsky’s, the music of the Roussalki is the least successful part of the work. The sub-aquatic ballet in the last act is rather commonplace; while Natasha’s music, though expressive, has been criticised as being too human and warm-blooded for a soulless water-sprite. Undoubtedly the masterpiece of the opera is the musical presentment of the Miller. At first a certain sardonic humour plays about this crafty, calculating old peasant, but afterwards, when disappointed greed and his daughter’s disgrace have turned his brain, how subtly the music is made to suggest the cunning of mania in that strange scene in which he babbles of his hidden treasures, “stored safe enough where the fish guard them with one eye!” With extraordinary power Dargomijsky reproduces his hideous meaningless laugh as he pushes the Prince into the swirling mill-stream. The character of the Miller alone would suffice to prove that the composer possesses dramatic gifts of the highest order.

The Roussalka, first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in May 1856, met with very little success. The Director of the opera, Glinka’s old enemy Gedeonov, having made up his mind that so “unpleasing” a work could have no future, mounted it in the shabbiest style. Moreover, as was usually the case with national opera then—and even at a later date—the interpretation was entrusted to second-rate artists. Dargomijsky, in a letter to his pupil Madame Karmalina, comments bitterly upon this; unhappily he could not foresee the time, not so far distant, when the great singer Ossip Petrov would electrify the audience with his wonderful impersonation of the Miller; nor dream that fifty years later Shaliapin would make one of his most legitimate triumphs in this part. The critics met Dargomijsky’s innovations without in the least comprehending their drift. Serovit was before the days of his opposition to the national cause—alone appreciated the novelty and originality shown in the opera; he placed it above A Life for the Tsar; but even his forcible pen could not rouse the public from their indifference to every new manifestation of art. Dargomijsky himself perfectly understood the reason of its unpopularity. In one of his letters written at this time, he says: “Neither our amateurs nor our critics recognise my talents. Their old-fashioned notions cause them to seek for melody which is merely flattering to the ear. That is not my first thought. I have no intention of indulging them with music as a plaything. I want the note to be the direct equivalent of the word. I want truth and realism. This they cannot understand.”

Ten years after the first performance of The Roussalka, the public began to reconsider its verdict. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 changed the views of society towards the humble classes, and directed attention towards all that concerned the past history of the peasantry. A new spirit animated the national ideal. From Poushkin’s poetry, with its somewhat “Olympian” attitude to life, the reading public turned to the people’s poets, Nekrassov and Nikitin; while the realism of Gogol was now beginning to be understood. To these circumstances we may attribute the reaction in favour of The Roussalka, which came as a tardy compensation towards the close of the composer’s life.

During the ten years which followed the completion of The Roussalka, Dargomijsky was steadily working towards the formulation of new principles in vocal, and especially in dramatic music. We may watch his progress in the series of songs and ballads which he produced at this time. It is, however, in The Stone Guest that Dargomijsky carries his theories of operatic reform to a logical conclusion. One of his chief aims, in which he succeeded in interesting the little band of disciples whose work we shall presently review, was the elimination of the artificial and conventional in the accepted forms of Italian opera. Wagner had already experienced the same dissatisfaction, and was solving the question of reform in the light of his own great genius. But the Russian composers could not entirely adopt the Wagnerian theories. Dargomijsky, while rejecting the old arbitrary divisions of opera, split upon the question of the importance which Wagner gave to the orchestra. Later on we shall see how each member of the newly-formed school tried to work out the principles of reformation in his own way, keeping in view the dominant idea that the dramatic interest should be chiefly sustained by the singer, while the orchestra should be regarded as a means of enhancing the interest of the vocal music. Dargomijsky himself was the first to embody these principles in what must be regarded as one of the masterpieces of Russian music—his opera The Stone Guest. Early in the ’sixties he had been attracted to Poushkin’s fine poem, which has for subject the story of Don Juan, treated, not as we find it in Mozart’s opera, by a mere librettist, but with the dramatic force and intensity of a great poet. Dargomijsky was repelled by the idea of mutilating a fine poem; yet found himself overwhelmed by the difficulties of setting the words precisely as they stood. Later on, however, the illness from which he was suffering seems to have produced in him a condition of rare musical clairvoyance. “I am singing my swan song,” he wrote to Madame Karmelina in 1868; “I am writing The Stone Guest. It is a strange thing: my nervous condition seems to generate one idea after another. I have scarcely any physical strength.... It is not I who write, but some unknown power of which I am the instrument. The thought of The Stone Guest occupied my attention five years ago when I was in robust health, but then I shrank from the magnitude of the task. Now, ill as I am, I have written three-fourths of the opera in two and a half months.... Needless to say the work will not appeal to the many.”

“Thank God,” comments Stassov, in his energetic language, “that in 1863 Dargomijsky recoiled before so colossal an undertaking, since he was not yet prepared for it. His musical nature was still growing and widening, and he was gradually freeing himself from all stiffness and asperity, from false notions of form, and from the Italian and French influences which sometimes predominate in the works of his early and middle periods. In each new composition Dargomijsky takes a step forward, but in 1866 his preparations were complete. A great musician was ready to undertake a great work. Here was a man who had cast off all musical wrong thinking, whose mind was as developed as his talent, and who found such inward force and greatness of character as inspired him to write this work while he lay in bed, subject to the terrible assaults of a mortal malady.”

The Stone Guest, then, is the ultimate expression of that realistic language which Dargomijsky employs in his early cantata The Triumph of Bacchus, in The Roussalka, and in his best songs. It is applied not to an ordinary ready-made libretto, but to a poem of such excellence that the composer felt it a sacrilege to treat it otherwise than as on an equal footing with the music. This effort to follow with absolute fidelity every word of the book, and to make the note the representative of the word, led to the adoption of a new operatic form, and to the complete abandonment of the traditional soli, duets, choruses, and concerted pieces. In The Stone Guest the singers employ that melos, or mezzo-recitativo, which is neither melody nor speech, but the connecting link between the two. Some will argue, with Serov, that there is nothing original in these ideas; they had already been carried out by Wagner; and that The Stone Guest does not prove that Dargomijsky was an innovator but merely that he had the intelligence to become the earliest of Wagner’s disciples. Nothing could be further from the truth. By 1866 Dargomijsky had some theoretical knowledge of Wagner’s views, but he can have heard little, if any, of his music. Whether he was at all influenced by the former, it is difficult to determine; but undoubtedly his efforts to attain to a more natural and realistic method of expression date from a time when Wagner and Wagnerism were practically a sealed book to him. One thing is certain: from cover to cover of The Stone Guest it would be difficult to find any phrase which is strongly reminiscent of Wagner’s musical style. What he himself thought of Wagner’s music we may gather from a letter written to Serov in 1856, in which he says: “I have not returned your score of “Tannhäuser,” because I have not yet had time to go through the whole work. You are right; in the scenic disposition there is much poetry; in the music, too, he shows us a new and practical path; but in his unnatural melodies and spiciness, although at times his harmonies are very interesting, there is a sense of effort—will und kann nicht! Truth—above all truth—but we may demand good taste as well.”

Dargomijsky was no conscious or deliberate imitator of Wagner. The passion for realistic expression which possessed him from the first led him by a parallel but independent path to a goal somewhat similar to that which was reached by Wagner. But Dargomijsky adhered more closely to the way indicated a century earlier by that great musical reformer Gluck. In doing this justice to the Russian composer, a sense of proportion forbids me to draw further analogies between the two men. Dargomijsky was a strong and original genius, who would have found his way to a reformed music drama, even if Wagner had not existed. Had he been sustained by a Ludwig of Bavaria, instead of being opposed by a Gedeonov, he might have left his country a larger legacy from his abundant inspiration; but fate and his surroundings willed that his achievements should be comparatively small. Whereas Wagner, moving on from strength to strength, from triumph to triumph, raised up incontestable witnesses to the greatness of his genius.

In The Stone Guest Dargomijsky has been successful in welding words and music into an organic whole; while the music allotted to each individual in the opera seems to fit like a skin. “Poetry, love, passion, arresting tragedy, humour, subtle psychological sense and imaginative treatment of the supernatural,[15] all these qualities,” says Stassov, “are combined in this opera.” The chief drawback of the work is probably its lack of scenic interest, a fault which inevitably results from the unity of its construction. The music, thoughtful, penetrative, and emotional, is of the kind which loses little by the absence of scenic setting. The Stone Guest is essentially an opera which may be studied at the piano. It unites as within a focus many of the dominant ideas and tendencies of the school that proceeded from Glinka and Dargomijsky, and proves that neither nationality of subject nor of melody constitutes nationality of style, and that a tale which bears the stamp and colour of the South may become completely Russian, poetically and musically, when moulded by Russian hands. The Stone Guest has never attained to any considerable measure of popularity in Russia. In spite of Dargomijsky’s personal intimacy with his little circle of disciples, in which respect his attitude to his fellow workers was quite different to that of Glinka, the example which he set in The Stone Guest eventually found fewer imitators than Glinka’s ideal model A Life for the Tsar. At the same time in certain particulars, and especially as regards melodic recitative, this work had a decided influence upon a later school of Russian opera. But this is a matter to be discussed in a later chapter.

CHAPTER VI
WORK AND INFLUENCE OF SEROV

GLINKA and Dargomijsky were to Russian music two vitalising sources, to the power of which had contributed numerous affluent aspirations and activities. They, in their turn, flowed forth in two distinct channels of musical tendency, fertilising two different spheres of musical work. Broadly speaking, they stand respectively for lyrical idealism as opposed to dramatic realism in Russian opera. To draw some parallel between them seems inevitable, since together they make up the sum total of the national character. Their influences, too, are incalculable, for with few exceptions scarcely an opera has been produced by succeeding generations which does not give some sign of its filiation with one or the other of these composers. Glinka had the versatility and spontaneity we are accustomed to associate with the Slav temperament; Dargomijsky had not less imagination but was more reflective. Glinka was not devoid of wit; but Dargomijsky’s humour was full flavoured and racy of the soil. He altogether out-distanced Glinka as regards expression and emotional intensity. Glinka’s life was not rich in inward experiences calculated to deepen his nature, and he had not, like Dargomijsky, that gift of keen observation which supplies the place of actual experience. The composer of The Stone Guest was a psychologist, profound and subtle, who not only observed, but knew how to express himself with the laconic force of a man who has no use for the gossip of life.

When Glinka died in 1857, Russian musical life was already showing symptoms of that division of aims and ideals which ultimately led to the formation of two opposing camps: the one ultra-national, the other more or less cosmopolitan. In order to understand the situation of Russian opera at this time, it is necessary to touch upon the long hostility which existed between the rising school of young home-bred musicians, and those who owed their musical education to foreign sources, and in whose hands were vested for a considerable time all academic authority, and most of the paid posts which enabled a musician to devote himself wholly to his profession.

While Dargomijsky was working at his last opera, and gathering round his sick bed that group of young nationalists soon to be known by various sobriquets, such as “The Invincible Band,” and “The Mighty Five,”[16] Anton Rubinstein was also working for the advancement of music in Russia; but it was the general aspect of musical education which occupied his attention, rather than the vindication of the art as an expression of national temperament. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there had been but two musical elements in Russia, the creative and the auditory. In the latter we may include the critics, almost a negligible quantity in those days. At the close of the ’fifties a third element was added to the situation—the music schools. “The time had come,” says Stassov, “when the necessity for schools, conservatoires, incorporated societies, certificates, and all kinds of musical castes and privileges, was being propagated among us. With these aims in view, the services were engaged of those who had been brought up to consider everything excellent which came from abroad, blind believers in all kinds of traditional prejudices. Since schools and conservatoires existed in Western Europe, we, in Russia, must have them too. Plenty of amateurs were found ready to take over the direction of our new conservatoires. Such enterprise was part of a genuine, but hasty, patriotism, and the business was rushed through. It was asserted that music in Russia was then at a very low ebb and that everything must be done to raise the standard of it. With the object of extending the tone and improving the knowledge of music, the Musical Society was founded in 1859, and its principal instrument, the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, in 1862.... Not long before the opening of this institution, Rubinstein wrote an article,[17] in which he deplored the musical condition of the country, and said that in Russia ‘the art was practised only by amateurs’ ... and this at a time when Balakirev, Moussorgsky and Cui had already composed several of their early works and had them performed in public. Were these men really only amateurs? The idea of raising and developing the standard of music was laudable, but was Russia truly in such sore need of that kind of development and elevation when an independent and profoundly national school was already germinating in our midst? In discussing Russian music, the first questions should have been: what have we new in our music; what is its character; what are its idiosyncrasies, and what is necessary for its growth and the preservation of its special qualities? But the people who thought to encourage the art in Russia did not, or would not, take this indigenous element into consideration, and from the lofty pinnacle of the Western Conservatoire they looked down on our land as a tabula rasa, a wild uncultivated soil which must be sown with good seed imported from abroad.... In reply to Rubinstein’s article I wrote:[18] ‘How many academies in Europe are grinding out and distributing certificated students, who occupy themselves more or less with art? But they cannot turn out artists; only people all agog to acquire titles, recognised positions, and privileges. Why must this be? We do not give our literary men certificates and titles, and yet a profoundly national literature has been created and developed in Russia. It should be the same with music.... Academic training and artistic progress are not synonymous terms.... Germany’s noblest musical periods preceded the opening of her conservatoires, and her greatest geniuses have all been educated outside the schools. Hitherto all our teachers have been foreigners brought up in the conservatoires abroad. Why then have we cause to complain of the wretched state of musical education in Russia? Is it likely that the teachers sent out into the world from our future academies will be any better than those hitherto sent to us from abroad? It is time to cease from this importation of foreign educative influences, and to consider that which will be most truly profitable and advantageous for our own race and country. Must we copy that which exists abroad, merely that we may have the satisfaction of boasting a vast array of teachers and classes, of fruitless distributions of prizes and scholarships, of reams of manufactured compositions, and hosts of useless musicians.”[19]

I have quoted these extracts from Stassov’s writings partly for the sake of the sound common-sense with which he surrounds the burning question of that and later days, and partly because his protest is interesting as echoing the reiterated cry of the ultra-patriotic musical party in this country.

Such protests, however, were few, while the body of public enthusiasm was great; and Russian enthusiasm, it may be observed, too often takes the externals into higher account than the essentials. Rubinstein found a powerful patroness in the person of the Grand Duchess Helena Pavlovna; the Imperial Russian Musical Society was founded under the highest social auspices; and two years later all officialdom presided at the birth of its offshoot, the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Most of the evils prophesied by Stassov actually happened, and prevailed, at least for a time. But foreign influences, snobbery, official tyranny and parsimony, the over-crowding of a privileged profession, and mistakes due to the well-intentioned interference of amateurs in high places—these things are but the inevitable stains on the history of most human organisations. What Cheshikin describes as “alienomania,” the craze for everything foreign, always one of the weaknesses of Russian society, was undoubtedly fostered to some extent under the early cosmopolitan régime of the conservatoire; but even if it temporarily held back the rising tide of national feeling in music, it was powerless in the end to limit its splendid energy. The thing most feared by the courageous old patriot, Stassov, did not come to pass. The intense fervour of the group known as “The Mighty Band” carried all things before it. Russian music, above all Russian opera, triumphs to-day, both at home and abroad, in proportion to its amor patriæ. It is not the diluted cosmopolitan music of the schools, with its familiar echoes of Italy, France and Germany, but the folk-song operas in their simple, forceful and sincere expression of national character that have carried Paris, Milan and London by storm.

The two most prominent representatives of the cosmopolitan and academic tendencies in Russia were Anton Rubinstein and Alexander Serov. Both were senior to any member of the nationalist circle, and their work being in many respects very dissimilar in character to that of the younger composers, I propose to give some account of it in this and the following chapter, before passing on to that later group of workers who made the expression of Russian sentiment the chief feature of their operas.

Alexander Nicholaevich Serov, born in St. Petersburg January 11th, 1820 (O.S.), was one of the first enlightened musical critics in Russia. As a child he received an excellent education. Later on he entered the School of Jurisprudence, where he passed among his comrades as “peculiar,” and only made one intimate friend. This youth—a few years his junior—was Vladimir Stassov, destined to become a greater critic than Serov himself. Stassov, in his “Reminiscences of the School of Jurisprudence,” has given a most interesting account of this early friendship, which ended in something like open hostility when in later years the two men developed into the leaders of opposing camps. When he left the School of Jurisprudence in 1840, Serov had no definite views as to his future, only a vague dreamy yearning for an artistic career. At his father’s desire he accepted a clerkship in a Government office, which left him leisure for his musical pursuits. At that time he was studying the violoncello. Gradually he formed, if not a definite theory of musical criticism, at least strong individual proclivities. He had made some early attempts at composition, which did not amount to much more than improvisation. Reading his letters to Stassov, written at this early period of his career, it is evident that joined to a vast, but vague, ambition was the irritating consciousness of a lack of genuine creative inspiration.

In 1842 Serov became personally acquainted with Glinka, and although he was not at that period a fervent admirer of this master, yet personal contact with him gave the younger man his first impulse towards more serious work. He began to study A Life for the Tsar with newly opened eyes, and became enthusiastic over this opera, and over some of Glinka’s songs. But when in the autumn of the same year Russlan and Liudmilla was performed for the first time, his enthusiasm seems to have received a check. He announced to Stassov his intention of studying this opera more seriously, but his views of it, judging from what he has written on the subject, remain after all very superficial. All that was new and lofty in its intention seems to have passed clean over his head. His criticism is interesting as showing how indifferent he was at that time to the great musical movement which Wagner was leading in Western Europe, and to the equally remarkable activity which Balakirev was directing in Russia. He was, indeed, still in a phase of Meyerbeer worship.

In 1843 Serov began to think of composing an opera. He chose the subject of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” but hardly had he made his first essays, when his musical schemes were cut short by his transference from St. Petersburg to the dull provincial town of Simferopol. Here he made the acquaintance of the revolutionary Bakounin, who had not yet been exiled to Siberia. The personality of Bakounin made a deep impression upon Serov, as it did later upon Wagner. Under his influence Serov began to take an interest in modern German philosophy and particularly in the doctrines of Hegel. As his intellect expanded, the quality of his musical ideas improved. They showed greater independence, but it was an acquired originality rather than innate creative impulse. He acquired the theory of music with great difficulty, and being exceedingly anxious to master counterpoint, Stassov introduced him by letter to the celebrated theorist Hunke, then residing in St. Petersburg. Serov corresponded with Hunke, who gave him some advice, but the drawbacks of a system of a college by post were only too obvious to the eager but not very brilliant pupil, separated by two thousand versts from his teacher. At this time he was anxious to throw up his appointment and devote himself entirely to music, but his father sternly discountenanced what he called “these frivolous dreams.”

It was through journalism that Serov first acquired a much desired footing in the musical world. At the close of the ’forties musical criticism in Russia had touched its lowest depths. The two leading men of the day, Oulibishev and Lenz, possessed undoubted ability, but had drifted into specialism, the one as the panegyrist of Mozart, the other of Beethoven. Moreover both of them published their works in German. All the other critics of the leading journals were hardly worthy of consideration. These were the men whom Moussorgsky caricatured in his satirical songs “The Peepshow” and “The Classicist.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Serov’s first articles, which appeared in the “Contemporary” in 1851, should have created a sensation in the musical world. We have seen that his literary equipment was by no means complete, that his convictions were still fluctuant and unreliable; but he was now awake to the movements of the time, and joined to a cultivated intelligence a “wit that fells you like a mace.” His early articles dealt with Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Spontini, and in discussing the last-named, he explained and defended the historical ideal of the music-drama. Considering that at that time Serov was practically ignorant of Wagner’s work, the conclusions which he draws do credit to his foresight and reflection.

As I am considering Serov rather as a composer than as a critic, I need not dwell at length upon this side of his work. Yet it is almost impossible to avoid reference to that long and bitter conflict which he waged with one whom, in matters of Russian art and literature, I must regard as my master. The writings of Serov, valuable as they were half a century ago, because they set men thinking, have now all the weakness of purely subjective criticism. He was inconstant in his moods, violent in his prejudices, and too often hasty in his judgments, and throughout the three weighty volumes which represent his collected works, there is no vestige of orderly method, nor of a reasoned philosophy of criticism. The novelty of his style, the prestige of his personality, and perhaps we must add the deep ignorance of the public he addressed, lent a kind of sacerdotal authority to his utterances. But, like other sacerdotal divulgations, they did not always tend to enlightenment and liberty of conscience. With one hand Serov pointed to the great musical awakening in Western Europe; with the other he sought persistently to blind Russians to the important movement that was taking place around them. In 1858 Serov returned from a visit to Germany literally hypnotised by Wagner. To quote his own words: “I am now Wagner mad. I play him, study him, read of him, talk of him, write about him, and preach his doctrines. I would suffer at the stake to be his apostle.” In this exalted frame of mind he returned to a musical world of which Rubinstein and Balakirev were the poles, which revolved on the axis of nationality. In this working, practical world, busy with the realisation of its own ideals and the solution of its own problems, there was, as yet, no place for Wagnerism. And well it has proved for the development of music in Europe that the Russians chose, at that time, to keep to the high road of musical progress with Liszt and Balakirev, rather than make a rush for the cul-de-sac of Wagnerism. Serov had exasperated the old order of critics by his justifiable attacks on their sloth and ignorance; had shown an ungenerous depreciation of Balakirev and his school, and adopted a very luke-warm attitude towards Rubinstein and the newly-established Musical Society. Consequently, he found himself now in an isolated position. Irritated by a sense of being “sent to Coventry,” he attacked with extravagant temper the friend of years in whom, as the champion of nationality, he imagined a new enemy. The long polemic waged between Serov and Stassov is sometimes amusing, and always instructive; but on the whole I should not recommend it as light literature. Serov lays on with bludgeon and iron-headed mace; Stassov retaliates with a two-edged sword. The combatants are not unfairly matched, but Stassov’s broader culture keeps him better armed at all points, and he represents, to my mind, the nobler cause.

When Serov the critic felt his hold on the musical world growing slacker, Serov the composer determined to make one desperate effort to recover his waning influence. He was now over forty years of age, and the great dream of his life—the creation of an opera—was still unrealised. Having acquired the libretto of Judith, he threw himself into the work of composition with an energy born of desperation. There is something fine in the spectacle of this man, who had no longer the confidence and elasticity of youth, carrying his smarting wounds out of the literary arena, and replying to the taunts of his enemies, “show us something better than we have done,” with the significant words “wait and see.” Serov, with his extravagances and cocksureness of opinion, has never been a sympathetic character to me; but I admire him at this juncture. At first, the mere technical difficulties of composition threatened to overwhelm him. The things which should have been learnt at twenty were hard to acquire in middle-life. But with almost superhuman energy and perseverance he conquered his difficulties one by one, and in the spring of 1862 the opera was completed.

Serov had many influential friends in aristocratic circles, notably the Grand Duchess Helena Pavlovna, who remained his generous patroness to the last. On this occasion, thanks to the good offices of Count Adelberg, he had not, like so many of his compatriots, to wait an indefinite period before seeing his opera mounted. In March 1863 Wagner visited St. Petersburg, and Serov submitted to him the score of Judith. Wagner was particularly pleased with the orchestration, in which he cannot have failed to see the reflection of his own influence.

The idea of utilising Judith as the subject for an opera was suggested to Serov by K. I. Zvantsiev, the translator of some of the Wagnerian operas, after the two friends had witnessed a performance of the tragedy “Giuditta,” with Ristori in the leading part. At first Serov intended to compose to an Italian libretto, but afterwards Zvantsiev translated into the vernacular, and partially remodelled, Giustiniani’s original text. After a time Zvantsiev, being doubtful of Serov’s capacity to carry through the work, left the libretto unfinished, and it was eventually completed by a young amateur, D. Lobanov.

The opera was first performed in St. Petersburg on May 16th, 1862 (O.S.). The part of Judith was sung by Valentina Bianchi, that of Holofernes by Sariotti. The general style of Judith recalls that of “Tannhäuser,” and of “Lohengrin,” with here and there some reminiscences of Meyerbeer. The opera is picturesque and effective, although the musical colouring is somewhat coarse and flashy. Serov excels in showy scenic effects, but we miss the careful attention to detail, and the delicate musical treatment characteristic of Glinka’s work, qualities which are carried almost to a defect in some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas. But the faults which are visible to the critic seemed virtues to the Russian public, and Judith enjoyed a popular success rivalling even that of A Life for the Tsar. The staging, too, was on a scale of magnificence hitherto unknown in the production of national opera. The subject of Judith and Holofernes is well suited to Serov’s opulent and sensational manner. It is said that the scene in the Assyrian camp, where Holofernes is depicted surrounded by all the pomp and luxury of an oriental court, was the composer’s great attraction to the subject; the music to this scene was written by him before all the rest of the opera, and it is considered one of the most successful numbers in the work. The chorus and dances of the Odalisques are full of the languor of Eastern sentiment. The March of Holofernes, the idea of which is probably borrowed from Glinka’s March of Chernomor in Russlan and Liudmilla, is also exceedingly effective; for whatever we may think of the quality of that inspiration, which for over twenty years refused to yield material for the making of any important musical work, there is no doubt that Serov had now acquired from the study of Wagner a remarkable power of effective orchestration. Altogether, when we consider the circumstances under which it was created, we can only be surprised to find how little Judith smells of the lamp. We can hardly doubt that the work possesses intrinsic charms and qualities, apart from mere external glitter, when we see how it fascinated not only the general public, but many of the young musical generation, of whom Tchaikovsky was one. Although in later years no one saw more clearly the defects and makeshifts of Serov’s style, he always spoke of Judith as “one of his first loves in music.” “A novice of forty-three,” he wrote, “presented the public of St. Petersburg with an opera which in every respect must be described as beautiful, and shows no indications whatever of being the composer’s first work. The opera has many good points. It is written with unusual warmth and sometimes rises to great emotional heights. Serov, who had hitherto been unknown, and led a very humble life, became suddenly the hero of the hour, the idol of a certain set, in fact a celebrity. This unexpected success turned his head and he began to regard himself as a genius. The childishness with which he sings his own praises in his letters is quite remarkable. And Serov had actually proved himself a gifted composer but not a genius of the first order.” It would be easy to find harsher critics of Serov’s operas than Tchaikovsky, but his opinion reflects on the whole that of the majority of those who had felt the fascination of Judith and been disillusioned by the later works.

If Judith had remained the solitary and belated offspring of Serov’s slow maturity it is doubtful whether his reputation would have suffered. But there is no age at which a naturally vain man cannot be intoxicated by the fumes of incense offered in indiscriminate quantities. The extraordinary popular success of Judith showed Serov the short cut to fame. The autumn of the same year which witnessed its production saw him hard at work upon a second opera. The subject of Rogneda is borrowed from an old Russian legend dealing with the time of Vladimir, “the Glorious Sun,” at the moment of conflict between Christianity and Slavonic paganism. Rogneda was not written to a ready-made libretto, but, in Serov’s own words, to a text adapted piecemeal “as necessary to the musical situations.” It was completed and staged in the autumn of 1865. We shall look in vain in Rogneda for the higher purpose, the effort at psychological delineation, the comparative solidity of workmanship which we find in Judith. Nevertheless the work amply fulfilled its avowed intention to take the public taste by storm. Once more I will quote Tchaikovsky, who in his writings has given a good deal of space to the consideration of Serov’s position in the musical world of Russia. He says: “The continued success of Rogneda, and the firm place it holds in the Russian repertory, is due not so much to its intrinsic beauty as to the subtle calculation of effects which guided its composer.... The public of all nations are not particularly exacting in the matter of æsthetics; they delight in sensational effects and violent contrasts, and are quite indifferent to deep and original works of art unless the mise-en-scène is highly coloured, showy, and brilliant. Serov knew how to catch the crowd; and if his opera suffers from poverty of melodic inspiration, want of organic sequence, weak recitative and declamation, and from harmony and instrumentation which are crude and merely decorative in effect—yet what sensational effects the composer succeeds in piling up! Mummers who are turned into geese and bears; real horses and dogs, the touching episode of Ruald’s death, the Prince’s dream made actually visible to our eyes; the Chinese gongs made all too audible to our ears, all this—the outcome of a recognised poverty of inspiration—literally crackles with startling effects. Serov, as I have said, had only a mediocre gift, united to great experience, remarkable intellect, and extensive erudition; therefore it is not surprising to find in Rogneda numbers—rare oases in a desert—in which the music is excellent. As to these numbers which are special favourites with the public, as is so frequently the case, their real value proves to be in inverse ratio to the success they have won.”

Some idea of the popularity of Rogneda may be gathered from the fact that the tickets were subscribed for twenty representations in advance. This success was followed by a pause in Serov’s literary and musical activity. He could now speak with his enemies in the gate, and point triumphantly to the children of his imagination. Success, too, seems to have softened his hostility to the national school, for in 1866 he delivered some lectures before the Musical Society upon Glinka and Dargomijsky, which are remarkable not only for clearness of exposition, but for fairness of judgment.

In 1867 Serov began to consider the production of a third opera, and selected one of Ostrovsky’s plays on which he founded a libretto entitled The Power of Evil. Two quotations from letters written about this time reveal his intention with regard to the new opera. “Ten years ago,” he says, “I wrote much about Wagner. Now it is time to act. To embody the Wagnerian theories in a music-drama written in Russian, on a Russian subject.” And again: “In this work, besides observing as far as possible the principles of dramatic truth, I aim at keeping more closely than has yet been done to the forms of Russian popular music, as preserved unchanged in our folk-songs. It is clear that this demands a style which has nothing in common with the ordinary operatic forms, nor even with my two former operas.” Here we have Serov’s programme very clearly put before us: the sowing of Wagnerian theories in Russian soil. But in order that the acclimatisation may be complete, he adopts the forms of the folk-songs. He is seeking, in fact, to fuse Glinka and Wagner, and produce a Russian music-drama. Serov was a connoisseur of the Russian folk-songs, but he had not that natural gift for assimilating the national spirit and breathing it back into the dry bones of musical form as Glinka did. In creating this Russo-Wagnerian work, Serov created something purely artificial: a hybrid, which could bring forth nothing in its turn. It is characteristic, too, of Serov’s short-sighted egotism that we find him constantly referring to this experiment of basing an opera upon the forms of the national music as a purely original idea; ignoring the fact that Glinka, Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky had all produced similar works, and that the latter had undoubtedly written “music-dramas,” which, though not strictly upon Wagnerian lines, were better suited to the genius of the nation.

Ostrovsky’s play,[20] upon which The Power of Evil is founded, is a strong and gloomy drama of domestic life. A merchant’s son abducts a girl from her parents, and has to atone by marrying her. He soon wearies of enforced matrimony and begins to amuse himself away from home. One day while drinking at an inn he sees a beautiful girl and falls desperately in love with her. The neglected wife discovers her husband’s infidelity, and murders him in a jealous frenzy. The story sounds as sordid as any of those one-act operas so popular with the modern Italian composers of sensational music-drama. But in the preparation of the libretto Serov had the co-operation of the famous dramatist Ostrovsky, who wrote the first three acts of the book himself. Over the fourth act a split occurred between author and composer; the former wished to introduce a supernatural element, recalling the village festival in “Der Freischütz” into the carnival scene; but Serov shrank from treating a fantastic episode. The book was therefore completed by an obscure writer, Kalashinkev. Thus the lofty literary treatment by which Ostrovsky sought to raise the libretto above the level of a mere “shocker” suffered in the course of its transformation. The action of the play takes place at carnival time, which gives occasion for some lively scenes from national life. The work never attained the same degree of popularity as Judith or Rogneda. Serov died rather suddenly of heart disease in January 1871, and the orchestration of The Power of Evil was completed by one of his most talented pupils, Soloviev.

We have read Tchaikovsky’s views upon Serov. Vladimir Stassov, after the lapse of thirty years, wrote in one of his last musical articles as follows: “A fanatical admirer of Meyerbeer, he succeeded nevertheless in catching up all the superficial characteristics of Wagner, from whom he derived his taste for marches, processions, festivals, every sort of ‘pomp and circumstance,’ every kind of external decoration. But the inner world, the spiritual world, he ignored and never entered; it interested him not at all. The individualities of his dramatis personæ were completely overlooked. They are mere marionettes.” His influence on the Russian opera left no lasting traces. His strongest quality was a certain robust dramatic sense which corrected his special tendency to secure effects in the cheapest way, and kept him just on the right side of that line which divides realism from offensive coarseness and bathos.

Two more quotations show an interesting light on Serov. The first is a confession of his musical tastes, written not long before his death: “After Beethoven and Weber, I like Mendelssohn fairly well; I love Meyerbeer; I adore Chopin; I detest Schumann and all his disciples. I am fond of Liszt, with numerous exceptions, and I worship Wagner, especially in his latest works, which I regard as the ne plus ultra of the symphonic form to which Beethoven led the way.”

The second quotation is Wagner’s tribute to the personality of his disciple, and it seems only fair to print it here, since it contradicts almost all the views of Serov as a man which we find in the writings of his contemporaries in Russia. “For me Serov is not dead,” says Wagner; “for me he still lives actually and palpably. Such as he was to me, such he remains and ever will: the noblest and highest-minded of men. His gentleness of soul, his purity of feeling, his serenity, his mind, which reflected all these qualities, made the friendship which he cherished for me one of the gladdest gifts of my life.”

CHAPTER VII
ANTON RUBINSTEIN

ANTON GRIGORIEVICH RUBINSTEIN was born November 16/28, 1829, in the village of Vykhvatinets, in the government of Podolia. He was of Jewish descent, his father being, however, a member of the Orthodox Church, while his mother—a Löwenstein—came from Prussian Silesia. Shortly after Anton’s birth his parents removed to Moscow, in the neighbourhood of which his father set up a factory for lead pencils and pins. Anton, and his almost equally gifted brother Nicholas, began to learn the piano with their mother, and afterwards the elder boy received instruction from A. Villoins, a well-known teacher in Moscow. At ten years of age Anton made his first public appearance at a summer concert given in the Petrovsky Park, and the following year (1840) he accompanied Villoins to Paris with the intention of entering the Conservatoire. This project was not realised and the boy started upon an extensive tour as a prodigy pianist. In 1843 he was summoned to play to the Court in St. Petersburg, and afterwards gave a series of concerts in that city. The following year he began to study music seriously in Berlin, where his mother took him first to Mendelssohn and, acting on his advice, subsequently placed him under Dehn. The Revolution of 1848 interrupted the ordinary course of life in Berlin. Dehn, as one of the National Guard, had to desert his pupils, shoulder a musket and go on duty as a sentry before some of the public buildings, performing this task with a self-satisfied air, “as though he had just succeeded in solving some contrapuntal problem, such as a canon by retrogression.” Rubinstein hastened back to Russia, having all his music confiscated at the frontier, because it was taken for some diplomatic cipher.

Soon after his return, the Grand Duchess Helena Pavlovna appointed Rubinstein her Court pianist and accompanist, a position which he playfully described as that of “musical stoker” to the Court. In April 1852 his first essay in opera, Dmitri Donskoi (Dmitri of the Don), the libretto by Count Sollogoub, was given in St. Petersburg, but its reception was disappointing. It was followed, in May 1853, by Thomouska-Dourachok (Tom the Fool), which was withdrawn after the third performance at the request of the composer, who seems to have been hurt at the lack of enthusiasm shown for his work. Two articles from his pen which appeared in the German papers, and are quoted by Youry Arnold in his “Reminiscences,” show the bitterness of his feelings at this time. “No one in his senses,” he wrote, “would attempt to compose a Persian, a Malay, or a Japanese opera; therefore to write an English, French or Russian opera merely argues a want of sanity. Every attempt to create a national musical activity is bound to lead to one result—disaster.”

Between the composition of the Dmitri Donskoi and Tom the Fool, Rubinstein’s amazingly active pen had turned out two one-act operas to Russian words: Hadji-Abrek and Sibirskie Okhotniki (The Siberian Hunters). But now he laid aside composition for a time and undertook a long concert tour, starting in 1856 and returning to Russia in 1858. During this tour[21] he visited Nice, where the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Grand Duchess Helena spent the winter of 1856-1857, and it seems probable that this was the occasion on which the idea of the Imperial Russian Musical Society[22] was first mooted, although the final plans may have been postponed until Rubinstein’s return to Petersburg in 1858. Little time was lost in any case, for the society was started in 1859, and the Moscow branch, under the direction of his brother Nicholas, was founded in 1860.

Piqued by the failure of his Russian operas, Rubinstein now resolved to compose to German texts and to try his luck abroad. Profiting by his reputation as the greatest of living pianists, he succeeded in getting his Kinder der Heide accepted in Vienna (1861); while Dresden mounted his Feramors (based upon Moore’s “Lalla Rookh”) in 1863. Between two concert tours—one in 1867, and the other, with Wienawski in America, in 1872—Rubinstein completed a Biblical opera The Tower of Babel, the libretto by Rosenburg. This type of opera he exploited still further in The Maccabees (Berlin, 1875) and Paradise Lost, a concert performance of which took place in Petersburg in 1876. Between the completion of these sacred operas, he returned to a secular and national subject, drawn from Lermontov’s poem “The Demon,” which proved to be the most popular of his works for the stage. The Demon was produced in St. Petersburg on January 13th (O.S.), and a more detailed account of it will follow. Nero was brought out in Hamburg in 1875, and in Berlin in 1879. After this Rubinstein again reverted to a Russian libretto, this time based upon Lermontov’s metrical tale The Merchant Kalashnikov, but the opera was unfortunate, being performed only twice, in 1880 and 1889, and withdrawn from the repertory on each occasion in consequence of the action of the censor. The Shulamite, another Biblical opera, dates from 1880 (Hamburg, 1883), and a comic opera, Der Papagei, was produced in that city in 1884. Goriousha, a Russian opera on the subject of one of Averkiev’s novels, was performed at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in the autumn of 1889, when Rubinstein celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his artistic career.

The famous series of “Historical Concerts,” begun in Berlin in October, 1885, was concluded in London in May, 1886, after which Rubinstein returned to St. Petersburg and resumed his duties as Director of the Conservatoire, a position which he had relinquished since 1867. During the next few years he composed the Biblical operas Moses (Paris, 1892) and Christus, a concert performance of which was given under his own direction at Stuttgart, in 1893; the first stage performance following in 1895, at Bremen.

In the winter of 1894 Rubinstein became seriously ill in Dresden, and, feeling that his days were numbered, he returned in haste to his villa at Peterhof. He lingered several months and died of heart disease in November 1895. “His obsequies were solemnly carried out,” says Rimsky-Korsakov.[23] “His coffin was placed in the Ismailovsky Cathedral, and musicians watched by it day and night. Liadov and I were on duty from 2 to 3 a.m. I remember in the dim shadows of the church seeing the black, mourning figure of Maleziomova[24] who came to kneel by the dust of the adored Rubinstein. There was something fantastic about the scene.”

With Rubinstein’s fame as a pianist, the glamour of which still surrounds his name, with his vast output of instrumental music, good, bad and indifferent, I have no immediate concern. Nor can I linger to pay more than a passing tribute to his generous qualities as a man. His position as a dramatic composer and his influence on the development of Russian opera are all I am expected to indicate here. This need not occupy many pages, since his influence is in inverse ratio to the voluminous outpourings of his pen. Rubinstein’s ideal oscillates midway between national and cosmopolitan tendencies. The less people have penetrated into the essential qualities of Russian music, the more they are disposed to regard him as typically Russian; whereas those who are most sensitive to the vibrations of Russian sentiment will find little in his music to awaken their national sympathies. The glibness with which he spun off music now to Russian, now to German texts, and addressed himself in turn to either public, proves that he felt superficially at ease with both idioms. It suggests also a kind of ready opportunism which is far from admirable. His attack on the national ideal in music, when he failed to impress the public with his Dmitri Donskoi, and his rapid change of front when Dargomijsky and the younger school had compelled the public to show some interest in Russian opera, will not easily be forgiven by his compatriots. We have seen how he fluctuated between German and Russian opera, and there is no doubt that this diffusion of his ideals and activities, coupled with a singular lack of self-criticism, is sufficient to account for the fact that of his operas—about nineteen in all[25]—scarcely one has survived him. Let a Russian pass judgment upon Rubinstein’s claims to be regarded as a national composer. Cheshikin, who divides his operas into two groups, according as they are written to German or Russian librettos, sums up the general characteristics of the latter as follows:

“Rubinstein’s style bears a cosmopolitan stamp. He confused nationality in music with a kind of dry ethnography, and thought the question hardly worth a composer’s study. A passage which occurs in his ‘Music and its Representatives’ (Moscow, 1891) shows his views on this subject. ‘It seems to me,’ he writes, ‘that the national spirit of a composer’s native land must always impregnate his works, even when he lives in a strange land and speaks its language. Look for instance at Handel, Gluck and Mozart. But there is a kind of premeditated nationalism now in vogue. It is very interesting, but to my mind it cannot pretend to awaken universal sympathies, and can merely arouse an ethnographical interest. This is proved by the fact that a melody that will bring tears to the eyes of a Finlander will leave a Spaniard cold; and that a dance rhythm that would set a Hungarian dancing would not move an Italian.’ Rubinstein [comments Cheshikin], is presuming that the whole essence of nationality in music lies not in the structure of melody, or in harmony, but in a dance rhythm. It is not surprising that holding these superficial views his operas based on Russian life are not distinguished for their musical colour, and that he is only unconsciously and instinctively successful when he uses the oriental colouring which is in keeping with his descent. He cultivated the commonly accepted forms of melodic opera which were the fashion in the first half of the nineteenth century. His musical horizon was bounded by Meyerbeer. He held Wagner in something like horror, and kept contemptuous silence about all the Russian composers who followed Glinka. This may be partly explicable on the ground of his principles, which did not admit the claims of declamatory opera; but it was partly a policy of tit for tat, because Serov and ‘the mighty band’ had trounced Rubinstein unsparingly during the ’sixties for his Teutonic tendencies in his double capacity as head of the I. R. M. S. and Director of the Conservatoire. Narrow and conventional forms, especially as regards his arias; melody as the sole ideal in opera; an indeterminate cosmopolitan style, and now and again a successful reflection of the oriental spirit—these are the distinguishing characteristics of all Rubinstein’s Russian operas from Dmitri Donskoi to Goriousha.”[26]

It is impossible to speak in detail of all Rubinstein’s operas. The published scores are available for those who have time and inclination for so unprofitable a study. Such works as Hadji-Abrek, based on Lermontov’s metrical tale of bloodshed and horror; or Tom the Fool, which carries us a little further in the direction of nationalism, but remains a mere travesty of Glinka’s style; or The Tower of Babel; or Nero, are hardly likely to rise again to the ranks of living operatic works. His first national opera Dmitri Donskoi, in five acts, is linked, by the choice of a heroic and historical subject, with such patriotic works as Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Borodin’s Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov (“Ivan the Terrible”); but it never succeeded in gripping the Russian public. The libretto is based on an event often repeated by the contemporary monkish chroniclers who tell how Dmitri, son of Ivan II., won a glorious victory over the Mongolian Khan Mamaï at Kulikovo, in 1380, and freed Russia for the time being from the Tatar yoke. Youry Arnold, comparing Rubinstein’s Dmitri Donskoi with Dargomijsky’s early work Esmeralda,[27] finds that, judged by the formal standards of the period, it was in advance of Dargomijsky’s opera as regards technique, but, he says, “the realistic emotional expression and unforced lyric inspiration of Esmeralda undoubtedly makes a stronger appeal to our sympathies and we recognise more innate talent in its author.”

After the failure of Dmitri Donskoi, Rubinstein neglected the vernacular for some years and composed only to German texts. But early in the ’seventies the production of a whole series of Russian operas, Dargomijsky’s The Stone Guest, Serov’s The Powers of Evil, Cui’s William Ratcliff, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov, and Moussorgsky’s Boris Godounov, resuscitated the public interest in the national ideal and Rubinstein was obviously anxious not to be excluded from the movement. His comparative failure with purely Russian subjects, and the knowledge that he felt more at ease among Eastern surroundings, may have influenced his choice of a subject in this emergency; but undoubtedly Lermontov’s poetry had a strong fascination for him, for The Demon was the third opera based upon the works of the Russian Byron. Lermontov’s romanticism, and the exquisite lyrical quality of his verse, which almost suggests its own musical setting, may well have appealed to Rubinstein’s temperament. The poet Maikov took some part in arranging the text for the opera, but the libretto was actually carried out by Professor Vistakov, who had specialised in the study of Lermontov. When The Demon was finished, Rubinstein played it through to “the mighty band” who assembled at Stassov’s house to hear this addition to national opera. It would be expecting too much from human nature to look for a wholly favourable verdict from such a court of enquiry, but “the five” picked out for approval precisely the two numbers that have best withstood the test of time, namely, the Dances and the March of the Caravan which forms the Introduction to the third scene of Act III. As a national composer Rubinstein reached his highest level in The Demon. The work was presented to the English public, in Italian, at Covent Garden, on June 21, 1881, but as it is unknown to the younger generation some account of its plot and general characteristics will not be out of place here.[28]

The Demon, that “sad and exiled spirit,” who is none other than the poet Lermontov himself, thinly veiled in a supernatural disguise, is first introduced to us hovering over the peak of Kazbec, in the Caucasus, gazing in melancholy disenchantment upon the glorious aspects of the world below him—a world which he regards with scornful indifference. The Demon’s malady is boredom. He is a mortal with certain “demoniacal” attributes. Like Lermontov, he is filled with vague regrets for wasted youth and yearns to find in a woman’s love the refuge from his despair and weariness. From the moment he sees the lovely Circassian, Tamara, dancing with her maidens on the eve of her wedding, the Demon becomes enamoured of her, and the first stirrings of love recall the long-forgotten thought of redemption. Tamara is betrothed to Prince Sinodal, who is slain by Tatar brigands on his way to claim his bride in the castle of her father, Prince Gudal. The malign influence of the Demon brings about this catastrophe. In order to escape from her unholy passion for her mysterious lover, Tamara implores her father to let her enter a convent, where she is supposed to be mourning her lost suitor. But even within these sacred precincts the Demon follows her, although not without some twinges of human remorse. For a moment he hesitates, and is on the point of conquering his sinister desire; then the good impulse passes, and with it the one chance of redemption through unselfish love. He meets Tamara’s good angel on the threshold of the convent, and, later on, sees the apparition of the murdered Prince. The Angel does not seem to be a powerful guardian spirit, but rather the weak, tormented soul of Tamara herself. The Demon enters her cell, and there follows the long love duet and his brief hour of triumph. Suddenly the Angel and celestial voices are heard calling to the unhappy girl: “Tamara, the spirit of doubt is passing.” The nun tears herself from the arms of her lover and falls dead at the Angel’s feet. The Demon, baffled and furious, is left gazing upon the corpse of Tamara. In the end the gates of Paradise are opened to her, as to Margaret in “Faust,” because by its purity and self-sacrifice her passion works out its own atonement. But the Demon remains isolated and despairing, “without hope and without love.”

The poem, with its inward drama of predestined passion, unsatisfied yearning and possible redemption through love, almost fulfils the Wagnerian demand for a subject in which emotion outweighs action; a subject so purely lyrical that the drama may be said to be born of music. Cheshikin draws a close emotional parallel between The Demon and “Tristan and Isolde”; but perhaps its spirit might be more justly compared with the romanticism of “The Flying Dutchman.” Musically it owes nothing to Wagner. Its treatment is that of pre-Wagnerian German opera strongly tinged with orientalism. Rubinstein effectively contrasts the tender monotonous chromaticism of eastern music, borrowed from Georgian and Armenian sources, with the more vigorous melodies based on Western and diatonic scales, and, in this respect, his powers of invention were remarkable. Among the most successful examples of the oriental style are the Georgian Song “We go to bright Aragva,” sung by Tamara’s girl friends in the second scene of Act I.; the Eastern melody sung in Gudal’s castle in Act II.; the passing of the Caravan, and the Dance for women in the same act. The Demon’s arias are quite cosmopolitan in character, and the opening chorus of Evil Spirits and forces of Nature, though effective, are not strikingly original. There is real passion in the great love duet in the last act, with its energetic accompaniment that seems to echo the sound of the wild turbulent river that rushes through the ravine below the convent walls.

The Demon met with many objections from the Director of the Opera and the Censor. The former mistrusted novelties, especially those with the brand of nationality upon them, and was alarmed by the cost of the necessary fantastic setting. The latter would not sanction the lamps and ikons in Tamara’s cell, and insisted on the Angel being billed as “a Good Genius.” The singers proved rebellious, and finally it was decided to produce the work for the first time on January 13th, 1875 (O.S.), on Melnikov’s benefit night, he himself singing the title rôle. The other artists, who made up a fine caste, were: Tamara, Mme. Raab; the Angel, Mme. Kroutikov; Prince Sinodal, Komessarievich; Prince Gudal, the veteran Petrov, and the Nurse, Mme. Shreder. The immediate success of The Demon did much to establish Rubinstein’s reputation as a popular composer, and the opera is still regarded as his best dramatic work, although many critics give the palm to The Merchant Kalashnikov, which followed it about five years later.

As I have already said, the fate of this work, based on a purely Russian subject, seems to have been strangely unjust. Twice received with considerable enthusiasm in St. Petersburg, it was quashed by the Censor on both occasions after the first night. The libretto, by Koulikov, is founded on Lermontov’s “Lay of the Tsar Ivan Vassilievich (The Terrible), of the young Oprichnik[29], and the bold merchant Kalashnikov.” The opera is in three acts. In the first scene, which takes place in the Tsar’s apartments, the Oprichniki are about to celebrate their religious service. Maliouta enters with the Tsar’s jester Nikitka, and tells them that the Zemstvo has sent a deputation to the Tsar complaining of their conduct, and that Nikitka has introduced the delegates at Court. The Oprichniki fall upon the jester and insist on his buying their forgiveness by telling them a tale. Nikitka’s recital is one of Rubinstein’s best attempts to reproduce the national colour. Afterwards the Tsar appears, the Oprichniki don their black cloaks and there follows an effective number written in strict church style. The service ended, the Tsar receives the members of the Zemstvo. To this succeeds an animated scene in which Ivan feasts with his guards. Observing that one of them, Kiribeievich, is silent and gloomy, he asks the reason, and the young Oprichnik confesses that he is in love, and sings his song “When I go into the garden,” a Russian melody treated by Rubinstein in a purely cosmopolitan style. The finale of the first act consists of dances by the Skomorokhi and a chorus for the Oprichniki, the music being rather pretentious and theatrical in style. The opening scene of Act II. takes place in the streets of Moscow, and begins with a chorus of the people, who disperse on hearing that the Oprichniki are in the vicinity. Alena, the wife of the merchant Kalashnikov, now comes out of her house on her way to vespers, accompanied by a servant. She sings a quiet recitative in which she tells the maid to go home and await the return of the master of the house, and reveals herself as a happy mother and devoted wife. She goes her way to the church alone, pausing however to sing a pretty, common-place Italianised aria, “I seek the Holy Temple.” Kiribeievich appears on the scene, makes passionate love to her and carries her off. An old gossip who has watched this incident now emerges from her hiding place and sings a song which introduces a touch of humour. Enter Kalashnikov, who learns from her of his wife’s departure with the young Oprichnik; but she gives a false impression of the incident. His recitative is expressive and touching. The scene ends with the return of the populace who sing a chorus. In the second scene Kalashnikov plays an important part and his doubts and fears after the return of Alena are depicted with power. This is generally admitted to be one of Rubinstein’s few successful psychological moments, the realistic expression of emotion being one of his weak points. Kalashnikov’s scene, in which he confers with his brothers, completes Act II. The curtain rises in Act III. upon a Square in Moscow where the people are assembling to meet the Tsar. Their chorus of welcome, “Praise to God in Heaven,” is not to be compared for impressiveness with similar massive choruses in the operas of Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. There are some episodes of popular life, such as the scene between a Tatar and the jester Nikitka, that are not lacking in humour; and the latter has another tale about King David which is in the style of the so-called “spiritual songs” of the sixteenth century. The accusations brought by Kiribeievich are spirited. In a dramatic scene the Tsar listens to Alena’s prayer for mercy, and pardons the bold Kalashnikov who has dared to defy his Pretorian guards, the Oprichniki. The opera winds up with a final chorus of the people who escort the Merchant from prison.

The Merchant Kalashnikov, although somewhat of a hybrid as regards style, with its Russian airs handled à la Tedesca, and its occasional lapses into vulgarity, has at the same time more vitality and human interest than most of Rubinstein’s operas, so that it is to be regretted that it has remained so long unknown alike to the public of Russia and of Western Europe.

Rubinstein’s Biblical operas have now practically fallen into oblivion. Seeing their length, the cost involved in mounting them, and their lack of strong, clear-cut characterisation, this is not surprising. The Acts of Artaxerxes and the Chaste Joseph, presented to the Court of Alexis Mikhaïlovich, could hardly have been more wearisome than The Tower of Babel and The Shulamite. These stage oratorios are like a series of vast, pale, pseudo-classical frescoes, and scarcely more moving than the official odes and eclogues of eighteenth-century Russian literature. Each work, it is true, contains some saving moments, such as the Song of Victory, with chorus, “Beat the drums,” sung by Leah, the heroic mother of the Maccabees, in the opera bearing that title, in which the Hebrew colouring is admirably carried out; the chorus “Baal has worked wonders,” from The Tower of Babel; and a few pages from the closing scene of Paradise Lost; but these rare flashes of inspiration do not suffice to atone for the long, flaccid Handelian recitatives, the tame Mendelssohnian orchestration, the frequent lapses into a pomposity which only the most naïve can mistake for sublimity of utterance, and the fluent dulness of the operas as a whole.

Far more agreeable, because less pretentious, is the early secular opera, a German adaptation of Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” entitled Feramors. The ballets from this opera, the Dance of Bayadères, with chorus, in Act I., and The Lamplight Dance of the Bride of Kashmere (Act II.) are still heard in the concert room; and more rarely, Feramor’s aria, “Das Mondlicht träumt auf Persiens See.” From the dramatic side the subject is weak, but, as Hanslick observes in his “Contemporary Opera”—in which he draws the inevitable parallel between Félicien David and the Russian composer—it was the oriental element in the poem that proved the attraction to Rubinstein. Yet how different is the conventional treatment of Eastern melody in Feramors from Borodin’s natural and characteristic use of it in Prince Igor! But although it is impossible to ignore Rubinstein’s operas written to foreign texts for a foreign public, they have no legitimate place in the evolution of Russian national opera. It is with a sense of relief that we turn from him with his reactionary views and bigoted adherence to pre-Wagnerian conventions, to that group of enthusiastic and inspired workers who were less concerned with riveting the fetters of old traditions upon Russian music than with the glorious task of endowing their country with a series of national operas alive and throbbing with the very spirit of the people. We leave Rubinstein gazing westwards upon the setting sun of German classicism, and turn our eyes eastwards where the dawn is rising upon the patient expectations of a nation which has long been feeling its way towards a full and conscious self-realisation in music.

CHAPTER VIII
BALAKIREV AND HIS DISCIPLES

SOMETIMES in art, as in literature, there comes upon the scene an exceptional, initiative personality, whose influence seems out of all proportion to the success of his work. Such was Keats, who engendered a whole school of English romanticism; and such, too, was Liszt, whose compositions, long neglected, afterwards came to be recognised as containing the germs of a new symphonic form. Such also was Mily Alexevich Balakirev, to whom Russian national music owes its second renaissance. Born at Nijny-Novgorod, December 31st, 1836 (O.S.), Balakirev was about eighteen when he came to St. Petersburg in 1855, with an introduction to Glinka in his pocket. He had previously spent a short time at the University of Kazan, but had actually been brought up in the household of Oulibishev, author of the famous treatise on Mozart. It is remarkable, and testifies to his sturdy independence of character—that the young man had not been influenced by his benefactor’s limited and ultra-conservative views. Oulibishev, as we know, thought there could be no advance upon the achievements of his adored Mozart. Balakirev as a youth studied and loved Beethoven’s symphonies and quartets, Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Mendelssohn’s Overtures and Chopin’s works as a whole. He was by no means the incapable amateur that his academic detractors afterwards strove to prove him. His musical culture was solid. He had profited by Oulibishev’s excellent library, and by the private orchestra which he maintained and permitted his young protégé to conduct. Although partially self-taught, Balakirev had already mastered the general principles of musical form, composition and orchestration. He was not versed in counterpoint and fugue; and certainly his art was not rooted in Bach; but that could hardly be made a matter of reproach, seeing that in Balakirev’s youth the great poet-musician of Leipzig was neglected even in his own land, and it is doubtful whether the budding schools of Petersburg and Moscow, or even the long established conservatoires of Germany, would then have added much to his education in that respect. In his provincial home in the far east of Europe Balakirev stood aloof from the Wagnerian controversies. But his mind, sensitive as a seismograph, had already registered some vibrations of this distant movement which announced a musical revolution. From the beginning he was preoccupied with the question of transfusing fresh blood into the impoverished veins of old and decadent forms. Happily the idea of solving the problem by the aid of the Wagnerian theories never occurred to him. He had already grasped the fact that for the Russians there existed an inexhaustible source of fresh inspiration in their abundant and varied folk-music.

The great enthusiasm of his youth had been Glinka’s music, and while living at Nijny-Novgorod he had studied his operas to good purpose. Filled with zeal for the new cause, Balakirev appeared in the capital like a St. John the Baptist from the wilderness to preach the new gospel of nationality in art to the adorers of Bellini and Meyerbeer. Glinka was on the point of leaving Russia for what proved to be his last earthly voyage. But during the weeks which preceded his departure he saw enough of Balakirev to be impressed by his enthusiasm and intelligence, and to point to him as the continuator of his work.

The environment of the capital proved beneficial to the young provincial. For the first time he was able to mix with other musicians and to hear much that was new to him, both at the opera and in the concert room. But his convictions remained unshaken amid all these novel experiences. From first to last he owed most to himself, and if he soon became head and centre of a new musical school, it was because, as Stassov has pointed out, “he had every gift for such a position: astonishing initiative, love and knowledge of his art, and to crown all, untiring energy.”

Balakirev left no legacy of opera, but his influence on Russian music as a whole was so predominant that it crops up in every direction, and henceforth his name must constantly appear in these pages. Indeed the history of Russian opera now becomes for a time the history of a small brotherhood of enthusiasts, united by a common idea and fighting shoulder to shoulder for a cause which ought to have been popular, but which was long opposed by the press and the academic powers in the artistic world of Russia, and treated with contempt by the “genteel” amateur to whom a subscription to Italian opera stood as the external sign of social and intellectual superiority. It was known as “Balakirev’s set,” or by the ironical sobriquet of “the mighty band.”

At the close of the ’fifties César Cui and Modeste Moussorgsky had joined Balakirev’s crusade on behalf of the national ideal. A year or two later Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov were admitted to the circle; and subsequently a gifted young amateur, Nicholas Lodyjensky, attached himself for a time to the nationalists. To these names must be added that of the writer, Vladimir Stassov, whose active brain and pen were always at the service of the new school. Although Glinka had no further personal intercourse with Balakirev and his friends, Dargomijsky, as we have already seen, gladly opened his house as a meeting place for this group of young enthusiasts, who eagerly discussed questions of art with the older and more experienced musician, and watched with keen interest the growth of his last opera, The Stone Guest.

Rimsky-Korsakov, in his “Chronicle of my Musical Life,” gives some interesting glimpses of the pleasant relations existing between the members of the nationalist circle during the early years of its existence. Rimsky-Korsakov, who was studying at the Naval School, St. Petersburg, made the acquaintance of Balakirev in 1861. “My first meeting with Balakirev made an immense impression upon me,” he writes. “He was an admirable pianist, playing everything from memory. The audacity of his opinions and their novelty, above all, his gifts as a composer, stirred me to a kind of veneration. The first time I saw him I showed him my Scherzo in C minor, which he approved, after passing a few remarks upon it, and some materials for a symphony. He ordained that I should go on with the symphony.[30] Of course I was delighted. At his house I met Cui and Moussorgsky. Balakirev was then orchestrating the overture to Cui’s early opera The Prisoner in the Caucasus. With what enthusiasm I took a share in these actual discussions about instrumentation, the distribution of parts, etc! Through November and December I went to Balakirev’s every Saturday evening and frequently found Cui and Moussorgsky there. I also made the acquaintance of Stassov. I remember an evening on which Stassov read aloud extracts from “The Odyssey,” more especially for my enlightenment. On another occasion Moussorgsky read “Prince Kholmsky,” the painter Myassedov read Gogol’s “Viya,” and Balakirev and Moussorgsky played Schumann’s symphonies arranged for four hands, and Beethoven’s quartets.”

On these occasions the young brotherhood, all of whom were under thirty, with the exception of Stassov, aired their opinions and criticised the giants of the past with a frankness and freedom that was probably very naïve, and certainly scandalised their academic elders. They adored Glinka; regarded Haydn and Mozart as old-fashioned; admired Beethoven’s latest quartets; thought Bach—of whom they could have known little beyond the Well-Tempered Clavier—a mathematician rather than a musician; they were enthusiastic over Berlioz, while, as yet, Liszt had not begun to influence them very greatly. “I drank in all these ideas,” says Rimsky-Korsakov, “although I really had no grounds for accepting them, for I had only heard fragments of many of the foreign works under discussion, and afterwards I retailed them to my comrades (at the Naval School) who were interested in music, as being my own convictions.” From the standpoint of a highly educated musician, a Professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, Rimsky-Korsakov adopts a frankly mocking tone in his retrospective account of these youthful discussions; but it must be admitted that it was far better for the future development of Russian music that these young composers should have thought their own thoughts about their art, instead of taking their opinions ready-made from German text-books and the æsthetic dogmas laid down in the class rooms of the conservatoires.

For Rimsky-Korsakov these happy days were short-lived, for in 1862 he was gazetted to the cruiser “Almaz” and the next three years were spent on foreign service which took him as far afield as New York and Rio Janeiro.

Balakirev was distressed at this interruption to Rimsky’s musical career. If the disciple idealised the master in those days, the latter in his turn treated the young sailor with fraternal affection, declaring that he had been providentially sent to take the place of a favourite pupil who had just gone abroad. A. Goussakovsky was a brilliant youth who had recently finished his course at the university and was specialising in chemistry. He appears to have been a strange, wild, morbid nature. His compositions for piano were full of promise, but he was unstable of purpose, flitted from one work to another and finished none. He did not trouble to write down his ideas, and many of his compositions existed only in Balakirev’s memory. He flashes across this page of Russian musical history and is lost to view, like a small but bright falling star. Rimsky-Korsakov was endowed with far greater tenacity of purpose, and in spite of all difficulties he continued to work at his symphony on board ship and to post it piece by piece to Balakirev from the most out-of-the-way ports in order to have his advice and assistance.

Rimsky-Korsakov came back to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1865 to find that some important changes had taken place in Balakirev’s circle during his absence. In the first place, to the brotherhood was added a new member of whom great things were expected. This was Alexander Borodin, then assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Academy of Medicine. Secondly, Balakirev, in conjunction with Lomakin, one of Russia’s most famous choir trainers, had founded the Free[31] School of Music, a most interesting experiment. It has been said that this institution was established in rivalry with the Conservatoire. The concerts given in connection with it, and conducted by its two initiators, were certainly much less conservative than those of the official organisation of the I. R. M. S. At the same time it must be borne in mind that during the ’sixties there was a great movement “towards the people,” and that an enthusiastic temperament such as Balakirev’s could hardly have escaped the passionate altruistic impulse which was stirring society. Individual effort, long restricted by official despotism, was becoming active in every direction. Between 1860-1870 a number of philanthropic schools were established in Russia, and the Free School, with its avowed aim of defending individual tendencies and upholding the cause of national music, was really only one manifestation of a widespread sentiment.

Other important events which Rimsky-Korsakov missed during his three years’ cruise were the first production of Serov’s opera Judith, and Wagner’s visit to the Russian capital when he conducted the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society.

At this time, with the sole exception of Balakirev, every member of the nationalist circle was earning his living by other means than music. Cui was an officer of Engineers, and added to his modest income by coaching. Moussorgsky was a lieutenant in the Preobrajensky Guards. Rimsky-Korsakov was in the Imperial navy, and Borodin was a professor of chemistry.

Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin soon became intimate, notwithstanding the ten years difference in their ages. The former gives an interesting picture of the composer of Prince Igor, whose life was divided between chemistry and music, to both of which he was sincerely attached. “I often found him at work in his laboratory,” writes Rimsky-Korsakov, “which communicated directly with his dwelling. When he was seated before his retorts, which were filled with colourless gases of some kind, forcing them by means of tubes from one vessel to another, I used to tell him he was spending his time in pouring water into a sieve. As soon as he was free he would take me to his livingrooms and there we occupied ourselves with music and conversation, in the midst of which Borodin would rush off to the laboratory to make sure that nothing was burning or boiling over, making the corridor ring as he went with some extraordinary passage of ninths or seconds. Then back again for more music and talk.” Borodin’s life, between his scientific work, his constant attendance at all kinds of boards and committee meetings,[32] and his musical interests, was strenuous beyond description. Rimsky-Korsakov, who grudged his great gifts to anything but music, says: “My heart is torn when I look at his life, exhausted by his continual self-sacrifice.” He was endowed with great physical endurance and was utterly careless of his health. Sometimes he would dine twice in one day, if he chanced to call upon friends at mealtimes. On other occasions he would only remember at 9 p.m. that he had forgotten to take any food at all during the day. The hospitable board of the Borodins was generally besieged and stormed by cats, who sat on the table and helped themselves as they pleased, while their complacent owners related to their human guests the chief events in the biography of their feline convives. Borodin’s wife was a woman of culture, and an accomplished pianist, who had profound faith in her husband’s genius. Their married life was spoiled only by her failing health, for she suffered terribly from asthma and was obliged to spend most of the winter months in the drier air of Moscow, which meant long periods of involuntary separation from her husband.

Another meeting place of Balakirev’s circle was at the house of Lioudmilla Ivanovna Shestakov, Glinka’s married sister. Here, besides the composers, came several excellent singers, mostly amateurs, including the sisters Karmalina and Mme. S. I. Zotov, for whom Rimsky-Korsakov wrote several of his early songs. Among those who sympathised with the aims of the nationalists were the Pourgold family, consisting of a mother and three daughters, two of whom were highly accomplished musicians. Alexandra Nicholaevna had a fine mezzo-soprano voice with high notes. She sang the songs of Cui, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov with wonderful sympathy and insight, and “created” most of the female parts in the operas of “the mighty band” in the days when they had to be satisfied with drawing-room performances of their works. But her strong point was the interpretation of Moussorgsky’s songs, which was a revelation of the composer’s depth of feeling and close observation of real life and natural declamation. I had the privilege of visiting this gifted woman in later years when she was Mme. Molas,[33] and I can never forget the impression made upon me by her rendering of Moussorgsky’s songs, “The Orphan,” “Mushrooming,” “Yeremoushka’s Cradle Song,” and more especially of the realistic pictures of child-life entitled “The Nursery.” Her sister Nadejda Nicholaevna, who became Mme. Rimsky-Korsakov, was a pupil of Herke and Zaremba, Tchaikovsky’s first master for theory. An excellent pianist and sight-reader, a musician to her finger-tips, she was always available as an accompanist when any new work by a member of the brotherhood needed a trial performance. She was also a skilful arranger of orchestral and operatic works for pianoforte.[34] The Pourgolds were devoted friends of Dargomijsky, and during the autumn of 1868 the entire circle met almost daily at his house, to which he was more or less confined by his rapidly failing health.

I have spoken of so many friends of “the mighty band” that it might be supposed that their movement was a popular one. This was not the case. With the exception of Stassov and Cui, who in their different styles did useful literary work for their circle, all the critics of the day, and the academical powers en bloc, were opposed to these musical Ishmaelites. Serov and Laroche carried weight, and were opponents worth fighting. Theophil Tolstoy (“Rostislav”) and Professor Famitzin, although they wrote for important papers, represented musical criticism in Russia at its lowest ebb, and would be wholly forgotten but for the spurious immortality conferred upon them in Moussorgsky’s musical satire “The Peepshow.” Nor was Anton Rubinstein’s attitude to the new school either just or generous. Tchaikovsky, who, during the first years of their struggle for existence, was occupying the position of professor of harmony at the Moscow Conservatoire, started with more friendly feelings towards the brotherhood. His symphonic poem “Romeo and Juliet” (1870) was written under the influence of Balakirev, and his symphonic poem “The Tempest” (1873) was suggested by Vladimir Stassov. But as time went on, Tchaikovsky stood more and more aloof from the circle, and in his correspondence and criticisms he shows himself contemptuous and inimical to their ideals and achievements, especially to Moussorgsky, the force of whose innate genius he never understood. Throughout the ’sixties, the solidarity between the members of Balakirev’s set was so complete that they could afford to live and work happily although surrounded by a hostile atmosphere. Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Chronicle” of these early days often reminds us of the history of our own pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and we are moved to admire the devotion with which the members worked for one another and for the advancement of their common cause. A more ideal movement it would be difficult to find in the whole history of art, and all the works produced at this time were the outcome of single-minded and clear convictions, uninfluenced by the hope of pecuniary gain, and with little prospect of popular appreciation.

CHAPTER IX
GRADUAL DISSOLUTION OF THE CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

IT is difficult to fix the exact moment at which the little “rift within the lute” became audible in the harmony of Balakirev’s circle. In 1872 Balakirev himself was in full opposition on many points with the policy of the I. R. M. S. and was maintaining his series of concerts in connection with the Free School in avowed rivalry with the senior institution. His programmes were highly interesting and their tendency progressive, but the public was indifferent, and his pecuniary losses heavy. In the autumn of that year he organised a concert at Nijny-Novgorod in which he appeared as a pianist, hoping that for once a prophet might not only find honour but substantial support in his own country. He was doomed to disappointment; the room was empty and Balakirev used to allude to this unfortunate event as “my Sedan.” He returned to St. Petersburg in low spirits and began to hold aloof from his former friends and pupils. Eventually—so it is said—he took a clerkship in the railway service. At this period of his life he began to be preoccupied with those mystical ideas which absorbed him more or less until the end of his days.

After a time he returned to the musical life, and in the letters of Borodin and in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Chronicle” we get glimpses of the old ardent propagandist “Mily Alexe’ich.” From 1867 to 1869 he was Director of the Imperial Chapel. But a few years later he again separated from his circle and this time he shut himself off definitely from society, emerging only on rare occasions to play at some charity concert, or visit the house of one of the few friends with whom he was still in sympathy. It was during these years that I first met him at the Stassovs’ house. So few strangers ever came in contact with Mily Balakirev that I may be excused for giving my own personal impressions of this remarkable man.

From the moment when I first began to study Russian music, Balakirev’s personality and genius exercised a great fascination for me. He was the spark from whence proceeded not only a musical conflagration but the warmth of my own poor enthusiasm. Naturally I was anxious to meet this attractive, yet self-isolated personality. It was an early summer’s evening in St. Petersburg in 1901, and the excuses for the gathering were a birthday in the Stassov family, and the presence of an English enthusiast for Russian music. Balakirev was expected about 9 p.m. Stassov left the grand piano open like a trap set for a shy bird. He seemed to think that it would ensnare Mily Alexe’ich as the limed twig ensnares the bullfinch. The ruse was successful. After greeting us all round, Balakirev gravitated almost immediately to the piano. “I’m going to play three sonatas,” he announced without further ceremony, “Beethoven’s Appassionata, Chopin’s B minor, and Schumann No. 3, in G minor.” Then he began to play.

Balakirev was rather short. I do not know his pedigree, but he did not belong to the tall, fair type of Great Russia. There was to my mind a touch of the oriental about him: Tatar, perhaps, not Jewish. His figure was thickset, but his face was worn and thin, and his complexion brownish; his air somewhat weary and nervous. He looked like a man who strained his mental energies almost to breaking point; but his eyes—I do not remember their colour—were extraordinarily magnetic, full of fire and sympathy, the eyes of the seer and the bard. As he sat at the piano he recalled for a moment my last remembrance of Hans von Bülow. Something, too, in his style of playing confirmed this impression. He was not a master of sensational technique like Paderewski or Rosenthal. His execution was irreproachable, but one did not think of his virtuosity in hearing him play for the first time; nor did he, as I expected, carry me away on a whirlwind of fiery emotion. A nature so ardent could not be a cold executant, but he had neither the emotional force nor the poetry of expression which were the leading characteristics of Rubinstein’s art. What struck me most in Balakirev, and reminded me of Bülow, was the intelligence, the sympathy, and the authority of his interpretations. He observed, analysed, and set the work in a lucid atmosphere. He might have adopted Stendhal’s formula: “Voir clair dans ce qui est.” It would be wrong, however, to think of Balakirev as a dry pedagogue. If he was a professor, he was an enlightened one—a sympathetic and inspired interpreter who knew how to reconstruct in imagination the period and personality of a composer instead of substituting his own.

Having finished his rather arduous but self-imposed programme, we were all afraid that he might disappear as quietly as he came. An inspiration on my part to address him some remarks, in extremely ungrammatical Russian, on the subject of his songs and their wonderful, independent accompaniments, sent him back to the piano, where he continued to converse with me, illustrating his words with examples of unusual rhythms employed in his songs, and gliding half unconsciously into some of his own and other people’s compositions. He could not be persuaded to play me “Islamey,” the Oriental Fantasia beloved of Liszt, but I remember one delicate and graceful valse which he had recently written. By this time the samovar was bubbling on the table and the room was filled with the perfume of tea and lemon. Happily Balakirev showed no signs of departure. He took his place at the table and talked with all his old passion of music in general, but chiefly of the master who had dominated the renaissance of Russian music—Michael Ivanovich Glinka.

Russians love to prolong their hospitality until far into the night. But in May the nights in St. Petersburg are white and spectral. At midnight the world is steeped in a strange light, neither twilight nor dawn, but something like the ghost of the departed day haunting the night that has slain it. Instead of dreams one’s mind is filled with fantastic ideas. As I drove home through the streets, as light as in the daytime, I imagined that Balakirev was a wizard who had carried me back to the past—to the stirring period of the ’sixties so full of faith and generous hopes—so strong was the conviction that I had been actually taking part in the struggles and triumphs of the new Russian school.[35]

After this I never entirely lost sight of Balakirev. We corresponded from time to time and he was always anxious to hear the fate of his music in this country. Unfortunately I could seldom reassure him on this point, for his works have never roused much enthusiasm in the British public. He died on Sunday, May 29th, 1910. I had not long arrived in Petersburg when I heard that he was suffering from a severe chill with serious complications. Every day I hoped to hear that he was on the road to recovery and able to see me. But on the 16th I received from him a few pencilled lines—probably the last he ever wrote—in which he spoke of his great weakness and said the doctor still forbade him to see his friends. From that time until his death, he saw no one but Dimitri Vassileivich, Stassov’s surviving brother, and his devoted friend and pupil Liapounov. He died, as he had lived for many years, alone, except for his faithful old housekeeper. He departed a true and faithful son of the Orthodox Church. In spite of his having spent nearly twenty years of his life in pietistic retirement, the news of his death reawakened the interest of his compatriots. From the time of his passing away until his funeral his modest bachelor apartments could hardly contain the stream of people of all ages and classes who wished to take part in the short services held twice a day in the death chamber of the master. He was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Cemetery, not far from the graves of Dargomijsky, Glinka and Stassov.

The true reason for the loosening of the bonds between Balakirev and his former pupils cannot be ascribed to differences in their religious opinions. It was rather the inevitable result of the growth of artistic individuality. Balakirev could not realise this, and was disenchanted by the gradual neglect of his co-operative ideal. Borodin took a broad and sensible view of the matter in writing to one of the sisters Karmalina in 1876:—“It is clear that there are no rivalries or personal differences between us; this would be impossible on account of the respect we have for each other. It is thus in every branch of human activity; in proportion to its development, individuality triumphs over the schools, over the heritage that men have gathered from their masters. A hen’s eggs are all alike; the chickens differ somewhat, and in time cease to resemble each other at all. One hatches out a dark-plumed truculent cock, another a white and peaceful hen. It is the same with us. We have all derived from the circle in which we lived the common characteristics of genus and species; but each of us, like an adult cock or hen, bears his own character and individuality. If, on this account, we are thought to have separated from Balakirev, fortunately it is not the case. We are as fond of him as ever, and spare no pains to keep up the same relations as before. As to us, we continue to interest ourselves in each other’s musical works. If we are not always pleased it is quite natural, for tastes differ, and even in the same person vary with age. It could not be otherwise.”

The situation was no doubt rendered more difficult by Balakirev’s unaccommodating attitude. “With his despotic character,” says Rimsky-Korsakov, “he demanded that every work should be modelled precisely according to his instructions, with the result that a large part of a composition often belonged to him rather than to its author. We obeyed him without question, for his personality was irresistible.” It was inevitable that, as time went on and the members of “the mighty band” found themselves less in need of guidance in their works than of practical assistance in bringing them before the public, Balakirev’s circle should have become Belaiev’s circle, and that the Mæcenas publisher and concert-giver should by degrees have acquired a preponderating influence in the nationalist school. This change took place during the ’eighties.

Mitrofane Petrovich Belaiev, born February 10th, 1836, was a wealthy timber merchant, with a sincere love of music. He was an exception to the type of the Russian commercial man of his day, having studied the violin and piano in his youth and found time amid the demands of a large business to occupy his leisure with chamber music. My recollections of Belaiev recall a brusque, energetic and somewhat choleric personality of the “rough diamond” type; a passionate, but rather indiscriminate, enthusiast, and an autocrat. Wishing to give some practical support to the cause of national music, he founded a publishing house in Leipzig in 1885 where he brought out a great number of works by the members of the then new school, including a fine edition of Borodin’s Prince Igor. He also founded the Russian Symphony Concerts, the programmes of which were drawn exclusively from the works of native composers. In 1889 he organised the Russian Concerts given with success at the Paris Exhibition; and started the “Quartet Evenings” in St. Petersburg in 1891. Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazounov and Liadov wrote a string quartet in his honour, on the notes B-la-f. Belaiev died in 1904, but the Leipzig house still continues its work under its original manager, Herr Scheffer.

Undoubtedly Belaiev exercised a powerful influence on the destinies of Russian music. Whether he was better fitted to be the central point of its activities at a certain stage of its development than Balakirev is a question which happily I am not called upon to decide. Money and business capacity are useful, perhaps indispensable, adjuncts to artistic progress in the present day, but they can never wholly take the place of enthusiasm and unstinted devotion. “Les choses de l’âme n’ont pas de prix,” says Renan; nevertheless there is a good deal of bidding done for them in this commercial age. It is easy to understand the bitterness of heart with which the other-worldly and unconformable Balakirev saw the members of his school passing one by one into “the circle of Belaiev.” He had steered the ship of their fortunes through the storms and shoals that beset its early ventures; but another was to guide it into the haven of prosperity and renown. Rimsky-Korsakov, in his “Chronicle of my Musical Life,” makes his recantation of old ideals and enthusiasms in the following terms: “Balakirev’s circle was revolutionary; Belaiev’s progressive. Balakirev’s disciples numbered five; Belaiev’s circle was more numerous, and continued to grow in numbers. All the five musicians who constituted the older school were eventually acknowledged as leading representatives of Russian music; the later circle was made up of more varied elements; some of its representatives were men of great creative gifts, others were less talented, and a few were not even composers, but conductors, like Dütsh, or executants like Lavrov. Balakirev’s circle consisted of musicians who were weak—almost amateurish—on the technical side, who forced their way to the front by the sheer force of their creative gifts; a force which sometimes replaced technical knowledge, and sometimes—as was frequently the case with Moussorgsky—did not suffice to cover their deficiences in this respect. Belaiev’s circle, on the contrary, was made up of musicians who were well equipped and thoroughly educated. Balakirev’s pupils did not interest themselves in any music prior to Beethoven’s time; Belaiev’s followers not only honoured their musical fathers, but their remoter ancestors, reaching back to Palestrina.... The relations of the earlier circle to its chief were those of pupils to their teacher; Belaiev was rather our centre than our head.... He was a Mæcenas, but not an aristocrat Mæcenas, who throws away money on art to please his own caprices and in reality does nothing to serve its interests. In what he did he stood on firm and honourable ground. He organised his concerts and publishing business without the smallest consideration for his personal profit. On the contrary, he sacrificed large sums of money, while concealing himself as far as possible from the public eye.... We were drawn to Belaiev by his personality, his devotion to art, and his wealth; not for its own sake but as the means to an end, applied to lofty and irreproachable aims, which made him the central attraction of a new musical circle which had only a few hereditary ties with the original ‘invincible band.’”

This is no doubt a sincere statement of the relations between Belaiev and the modern Russian school, and it is only fair to quote this tribute to his memory. At the same time, when the history of Russian music comes to be written later in the century, both sides of the question will have to be taken into consideration. My own views on some of the disadvantages of the patronage system I have already expressed in the “Edinburgh Review” for July 1912, and I venture to repeat them here:

“He who pays the piper will, directly or indirectly, call the tune. If he be a Mæcenas of wide culture and liberal tastes he will perhaps call a variety of tunes; if, on the other hand, he be a home-keeping millionaire with a narrowly patriotic outlook he will call only for tunes that awaken a familiar echo in his heart. So an edict—maybe an unspoken one—goes forth that a composer who expects his patronage must always write in the ‘native idiom’; which is equivalent to laying down the law that a painter’s pictures will be disqualified for exhibition if he uses more colours on his palette than those which appear in his country’s flag. Something of this kind occurred in the ultra-national school of music in Russia, and was realised by some of its most fervent supporters as time went on. It is not difficult to trace signs of fatigue and perfunctoriness in the later works of its representatives. At times the burden of nationality seems to hang heavy on their shoulders; the perpetual burning of incense to one ideal dulled the alertness of their artistic sensibilities. Less grew out of that splendid outburst of patriotic feeling in the ’sixties than those who hailed its first manifestations had reason to anticipate. Its bases were probably too narrowly exclusive to support an edifice of truly imposing dimensions. Gradually the inevitable has happened. The younger men threw off the restrictions of the folk-song school, and sought new ideas from the French symbolists, or the realism of Richard Strauss. There is very little native idiom, although there are still distinctive features of the national style, in the work of such latter day composers as Scriabin, Tcherepnin and Medtner. The physiognomy of Russian music is changing day by day, and although it is full of interest, one would welcome a development on larger and more independent lines.”

In 1867 Nicholas Lodyjensky joined the circle. He was a young amateur gifted with a purely lyrical tendency, who played the piano remarkably well and improvised fluently. He composed a number of detached pieces and put together some fragments of a symphony and an opera, on the subject of “The False Dimitrius.” Rimsky-Korsakov says his music showed a grace and beauty of expression which attracted the attention of the nationalist group, especially the music for the Wedding Scene of Dimitrius and Marina, and a setting for solo and chorus of Lermontov’s “Roussalka” (The Water Sprite). But Lodyjensky, like Goussakovsky, was a typical dilettante; almost inspired, but unable to concentrate on the completion of any important work. After a time he dropped out of the circle, probably because he had to earn his living in some other way, and the strain of a dual vocation discouraged all but the very strongest musical spirits.[36]

A musician of greater reputation who was partly attached to the nationalists was Anatol Liadov, whose work does not include any operatic composition.

Whatever the changes in the constitution of the nationalist party, Vladimir Stassov remained its faithful adherent through all vicissitudes. Some account of this interesting personality will not be out of place in a history of Russian opera. Vladimir Vassilievich Stassov, who may be called the godfather of Russian music—he stood sponsor for so many compositions of all kinds—was born in St. Petersburg, January 14th, 1825. He originally intended to follow his father’s profession and become an architect. But eventually he was educated at the School of Jurisprudence and afterwards went abroad for a time. He studied art in many centres, but chiefly in Italy, and wrote a few articles during his travels. He returned to St. Petersburg, having acquired a command of many languages and laid the foundation of his wide critical knowledge. For a time he frequented the Imperial Public Library, St. Petersburg, where his industry and enthusiasm attracted the notice of the Director, Baron Korf, who invited him to become his temporary assistant. Subsequently Stassov entered the service of the Library and became head of the department of Fine Arts. This, at least, was his title, although at the time when I knew him his jurisdiction seemed to have no defined limits. A man of wide culture, of strong convictions and fearless utterance, he was a power in his day. Physically he had a fine appearance, being a typical Russian of the old school. The students at the Library used to call him the Bogatyr,[37] or with more irreverence the “Father,” for he might have sat as an ideal model for the conventional representations of the First Person of the Trinity. Stassov’s views on art were always on the large side; but they were sometimes extreme and paradoxical. In polemics his methods were fierce, but not ungenerous. He was a kind of Slavonic Dr. Samuel Johnson, and there were times when one might as well have tried to argue calmly with the Car of Juggernaut. Those who were timid, inarticulate, or physically incapable of sustaining a long discussion, would creep away from his too-vigorous presence feeling baffled and hurt, and nursing a secret resentment. This was unfortunate, for Stassov loved and respected a relentless opponent, and only those who held their own to the bitter end enjoyed the fine experience of a reconciliation with him. And how helpful, considerate and generous he was in dispensing from his rich stores of knowledge, or his modest stores of worldly possessions, there must be many to testify; for his private room at the Public Library was the highway of those in search of counsel or assistance of any kind. He had a remarkable faculty for imparting to others a passion for work, a most beneficial power in the days when dilettantism was one of the worst banes of Russian society. In his home, too, he clung to the old national ideal of hospitality for all who needed it, and no questions asked. With all his rugged strength of character he had moments of childlike vanity when he loved to appear before his admiring guests attired in the embroidered scarlet shirt, wide velveteen knickers and high boots which make up the holiday costume of the Russian peasant; or dressed like a boyard of old. With all this, he was absolutely free from the snobbishness which is sometimes an unpleasant feature of the Russian chinovnik, or official. Naturally many stories were related of Vladimir Stassov, but I have only space for two short anecdotes here. The first illustrates the Russian weakness for hot, and often futile, discussion; the second, Stassov’s enthusiasm for art and indifference to social conventions.

Once he had been arguing with Tourgeniev, whose cosmopolitan and rather supercilious attitude towards the art of young Russia infuriated the champion of nationalism. At last Tourgeniev, wearied perhaps with what he called “this chewing of dried grass,” and suffering acutely from rheumatic gout, showed signs of yielding to Stassov’s onslaughts. “There,” cried the latter triumphantly, “now I see you agree with me!” This acted like the dart planted in the hide of the weary or reluctant bull. Tourgeniev sprang from his chair and shuffled on his bandaged feet to the window, exclaiming: “Agree with you indeed! If I felt I was beginning to think like you, I should fling open the window (here he suited the action to the word) and scream to the passers-by, ‘Take me to a lunatic asylum! I agree with Stassov!!’”

On another occasion “Vladimir Vassilich” returned late one evening from his country cottage at Pargolovo, without troubling to change the national dress which he usually wore there. This costume was looked upon with disfavour in the capital, as savouring of a too-advanced liberalism and sympathy with the people. On arriving home, his family reminded him that Rubinstein was playing that night at a concert of the I. R. M. S. and that by the time he had changed he would be almost too late to hear him. “I cannot miss Rubinstein,” said Vladimir Vassilich, “I must go as I am.” In vain his family expostulated, assuring him that “an exalted personage” and the whole Court would be there, and consequently he must put on more correct attire. “I will not miss Rubinstein,” was all the answer they got for their pains. And Stassov duly appeared in the Salle de la Noblesse in a red shirt with an embroidery of cocks and hens down the front. He was forgiven such breaches of etiquette for the sake of his true nobility and loyalty of heart.

Such was the doughty champion of the nationalists through good and evil fortune. His writings on musical questions form only a small part of his literary output, the result of over sixty years of indefatigable industry; for he was an authority on painting, architecture and design. Like Nestor, the faithful chronicler of mediæval Russia, he worked early and late. He did great service to native art by carefully collecting at the Imperial Public Library all the original manuscript scores of the Russian composers, their correspondence, and every document that might afterwards serve historians of the movement. He was the first to write an important monograph on Glinka, and this, together with his book on Borodin, his exhaustive articles on Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, and his general surveys of musical progress in Russia, are indispensable sources of first-hand information for those who would study the question of Russian music à fonds.[38] As a critic, time has proved that, in spite of his ardent crusade on behalf of modernism and nationality, his judgments were usually sound; as an historian he was painstaking and accurate; as regards his appreciation of contemporary art, he showed a remarkable flair for latent talent, and sensed originality even when deeply overlaid by crudity of thought and imperfect workmanship. He was apparently the first to perceive the true genius and power concealed under the foppishness and dilettantism of Moussorgsky’s early manhood. He considered that neither Balakirev, Cui, nor Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated the composer of Boris Godounov at his full value. He upheld him against all contemptuous and adverse criticism, and the ultimate triumph of Moussorgsky’s works was one of the articles in his artistic creed.

CHAPTER X
MOUSSORGSKY

WE have seen that Glinka and Dargomijsky represented two distinct tendencies in Russian operatic music. The one was lyrical and idealistic; the other declamatory and realistic. It would seem that Glinka’s qualities were those more commonly typical of the Russian musical temperament, since, in the second generation of composers, his disciples outnumbered those of Dargomijsky, who had actually but one close adherent: Modeste Moussorgsky. Cui, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov were all—as we shall see when we come to a more detailed analysis of their works—attracted in varying degrees to melodic and lyric opera. Although in the first flush of enthusiasm for Dargomijsky’s music-drama The Stone Guest—which Lenz once described as “a recitative in three acts”—the younger nationalists were disposed to adopt it as “the Gospel of the New School,” Moussorgsky alone made a decisive attempt to bring into practice the theories embodied in this work. Taking Dargomijsky’s now famous dictum: I want the note to be the direct representation of the word—I want truth and realism, as his starting-point, Moussorgsky proceeded to carry it to a logical conclusion. Rimsky-Korsakov speaks of his having passed through an early phase of idealism when he composed his Fantasia for piano “St. John’s Eve” (afterwards remodelled for orchestra and now known as “Night on the Bare Mountain”), “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” and the song “Night,” to a poem by Poushkin. But although at first he may not have been so consciously occupied in the creation of what Rimsky-Korsakov calls “grey music,” it is evident that no sooner had he found his feet, technically speaking, than he gripped fast hold of one dominant idea—the closer relationship of music with actual life. Henceforward musical psychology became the absorbing problem of his art, to which he devoted himself with all the ardour of a self-confident and headstrong nature. In a letter to Vladimir Stassov, dated October 1872, he reveals his artistic intentions in the following words: “Assiduously to seek the more delicate and subtle features of human nature—of the human crowd—to follow them into unknown regions, and make them our own: this seems to me the true vocation of the artist. Through the storm, past shoal and sunken rock, make for new shores without fear, against all hindrance!... In the mass of humanity, as in the individual, there are always some subtle impalpable features which have been passed by, unobserved, untouched by anyone. To mark these and study them, by reading, by actual observation, by intuition—in other words, to feed upon humanity as a healthy diet which has been neglected—there lies the whole problem of art.” However greatly we may disagree with Moussorgsky’s æsthetic point of view, we must confess that he carried out his theories with logical sequence, and with the unflinching courage of a clear conviction. His operas and his songs are human documents which bear witness to the spirit of their time as clearly as any of the great works of fiction which were then agitating the public conscience. In this connection I may repeat what I have said elsewhere: that “had the realistic schools of painting and fiction never come into being through the efforts of Perov, Repin, Dostoievsky and Chernichevsky, we might still reconstruct from Moussorgsky’s works the whole psychology of Russian life.”[39]

In order to understand his work and his attitude towards art, it is necessary to realise something of the period in which Moussorgsky lived. He was a true son of his time, that stirring time of the ’sixties which followed the emancipation of the serfs, and saw all Russian society agitated by the new, powerful stimulants of individual freedom and fraternal sympathy. Of the little group of musicians then striving to give utterance to their freshly awakened patriotism, none was so passionately stirred by the literary and political movements of the time as this born folk-composer. Every man, save the hide-bound official, or the frivolous imitator of Byron and Lermontov, was asking himself in the title of the most popular novel of the day: “What shall we do?” And the answer given to them was as follows: “Throw aside artistic and social conventions. Bring down Art from the Olympian heights and make her the handmaid of humanity. Seek not beauty but truth. Go to the people. Hold out the hand of fellowship to the liberated masses and learn from them the true purpose of life.” The ultra romanticism of Joukovsky and Karamzin, the affectation of Byronism, and the all too aristocratic demeanour of the admirers of Poushkin, invited this reaction. Men turned with disgust to sincere and simple things. The poets led the way; Koltsov and Nikitin with their songs of peasant life; Nekrassov with his revolt against creeds and social conventions. The prose writers and painters followed, and the new spirit invaded music when it found a congenial soil in Moussorgsky’s sincere and unsophisticated nature. Of the young nationalist school, he was the one eminently fitted by temperament and early education to give expression in music to this democratic and utilitarian tendency; this contempt for the dandyism and dilettantism of the past generation; and, above all, to this deep compassion for “the humiliated and offended.”

Modeste Moussorgsky was born March 16/28, 1839, at Karevo, in the government of Pskov. He was of good family, but comparatively poor. His childhood was spent amid rural surroundings, and not only the music of the people, but their characteristics, good and bad, were impressed upon his mind from his earliest years. He was equally conversant with the folk literature, and often lay awake at night, his youthful imagination over-excited by his nurse’s tales of witches, water-sprites and wood-demons. This was the seedtime of that wonderful harvest of national music which he gave to his race as soon as he had shaken off the superficial influences of the fashionable society into which he drifted for a time. His father, who died in 1853, was not opposed to Modeste’s musical education, which was carried on at first by his mother, an excellent pianist. The young man entered the Preobrajensky Guards, one of the smartest regiments in the service, before he was eighteen. Borodin met him for the first time at this period of his existence and described him in a letter to Stassov as a typical military dandy, playing selections from Verdi’s operas to an audience of appreciative ladies. He met him again two or three years later, when all traces of foppishness had disappeared, and Moussorgsky astonished him by announcing his intention of devoting his whole life to music; an announcement which Borodin did not take seriously at the time. During the interval Moussorgsky had been frequenting Dargomijsky’s musical evenings, where he met Balakirev, under whose inspiring influence he had undergone something like a process of conversion, casting the slough of dandyism, and becoming the most assiduous of workers.

While intercourse with Dargomijsky contributed to the forced maturing of Moussorgsky’s ideas about music, the circumstances of his life still hindered his technical development. But he was progressing. His early letters to Cui and Stassov show how deeply and independently he had already thought out certain problems of his art. Meanwhile Balakirev carried on his musical education in a far more effective fashion than has ever been admitted by those who claim that Moussorgsky was wholly self-taught, or, in other words, completely ignorant of his craft. The “Symphonic Intermezzo,” composed in 1861, shows how insistent and thorough was Balakirev’s determination that his pupils should grasp the principles of tradition before setting up as innovators. Here we have a sound piece of workmanship, showing clear traces of Bach’s influence; the middle movement, founded on a national air, being very original in its development, but kept strictly within classical form. His earliest operatic attempt, dating from his schooldays, and based upon Victor Hugo’s “Han d’Island,” was quite abortive as regards the music. Of the incidental music to “Œdipus,” suggested by Balakirev, we have Stassov’s testimony that a few numbers were actually written down, and performed at some of the friendly gatherings of the nationalist circle; only one, however, has been preserved, a chorus sung by the people outside the Temple of the Eumenides, which does not in any way presage Moussorgsky’s future style.

Faced with the prospect of service in a provincial garrison, Moussorgsky resolved to leave the army in 1859. His friends, and more particularly Stassov, begged him to reconsider his determination; but in vain. He had now reached that phase of his development when he was impatient of any duties which interfered with his artistic progress. Unfortunately poverty compelled him to accept a small post under the government which soon proved as irksome as regimental life. In 1856 he fell ill, and rusticated for a couple of years on an out-of-the-way country property belonging to his brother. During this period of rest he seems to have found himself as a creative artist. After working for a time upon an opera founded upon Flaubert’s novel “Salammbô,” he turned his attention to song, and during these years produced a number of his wonderful vocal pictures of Russian life, in its pathetic and humorous aspects. The music which he composed for Salammbô was far in advance of the Œdipus. Already in this work we find Moussorgsky treating the people, “the human crowd,” as one of the most important elements of opera. “In conformity with the libretto,” says Stassov, “certain scenes were full of dramatic movement in the style of Meyerbeer, evoking great masses of the populace at moments of intense pathos or exaltation.” Much of the music of this opera was utilised in later works. Stassov informs us that Salammbô’s invocation to Tanit is now the recitative of the dying Boris; the opening of the scene in the Temple of Moloch has become the Arioso in the third act of Boris Godounov; while the Triumphal Hymn to Moloch is utilised as the people’s chorus of acclamation to the False Demetrius in the same opera.

Moussorgsky’s next operatic essay took the form which he described as “opera dialogué.” The subject—Gogol’s prose comedy “The Match-Maker”—was admirably suited to him, and he started upon the work full of enthusiasm for the task. His methods are shown in a letter written to César Cui in the summer of 1868, in which he says: “I am endeavouring as far as possible to observe very clearly the changes of intonation made by the different characters in the course of conversation; and made, so it appears, for trifling reasons, and on the most insignificant words. Here, in my opinion, lies the secret of Gogol’s powerful humour.... How true is the saying: ‘the farther we penetrate into the forest the more trees we find!’ How subtle Gogol is! He has observed old women and peasants and discovered the most fascinating types.... All this is very useful to me; the types of old women are really precious.” Moussorgsky abandoned The Match-Maker after completing the first act. This was published by Bessel, in 1911, under the editorship of Rimsky-Korsakov, and contains the following note: “I leave the rights in this work of my pupilage unconditionally and eternally to my dear Vladimir Vassilievich Stassov on this his birthday, January 2nd, 1873. (Signed) Modeste Moussoryanin, alias Moussorgsky. Written with a quill pen in Stassov’s flat, Mokhovaya, House Melnikov, amid a considerable concourse of people.

“The said Moussorgsky.”

Moussorgsky originally designated this work as “an attempt at dramatic music set to prose.” The fragment, with its sincere and forcible declamation, is interesting as showing a phase in the evolution of his genius immediately preceding the composition of Boris Godounov. The four scenes which it comprises consist of conversations on the subject of marriage carried on between four sharply defined and contrasted characters: Podkolessin, a court councillor and petty official in the Civil Service; Kocharev, his friend; Tekla Ivanovna, a professional match-maker, and Stepan, Podkolessin’s servant. Rimsky-Korsakov, who often heard the music sung and played by its author, says in his preface to the work that it should be executed à piacere; that is to say, that for each individual a particular and characteristic tempo must be observed: for Podkolessin—a good-natured, vain and vacillating creature—a slow and lazy time throughout; a more rapid movement for his energetic friend Kocharev, who literally pushes him into matrimony; for the Match-maker a moderate tempo, somewhat restrained, but alert; and for Stepan rather a slow time. Stassov thought highly of this work, and believed that as traditional prejudices vanished, and opera became a more natural form of art, this prose comedy, the music of which fits closely as a glove to every passing feeling and gesture suggested by the text, would come to be highly appreciated.

One more unfinished opera engages our attention before we pass on to consider Moussorgsky’s two masterpieces. Fragments, consisting of an introduction and several “Comic Scenes,” based upon Gogol’s “The Fair at Sorochinsi,” have been recently published by Bessel, with Russian text only. The subject is peculiarly racy and the humour not very comprehensible to those ignorant of Malo-Russian life; but the music, though primitive, is highly characteristic, and may be commended to the notice of all who wish to study Moussorgsky in as full a light as possible.

The idea of basing a music-drama on Poushkin’s tragedy “Boris Godounov” was suggested by Prof. Nikolsky. From September 1868, to June 1870, Moussorgsky was engaged upon this work. Each act as it was finished was tried in a small circle of musical friends, the composer singing all the male rôles in turn, while Alexandra Pourgold (afterwards Mme. Molas) created the women’s parts. Dargomijsky, who heard a portion of it before his death in 1869, declared that Moussorgsky had entirely surpassed him in his own sphere.

Boris Godounov was rejected by the Direction of Imperial Opera on the ground that it gave too little opportunity to the soloists. The unusual form of the opera, the bold treatment of a dramatic, but unpopular, episode in national history, and the democratic sentiment displayed in making the People the protagonist in several scenes of the work, were probably still stronger reasons for the attitude of disapproval always shown by the “powers that be” towards Boris Godounov. Very unwillingly, yielding only to the entreaties of his friends, the composer consented to make some important changes in his work. The original plan of the opera consisted of the following scenes: The crowd awaiting the election of Boris, and his Coronation; Pimen in his cell; the scene in the Inn, on the Lithuanian frontier; Boris and his children, and the interview with Shouisky; the scene in the Duma, and the death of Boris; the peasant revolt, and the entry of the Pretender. It will be seen that the feminine element was curiously neglected. The additional scenes, composed on the advice of Stassov and the distinguished Russian architect V. Hartmann, were partially designed to rectify this omission. They include the scenes in the house of the Polish grandee Mnishek; the song of the Hostess of the Inn; portions of the first scene of Act I.; the episodes of the Chiming Clock and the Parrakeet; also some fine passages in the scene between Pimen and Gregory (Scene I, Act II.). Portions of Boris were given at Kondratiev’s benefit, at the Maryinski Theatre, in February, 1873, but the production of the opera in its entirety was delayed until January 24th, 1874. How often has Stassov described to me the excitement of the days that followed! The old-fashioned subscribers to the Opera sulked at this interruption to its routine; the pedants of the Conservatoire raged; the critics—Moussorgsky had already satirised them in “The Peepshow”—baffled, and consequently infuriated, “foamed at the mouth.” So stupid were the intrigues organised against Boris that some wreaths offered by groups of young people and bearing messages of enthusiastic homage to the composer, were intercepted at the doors of the opera house and sent to Moussorgsky’s private residence, in order to suppress a public recognition of his obnoxious genius. For it was the young generation that took Boris straight to their hearts, and in spite of all organised opposition, the work had twenty performances, the house being always crowded; while students sang the choruses from the opera as they went home through the streets at midnight.

While this controversy was raging, Moussorgsky was already occupied with a new music-drama upon an historical subject, suggested to him by Stassov, dealing with the tragic story of the Princes Khovansky and the rising of the old Archers-of-the-Guard—the Streltsy. He was full of confidence in his project, and just before the first performance of Boris in 1873, wrote to Stassov in the following characteristic strain: “Now for judgment! It is jolly to feel that we are actually thinking of and living for Khovanstchina while we are being tried for Boris. Joyfully and daringly we look to the distant musical horizon that lures us onward, and are not afraid of the verdict. They will say: ‘You are violating all laws, human and divine’; and we shall reply, ‘Yes’; thinking to ourselves, ‘so we shall again.’ They will warn us, ‘You will soon be forgotten for ever and a day’; and we shall answer, ‘Non, non, et non, madame.’” This triumphant moment in Moussorgsky’s life was fleeting. Boris Godounov was not suffered to become a repertory opera, but was thrust aside for long periods. Its subsequent revivals were usually due to some star artist who liked the title-rôle and insisted on performing the work on his benefit night; and also to private enterprise.

In 1871 Moussorgsky shared rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov until the marriage of the latter in 1873. Then he took up his abode with the gifted poet Count Golenishtiev-Koutouzov, whose idealistic and mystical tendencies were not without influence on the champion of realism, as may be seen from the two song-cycles, “Without sunshine” and “Songs and dances of death,” composed to his verses. “The Nursery,” a series of children’s songs, the “Pictures from an exhibition,” inspired by Hartmann’s drawings, and the orchestral piece, “Night on the Bare Mountain,” date from this period. Meanwhile the stress of poverty and the growing distaste for his means of livelihood—a singularly unsuitable official appointment—were telling on his health. Feeling, perhaps, that his time on earth was short, he worked with feverish energy. Finally, some friction with the authorities ended in his resigning his post in 1879, and undertaking a tour in South Russia with the singer, Madame Leonova. The appreciation shown to him during this journey afforded him some moments of happiness; but his constitution was hopelessly shattered, and in 1880 he was obliged to rest completely. A series of terrible nervous attacks compelled him at last to take refuge in the Nicholas Military Hospital, where he died on his forty-second birthday, March 16/28, of paralysis of the heart and the spinal marrow.

The historical drama “Boris Godounov” was one of the fruits of the poet Poushkin’s exile at Mikhaïlovsky in 1824. Virtually imprisoned on his father’s estate to repent at leisure some youthful delinquencies, moral and political, Poushkin occupied his time with the study of Karamzin’s History of Russia and Shakespeare’s plays. “Boris Godounov” marks a transition from the extreme influence of Byron to that of the creator of “Macbeth.” Ambition coupled with remorse is the moving passion of the tragedy. The insane cruelty of Ivan the Terrible deprived Russia of almost every strong and independent spirit with the exception of the sagacious and cautious Boyard, Boris Godounov, the descendant of a Tatar family. Brother-in-law and Regent of Ivan’s weak-witted heir, Feodor, Boris was already, to all intents and purposes, ruler of Russia before ambition whispered that he might actually wear the crown. Only the Tsarevich Dmitri, a child of six, stood between him and the fulfilment of his secret desire. In 1581 Dmitri was murdered, and suspicion fell upon Boris, who cleverly exculpated himself, and in due course was chosen to succeed Feodor. He reigned wisely and with authority; but his Nemesis finally appeared in the person of the monk Gregory, the False Demetrius, whose pretentions were eagerly supported by the Poles. Boris, unhinged by the secret workings of conscience, was brought to the verge of madness just at the moment when the people—who had never quite resigned themselves to a ruler of Tatar origin—wavered in their allegiance. Urged by Rome, the Poles took advantage of the situation to advance upon Moscow. At this critical juncture Boris was seized with a fatal illness. The Tsars, as we know, may appoint their own successors; Boris with his last breath nominated his son (also a Feodor), and died in his fifty-sixth year, in April 1605.

The intellectual power and fine workmanship which Poushkin displayed in “Boris Godounov” entitle this drama to rank as a classic in Russian literature. It contains moments of forcible eloquence, and those portions of the play which deal with the populace are undoubtedly the strongest. Here Poushkin disencumbers himself of all theatrical conventions, and shows not only accurate knowledge of the national temperament, but profound observation of human nature as a whole. Such a subject accorded well with Moussorgsky’s genius, which, as we have seen, was eminently democratic.

Moussorgsky arranged his own text for Boris Godounov, retaining Poushkin’s words intact wherever that was practicable, and simplifying, remodelling, or adding to the original material when necessary. The result is a series of living-pictures from Russian history, somewhat disconnected if taken apart from the music, which is the coagulating element of the work. The welding of these widely contrasting scenes is effected partially by the use of recurrent leading motives, but chiefly by a remarkable homogeneity of musical style. Moussorgsky, as may be proved from his correspondence, was consciously concerned to find appropriate musical phrases with which to accompany certain ideas in the course of opera; but he does not use leading motives with the persistency of Wagner. No person or thing is labelled in Boris Godounov, and we need no thematic guide to thread our way through the psychological maze of the work. There is one motive that plays several parts in the music-drama. Where it occurs on page 49 of the pianoforte score of 1908 (just after Pimen’s words to Gregory: “He would now be your age, and should be Tsar to-day”), it evokes the memory of the murdered Tsarevich Dmitri; but it also enters very subtly into the soul-states of the impostor who impersonates him, and those of the remorseful Boris. There are other characteristic phrases for Boris, suggesting his tenderness for his children and his ruthless ambition.

The opera opens with a prologue in which the people are gathered in the courtyard of the many-towered monastery of Novo-Dievichy at Moscow, whither Boris had withdrawn after the assassination of the Tsarevich. The crowd moves to and fro in a listless fashion; it hardly knows why it is there, but hopes vaguely that the election of a new ruler may bring some amelioration of its sad lot. Meanwhile the astute Boris shows no unseemly haste to snatch at the fruit of his crime. The simplicity and economy of means with which Moussorgsky produces precisely the right musical atmosphere is very striking. The constable enters, and with threats and blows galvanises the weary and indifferent throng into supplications addressed to Boris. The secretary of the Duma appears, and announces that Boris refuses the crown; the crowd renews its entreaties. When the pilgrims enter, the people wake to real life, pressing around them, and showing that their enthusiasm is for spiritual rather than for temporal things. In the second scene, which shows the coronation procession across the Red Square in the Kremlin, the Song of Praise (Slavsia) is sung with infinitely greater heartiness; for now the Tsar comes into personal contact with his people. The scenes of the Prologue and the Coronation move steadily on, just as they would do in real life; there is scarcely a superfluous bar of musical accompaniment, and the ordinary operatic conventions being practically non-existent, we are completely convinced by the realism of the spectacle and the strangely new, undisciplined character of the music. The truth is forcibly brought home to us of M. Camille Bellaigue’s assertion that every collective thought, or passion, needs not only words, but music, if we are to become completely sensible to it.

The text of the opening scene of Act I. is taken almost intact from Poushkin’s drama. Played as it now usually is between the strenuous animation of the Prologue and the brilliant Coronation Scene, its pervading atmosphere of dignity and monastic calm affords a welcome interlude of repose. Moussorgsky handles his ecclesiastical themes with sure knowledge. In early days Stassov tells us that he learnt from the chaplain of the Military Academy “the very essence of the old Church music, Greek and Catholic.” The scene in the Inn, where Gregory and the vagabond monks, Varlaam and Missail, halt on their flight into Lithuania, is often cut out of the acting version. It contains, however, two characteristic and popular solos: a lively folk-song for the Hostess, and a rollicking drinking-song for Varlaam (bass); besides frequent touches of the rough-hewn, sardonic humour which is a distinguishing quality of Moussorgsky’s genius. The unabashed “naturalism” of this scene displeased a fashionable Russian audience; although it was found possible to present it to a London audience which must have travelled much farther from the homely ribaldry of Elizabethan days than had the simple-minded “big public” of Russia to whom Moussorgsky’s work was designed to appeal a generation ago.

With the opening of Act II. we feel at once that Moussorgsky is treading on alien ground. This portion of the opera—for which he was his own librettist—was added in order that some conventional love interest might be given to the work. The glamour of romance is a borrowed quality in Moussorgsky’s art; and, in spite of the charm of the scenic surroundings, and some moments of sincere passion, the weakness of the music proclaims the fact. He who penetrates so deeply into the psychology of his own people, finds no better characterisation of the Polish temperament than the use of the polacca or mazurka rhythms. True, he may intend by these dance measures to emphasise the boastful vanity of the Polish nobles and the light, cold nature of Marina Mnishek; but the method becomes monotonous. Marina’s solo takes this form, and again in the duet by the fountain we are pursued by the eternal mazurka rhythm.

The second scene of Act II. is packed full of varied interest, and in every episode Moussorgsky is himself again. The lively dancing-songs for the young Tsarevich and the Nurse are interrupted by the sudden entry of Boris. In the scene which follows, where the Tsar forgets for a moment the cares of State and the sting of conscience, and gives himself whole-heartedly to his children, there is some exquisitely tender music, and we begin for the first time to feel profound pity for the usurper. The Tsarevich’s recital of the incident of the parakeet, reproducing with the utmost accuracy and transparent simplicity the varied inflections of the child’s voice, as he relates his tale without a trace of self-consciousness, is equal to anything of the kind which Moussorgsky has achieved in “The Nursery” song cycle. This delightful interlude of comedy gives place on the entrance of Shouisky to the first shadows of approaching tragedy. Darker and darker grows the mind of the Tsar, until the scene ends in an almost intolerable crisis of madness and despair. From the moment of Boris’s terrible monologue the whole atmosphere of the work becomes vibrant with terror and pity. But realistic as the treatment may be, it is a realism—like that of Shakespeare or Webster—that is exalted and vivified by a fervent and forceful imagination.

In the opening scene of Act III., enacted amid a winter landscape in the desolate forest of Kromy, Moussorgsky has concentrated all his powers for the creation of a host of national types who move before our eyes in a dazzling kaleidoscopic display. They are not attractive these revolted and revolting peasants, revenging themselves upon the wretched aristocrat who has fallen into their hands; for Moussorgsky, though he raises the Folk to the dignity of a protagonist, never idealises it, or sets it on a pedestal. But our pulses beat with the emotions of this crowd, and its profound groan of anguish finds an echo in our hearts. It is a living and terrible force, and beside it all other stage crowds seem mechanical puppets. In the foreground of this shifting mass is seen the village idiot, ‘God’s fool,’ teased by the thoughtless children, half-reverenced, half-pitied, by the men and women. After the False Demetrius has passed through the forest, drawing the crowd in his wake, the idiot is left sitting alone in the falling snow. He sings his heart-breaking ditty: “Night and darkness are at hand. Woe to Russia!” and the curtain falls to the sound of his bitter, paroxysmal weeping.

The last scene is pregnant with the “horror that awaits on princes.” The climax is built up step by step. After the lurking insanity of Boris, barely curbed by the presence of the Council; after his interview with Pimen, who destroys his last furtive hope that the young Tsarevich may not have been murdered after all; after his access of mental and physical agony, and his parting with his beloved son—it is with a feeling of relief that we see death put an end to his unbearable sufferings.