Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  It would be hard to imagine a situation or characterization that more thoroughly reflected the three terms of Official Nationality. What might have been a good deal less obvious was what kind of music would suit it in the same way. One might idly suppose that some combination of folk song and Orthodox chant would meet the case. But even if such an outlandish concept had occurred to Glinka, it’s hard to see how he could have implemented it on the scale required. Genuine folk tunes, such as had been collected, arranged, and published by Nikolay Lvov and Ivan Prach in 1790, were essentially compact, limited musical objects, ideal for adapting to the needs of comic vaudevilles (rather in the manner of The Beggar’s Opera in London a century earlier), but hardly adequate to the broad canvas and heightened tone of a grand historical drama. As for the music of the Orthodox liturgy, its beauties and limitations may seem familiar to anyone who has stood through any part of a Russian service; but in fact this form of setting was not widely known in the 1830s, which were still dominated liturgically by the Bortnyansky style of unaccompanied classical harmony.

  From the start Glinka seems to have planned Ivan Susanin (as it was originally called) as a musical drama without dialogue, something that, as a matter of fact, no Russian composer had attempted before, even though the operatic repertoire in St. Petersburg in the twenties and thirties offered plenty of foreign models: Glinka records seeing Cherubini’s rescue opera Les Deux Journées and Méhul’s biblical Joseph, among other French works. Later, in Germany, he saw Beethoven’s Fidelio, Weber’s Der Freischütz, Spohr’s Faust, and Cherubini’s Médée (which, however, he could neither understand nor remember). In Italy, he had become intimate with the local version of the unbroken-music formula: aria, ensemble, recitative. In Milan he had attended the premieres of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Bellini’s La sonnambula, theatrically powerful works that at times vary and extend the formula in the direction of seamless musical narrative. He may have wearied of the Italian and French styles, but when it came to operatic modelling on a tragic scale they were what he knew. On the other hand, he had no particular reason to feel restricted by them. His studies with Dehn in Berlin on the way home read now like the dreaded curriculum of a first-year university music student. He spent the five months harmonizing Bach chorales and writing fugues, essentially Teutonic disciplines not much cultivated in the opera houses of Italy, but a valuable resource to a Russian composer seeking to assemble the elements of his musical experience into a new and individual style of his own.

  A composer naturally composes out of his own head, without necessarily weighing up the ingredients that have gone to form his particular mode of expression. He writes what he feels with the largely unconscious help of what he knows. But Glinka’s situation was peculiar. Not only was he attempting a work on a vastly bigger scale than anything he himself had written before, but he was composing something that was completely outside the framework of what his audience would expect. Foreign touring operatic companies were a familiar part of the St. Petersburg landscape, and since their repertoire was in general contemporary, Petersburg audiences were reasonably au courant with the styles of opera being turned out in Paris, Italy, and Germany. Glinka could hardly evade such models, which were equally part of his own mental furniture. Yet at the same time he had to Russify them, both for the benefit of his subject matter and for the good of his soul. The Susanin story, after all, is about the rejection of foreign intrusion. Its operatic treatment had at least to seem to reject it too.

  Glinka’s solution to this problem was to have profound consequences for the entire course of Russian music in the nineteenth century. To some extent this was because of the specifically Russian elements that he worked into his score. They gave it, of course, an identity that set it apart from any previous grand opera, known or unknown to Russian audiences. Specifically, they marked it out from a work like Verstovsky’s Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova molgiva), a romantic opera with dialogue which had enjoyed a spectacularly successful premiere a year or so before, but which now seems lightweight and derivative and largely devoid of noticeable Russianisms.2 Crucially, Glinka’s opera did this without drastically disrupting the genre itself. So A Life for the Tsar is not some weird ethnic concoction derived from the tribal rituals of northern Muscovy, but a tragic opera recognizably in the traditions that Glinka had absorbed from France, Italy, and Germany, based on the formulae of recitative, arioso, aria, ensemble, and chorus, though without directly resembling any one particular composer or work.

  The overture starts, after a couple of peremptory gestures, with a slow introduction based on an oboe tune in Taruskin’s “urban style russe,” in which, in this case, “the Russian folk melos [has] been put through an Italianate refinery.”3 It then quickly reverts to type with a sparkling allegro in sonata form, complete with fugal development, such as might suit an opera by Weber or Spohr. The curtain goes up on a scene of peasant life, as it does, for example, in Weber’s Der Freischütz and Rossini’s William Tell. And like those composers, Glinka takes the opportunity provided by country people enjoying themselves to localize his story, while also, unlike them, localizing his music. A troop of partisan fighters against the invading Poles arrives in Domnino and are fêted by the villagers. One of the soldiers intones an apostrophe to the motherland, like a precentor giving the tune (zapev), and is answered in solemn harmony by the other partisans; then the village women enter to a sprightly dance tune, which again might be, and isn’t, an authentic song of welcome. But Glinka next does something extremely peculiar: he combines the two tunes in a complicated imitative texture that sounds like a brilliant solution to an exercise set by Dehn, and certainly nothing like anything ever heard in a Muscovy village. It’s true that the peasants of Glinka’s day, and no doubt Mikhail Romanov’s too, had a way of singing in polyphony, but it was a particular kind of polyphony, in which the different parts were variants of the same tune, freely individualized without regard to any rules of combination. (Musicologists call this heterophony.)4 Glinka’s chorus is very learned and regulated by comparison, but also, it must be said, a dazzlingly effective way of treating folk material in a formal context.

  This hybridization of what seem like folk materials continues, one way and another, for the rest of the work. Susanin’s daughter, Antonida, whose wedding has been postponed by her ultra-royalist father pending Romanov’s election, sings an exquisite lament in a cross between Italian bel canto and what Russian ethnomusicologists call protyazhnaya pesnya (extended song), in the manner of a highly ornate vocal elegy. The second part of her aria is a quick cabaletta, like Violetta’s “Sempre libera” in La traviata, but again with folk-song coloring: Antonida is, after all, a peasant girl, albeit with coquetries of her own, which are hinted at by distinctly unfolkish touches in the melody and rhythm. Susanin, on the other hand, enters to an actual folk tune, which Glinka had heard sung by a coachman in Luga.5 But the superbly convincing offstage song of the boatmen bringing Antonida’s betrothed with news of Romanov’s election is apparently Glinka’s own work, studiously fitted out with authentic details, like the melodic fall at the end of the third phrase and the persistent uncertainty whether—in Western harmonic language—we are in C major or A minor.6 Glinka typically doesn’t scruple to romanticize the approaching chorus with a double-speed “balalaika” (in fact string pizzicato) accompaniment, which contrasts the expectancy of the villagers with the stately progress of the oarsmen and their momentous news.

  To what extent Glinka had thought out this brilliant fusion of operatic convention with identifiable Russianisms, to what extent it emerged as an ad hoc solution to the self-imposed problem of writing a Western kind of grand opera in Russian and on a Russian subject, is hard to say. One element, at least, was preplanned, and it is by no means the most convincing. At the Polish court (act 2), and later when the Polish soldiers enter Susanin’s hut and haul him off as a guide to Romanov’s whereabouts, the hated foreigners are portrayed entirely through Polish dance music: a polonaise, a kr
akowiak, a mazurka—a device that both depersonalizes them (all Poles are the same) and, of course, ridicules them (nothing but a bunch of dancers). By contrast, the Russians are individually characterized and their emotions explored: Antonida, as we have seen; Susanin confronting the Poles, at first with feigned innocence (“Oh, sirs! How should we know where the tsar is pleased to stay? We live out here in the wilds”), then with an air of dignified reproach, and finally with lofty refusal. Glinka hits off each of these moods with amazing musical precision for a composer of such limited theatrical experience, portraying Susanin as a man of simple but stubborn loyalty and courage, an ideal model for a doctrine that wants to represent the authentic Russian soul as inextricably bound up with trust in the autocracy. In the deep wintry forest of the final act, realizing that the Poles are beginning to see through his deception, Susanin achieves a kind of tragic grandeur while never for a moment stepping out of character. The square phraseology, stepwise melody, and static D-minor harmony of his lament are those of the simple-hearted hero, no more than lightly touched by the pathos of all those Bellinian Aminas and Normas whom Glinka had fled Italy partly in order to escape. At the end, in place of the cabaletta that would hardly have suited either the man or the situation (but which an Italian audience would nevertheless have expected), Susanin sadly remembers his loved ones in fragments of their music: Antonida’s cavatina, Sobinin’s announcement of the new tsar, the adopted orphan Vanya’s song.

  The final hybrid in A Life for the Tsar is the epilogue in Red Square, in which the people greet Mikhail Romanov (unseen, because it was not permitted to represent the tsar onstage). For this scene Glinka devised a Russianized version of the choral hymns of triumph that conventionally ended the rescue operas he knew, such as Les Deux Journées and Fidelio, basing himself on the modernized and in fact Westernized Russian choral style of the late seventeenth century known as kant.7 It’s a style that masquerades as antique harmonized chant and was in fact accepted as such by nineteenth-century Russia, though its connection with the ancient and to a large extent forgotten znamenny chant of the Orthodox Church was negligible. As we shall see, it was part of Glinka’s genius to serve as a musical mythmaker, an inventor of genres and styles that would subsequently be accepted as the acme of authentic Russianness. This triumphal chorus, much imitated in later operas, might stand as a symbol of his paternity as a whole.

  A Life for the Tsar was received with enthusiasm on its first performance in St. Petersburg’s newly restored Bolshoi Theatre on 27 November 1836. People went around singing tunes from it, and Glinka became famous overnight. But it was perhaps inevitable that press reviewers should attempt to see beyond the work’s immediate appeal and position it as the start of a new era in Russian music. The music critic of the Severnaya pchela (Northern Bee), Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, reviewed the opera in millennial terms: “How can I convey the astonishment of true lovers of music when, from the first act onwards, it became clear that this opera was going to provide an answer to a question which is of vital importance to the arts in general and to the arts in Russia in particular—namely that of the very existence of Russian opera, Russian music and, ultimately, the existence of national music.” And he added: “Glinka’s music has brought to light what people have long sought and not found in Europe—a new element in art. This is the dawn of a new age in the history of the arts—the age of Russian music.”8 Glinka’s friend Nikolay Melgunov, who had in the past expressed sophisticated views on the possible character of a Russian national opera, was delighted that Glinka “has not confined himself to a more or less close imitation of folk-song; no, he has studied deeply the repertoire of Russian songs … [and] has opened up a whole system of Russian melody and harmony, founded upon the very music of the people, and in no way resembling the music of any prevailing schools.”9

  The expectation was naturally that Glinka would follow up A Life for the Tsar with another opera in the Russian national spirit. But even in the hour of his triumph Glinka was incapable of behaving like a professional composer. Soon after the premiere he began tinkering with an idea for an opera based on an early narrative poem of Pushkin, Ruslan and Lyudmila. Of all Pushkin’s tales apart from the verse novel Yevgeny Onegin, Ruslan is by far the longest and most diffuse; and like all the fairy tales of the master it is a subtly ironic work which treats the bardic tradition as an opportunity for satire as well as mimicry, and as a pretext for digressions on issues of style and genre. To distill a coherent operatic plot from it would have tested a Boito or a Hofmannsthal, whereas Glinka never managed to settle on a librettist at all. In his Memoirs he claims to have intended to map out a scenario with Pushkin himself, whom he knew well, but the poet’s death in a duel in January 1837 put paid to that idea. Some time later, at a soirée at which Glinka had played some of the music he had already written for Ruslan, another poet, Konstantin Bakhturin, “undertook to make a plan for the opera, and sketched it out in half an hour, while drunk, and—how about this?—the opera was written according to that plan!”10 In due course various other writers chipped in with individual numbers while Glinka pottered along composing his music whether or not relevant text was to hand. Few operas of significance can have been compiled in such a haphazard way. But Ruslan’s significance, luckily, does not hang on its coherence.

  Pushkin’s poem tells of the Kievan knight Ruslan and his young bride, the princess Lyudmila, who is abducted from their marriage bed by the evil dwarf Chernomor. Furious at Ruslan’s inattentiveness, Lyudmila’s father promises her hand and half his kingdom to whoever finds her and brings her back. What follows is in some respects a parody of those Russian fairy stories in which the hero is sent on some seemingly impossible quest and is subjected to an increasingly elaborate and improbable series of obstructions and misfortunes at the hands of assorted wizards, hags, giants, rival suitors, and fabulous monsters before returning safely with his prize. Bakhturin’s scenario necessarily cuts out a good deal of incident and simplifies the order of events, but in all essentials it follows Pushkin’s narrative—which is to say that it makes no serious attempt to rationalize its haphazard dramaturgy, or to remedy its psychological vacuity. In the opera, Lyudmila is abducted from the actual wedding feast (so no blame attaches to Ruslan); the number of rival suitors is reduced from three to two; and two of the most fantastic elements—Chernomor’s magic hat, which Lyudmila steals and puts on to avoid recapture, and the killing and resuscitation of Ruslan—are omitted. But Glinka retains the giant severed head of Chernomor’s brother, which Ruslan encounters on an old battlefield and which—in proto-Wagnerian fashion—reveals to him the magic sword with which he will defeat Chernomor; and he keeps Chernomor’s long beard, to which Ruslan clings as they fly through the air and then cuts off, thereby destroying the dwarf’s power.

  For those who had seen A Life for the Tsar as a landmark in the search for an authentically Russian style of opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila might well have seemed a retrograde step. It lacked almost all the features that had defined its predecessor as specifically and contemporaneously Russian. Instead of a realistic drama based on true history it offered a silly, dramatically inert and implausible fairy tale, acted out by pasteboard characters devoid of moral stature and helpless in the face of magic and fate. Of political or national signification there was no obvious trace. And as for the music, it abandoned almost completely the folk models that had so invigorated the earlier opera. Apparently only two melodies have folk origins, neither of them Slavonic: the main theme of the wizard Finn’s ballad, which Glinka had taken down from a coachman near Imatra, in Finland, in 1829; and the theme of the Persian chorus in the magic castle of the enchantress Naina, which he got from a Persian embassy official that same year. On the face of it, Ruslan diverges much less than A Life for the Tsar from the Franco-Italian manner that had still underpinned the latter work. For instance, Lyudmila’s cavatina, and especially her subsequent cabaletta, are noticeably more Bellinian than Antonida’s. One could nearly, if not quite
, say of Ruslan that had the young Wagner decided in 1833 to base his first opera on the Pushkin tale (instead of on a fairy play by Gozzi), it might not have come out as an essentially different style of work from Glinka’s.

  Nevertheless Ruslan was to prove fully the equal of its companion in the effect it had on Glinka’s Russian successors. “Nothing glaringly new appears anywhere,” Alfred Swan wrote of it, “but the sum-total of musical speech is the result of Glinka’s taste, measure, and proportion, imbued, moreover, with the hidden accents of the old Russian heritage … There is not a single formation here that one could not find in the romantic armoury, yet the whole effect is a revelation.”11 Swan perhaps underrates the force of some of Glinka’s eccentricities. No Western composer would have risked the interminable prophecies of Bayan (the ballad singer) at the very start of proceedings, or Finn’s extended life story at the beginning of act 2. But these studiously monotonous presentations embody something peculiarly Eastern and antique that Glinka must have intended to suggest far-off, immutable truths, even while, musically, they contain no single phrase that Schubert or Rossini could not have written. Later in the first act there is a rough unison chorus in praise of Lel, the Slav god of love, in a highly unusual five-four time and with harsh accents, building up to the moment when the lights suddenly go out and Lyudmila is whisked away by a pair of shadowy monsters. Glinka famously marks this, and all subsequent apparitions of Chernomor or his henchmen, with a loud descending whole-tone scale, a scale that, being completely symmetrical, disrupts our sense of musical gravity and hints therefore at the suspension of the normal laws of musical nature.