CHAPTER 2
VïSOKO STRONG SOKOL LETAYET, a serf chorus in a style a noble would recognize as lofty, was the perfect musical embodiment of the earliest, Enlightened model of Russian nationalism, purveyed by liberal aristocrats in the time of Catherine the Great. It is good to remember at the end of our bloody century that there was once such a thing as liberal nationalism even in Russia, and that it is possible for nationalism to inspire inclusive rather than exclusive sentiments. Neither nostalgic nor exotic, Fomin’s chorus did not merely represent the “other,” as, shorn of its leading tones and dominants, it might have done. Cast in an idiom a city-dweller or a landowner would find at once fresh and familiar, it united city and country, high and low, cosmopolitan and insular, self and other.
Such a nationalism, despite its top-down provenience, could actually work as a positive, ameliorative social force. When the peasant could symbolize not just class but nation, implying a society conceived as organically united within its national borders, he became more fully human. It became harder to justify an institution like serfdom, not only to “the West” but to oneself.
Not that one could call N. A. Lvov himself, “good” barin though he undoubtedly was, anything like an abolitionist yet, let alone a democrat. To confine ourselves to the evidence already before us, the very singspiel in which loving stylization of the peasant idiom as a national emblem reached its peak culminates in a celebration of the sovereign’s benevolent intervention in response to supplication, reinforcing, for the benefit of all spectators, belief in the autocratic hierarchy as divinely instituted instrument of human happiness.
And yet the early Russian abolitionists such as Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802), Lvov’s practically exact contemporary and social peer, came to their beliefs through the same burgeoning national consciousness, and shared Lvov’s regard for peasant lore. The famous chapter (“Myodnoye Station”) from Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, anonymously published the same year as the Lvov-Pratsch folk song anthology (also semi-anonymous, though not for the same reason), begins with a description of a village khorovod (to the strains of “The Birch Tree,” of all national emblems!) and ends in a fit of anguish over a slave auction at which the members of a family are sold off to different buyers. Running from the scene, the author meets an American acquaintance on the stairs: “Go back,” he cries. “Don’t be a witness to this arrant disgrace. You once cursed the barbaric custom of selling black captives in the remote settlements of your fatherland. Go back, . . . don’t be a witness to this blot of ours, and don’t proclaim our shame to your fellow citizens when you speak with them about our ways!”1
That shame was the early fruit of narodnosf. National consciousness became national conscience. The history of nationalism in post-Napoleonic Russia is the story of how that liberalizing bond was undone.
THE TRICK was to associate love of country not with love of its inhabitants but with love of the dynastic state. The sundering of the one link and the forging of the other was the chief cultural and educational accomplishment of the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. The way in which, in Russia, the professional arts fell into line behind this policy is striking evidence of the oft-hushed bond between romanticism and reaction.
On the second of April, 1833, Count Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov, the Tsar’s newly appointed minister of “popular enlightenment” (that is, education, as the Bolsheviks would also call it), circulated a letter to the heads of all educational districts in the Empire, stating that “our common obligation consists in this, that the education of the people be conducted, according to the Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.”2 Pravoslaviye, samoderzhaviye, narodnosf: this was the troika of interdependent values to which Russians would henceforth be expected to subscribe, formulated thus, apparently, in direct rebuttal to the familiar revolutionary slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. In its new company, narodnosf would function as “a worthy tool of the government,” as Uvarov put it, or, as quite accurately echoed in Soviet times, as an “ideological weapon in support of serfdom and autocracy.”3 The nation was conceived entirely in dynastic and religious terms, autocracy being related to Orthodoxy as “the ultimate link between the power of man and the power of God.”4
This was the brand of “nationalism”—Officiai Nationalism (ofitsioznaya narodnosf) as it came to be called—that was embodied and propagated in Glinka’s epochal first opera, conceived almost immediately upon promulgation of the new doctrine and as a celebration of its precepts, reaching a symbolic climax in the epilogue, a pageant of religious veneration of the nation in the person of the Tsar. It was no progressive thing.
The opera was indeed a direct response to the state ideology, mediated by one of its canonical proponents, Vasiliy Andreyevich Zhukovsky (1783—1852), author of the stout words quoted just above in defense of dynastic authority, and of the text to the epilogue of A Life for the Tsar as well. In addition to being Glinka’s friend and mentor, he was an outstanding romantic poet, the tutor to the royal heir (the future Alexander II), and an official state censor. A Life for the Tsar was hatched in Zhukovsky’s aristocratic literary salon, to which Glinka became attached immediately on his return to St. Petersburg from Italy in 1834. “When I declared my ambition to undertake an opera in Russian,” Glinka recalled in his memoirs, “Zhukovsky sincerely approved of my intention and suggested the subject of Ivan Susanin.”5
It was a predictable choice, even an inevitable one; for one of the cornerstones of Official Nationalism was the creation of a romantic national mythology, “a sense of the present based on a remodeled past,” in the well-chosen words of a recent historian of Slavic literature. “Legend and history,” he continues,
were a pleasing combination, and one sees among some Poles and Russians of this time that odd cultural phenomenon in which a legendary past is created to antedate and form a basis for history. Not having an Iliad or Aeneid, they wrote their own mythical past from folklore. They were inspired by the poems of Ossian and by Herder’s idea of creating a national consciousness out of national myths.6
Glinka’s maiden opera, the first Russian opera that was really an opera (not a singspiel) and the earliest to achieve permanent repertory status, hence the cornerstone of the national repertory, was created out of just such a didactic mythography.
The legend of Ivan Susanin had a tenuous documentary basis: a concession conferred in 1619 by Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first Russian ruler of the house of Romanov, on one Bogdan Sobinin, a peasant from the village of Domnino in the Kostroma district, and renewed to Sobinin’s heirs by every Romanov ruler all the way down to the first Nicholas, granting dispensation from certain taxes and obligations in recognition of the merits of Sobinin’s father-in-law, Ivan Susanin, who, “suffering at the hands of said Polish and Lithuanian persons immeasurable torments on Our account, did not tell said Polish and Lithuanian persons where We were at the time, and said Polish and Lithuanian persons did torture him to death.”7 That is, Ivan Susanin had at the cost of his life concealed from a Polish search party the whereabouts of Mikhail Fyodorovich, the sixteen-year-old scion of an old boyar family, who had been elected Tsar by a popular assembly in February 1613, thus ending the “time of troubles” regarding the Russian succession and founding the dynasty that would rule Russia until 1917. The name of Ivan Susanin entered historical literature in 1792 and his deed was embroidered and immortalized by Sergey Glinka (the composer’s cousin) in his Russian History for Purposes of Upbringing (Russkaya istoriya v pol’zu vospitaniya, 1817), since which time it went into all children’s textbooks and became part of every Russian’s patriotic consciousness.8
Parallels with Susanin’s deed were suggested by the activities of peasant partisans in the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon; in the aftermath of that war “Ivan Susanin” became a fixture of Russian Romantic literature (e.g., the eponymous ballad or “duma” by Kondratiy Rïleyev) and the Russian stage, including the fairly trivial musical stage of those days: e.g., Catterino Cavos’s eponymous singspiel of 1815, to a libretto by Alexander Sha-khovskoy, the Intendant of the Imperial Theaters, which, in accord with the conventions of its genre, allowed Susanin to be rescued by the timely arrival of Russian troops.
Glinka’s opera, too, was originally to have been called Ivan Susanin; its eventual title was conferred upon it by Tsar Nicholas himself in return for the dedication. Before suggesting the subject to Glinka, Zhukovsky had tried to interest the historical novelist Mikhail Zagoskin (1789-1852) in contributing to the Susanin literature. This too would have been natural: with a pair of blockbuster novels that had made him a literary celebrity—Yuriy Miloslavsky; or, The Russians in 1612 (1829) and Roslavlev; or, The Russians in 1812 (1831)—Zagoskin had already drawn explicit parallels between two periods of civil strife, foreign occupation, and expulsion of the foe, explicitly identifying the Russian national spirit with love of the Romanov dynasty, thus prefiguring the patriotic mythography of Official Nationalism.
Except for the epilogue, which he wrote himself, and which remains one of the essential historical documents of Nikolayan state ideology, Zhukovsky farmed out the actual task of composing the text of the opera to his court colleague and protégé, Baron Yegor Fyodorovich Rozen (Georg Rosen), a Prussian from Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia) who had learned Russian in the military and who was now the secretary to Zhukovsky’s pupil, the Tsarevich Alexander. Apart from augmenting the title character’s household so far as necessary to obtain a standard operatic quartet, Rozen seems for the most part to have followed Rïleyev’s treatment of the Susanin legend with its dramatic scene in the woods. Before Rozen’s involvement in the project Count Vladimir Alexandrovich Sollogub (1813-82), the future court historiographer then fresh from his university studies, wrote the texts for the opening choruses and for Antonida’s cavatina and rondo in act 1. Another precocious protégé of Zhukovsky, Nestor Vasilyevich Kukolnik (1809-68), who had already written a five-act historical verse drama, “The Hand of the All-High Has Saved the Fatherland” (Ruka Vsevïshnego otechestvo spasla, 1832), on the subject of the founding of the Romanov dynasty, contributed the text for the orphan-boy Vanya’s scene at the monastery gates, which was added to the opera after the première. Kukolnik would remain one of Glinka’s closest friends. His name lives on today, long after his pompous nationalistic dramas have perished, because Glinka set many of his lyrics to music.
This, then, is the context into which Glinka’s “patriotic heroic-tragic opera in five acts” should be placed in order to understand its “nationalism” and to avoid the misunderstandings that usually becloud discussion of it. A detailed scenario, modeled largely on the formal conventions of the contemporary Italian opera, was drawn up late in 1834 by the committee named above to guide the composer and his various librettists as they worked independently, the music frequently outrunning the text. Glinka relied as well on an unusually complete and well thought-out musical plan that reflected not only his acquaintance with French rescue operas and an aspiration to achieve “a single shapely whole”9 but also his enthusiastic commitment to the state ideology and his determination to embody it in symbolic sounds.
AS THE composer put it in an oft-quoted passage from his memoirs, his root conception of the drama underlying his first opera lay in the opposition of Russian music vs. Polish, a structural antithesis with many surface manifestations. The Poles (the “other”) are at all times and places represented by stereotyped dance genres in triple meter (polonaise, mazurka) or highly syncopated duple (krakowiak); they express themselves only collectively, in impersonal choral declamation. The Russian music is at all times highly personal and lyrical. While drawing to a small extent on existing folk melodies, it is chiefly modeled on the idiom of the contemporary sentimental urban romance, in which the Russian folk melos had been put through an italianate refinery.
The chief identifying traits of this urban style russe are not at all far removed from those of Pratsch’s folk song arrangements. They include the predominance of duple (or compound duple) time, though duple bars are often grouped very irregularly, as in the orphan Vanya’s song (act 3) with its seven-bar phrases (example 2.1); cadential terminations by (sometimes heavily embellished) falling fourths or fifths (what Glinka was fond of calling “the soul of Russian music”); and a very free, seemingly unstable interplay of relative major and minor keys reflecting, again as in Pratsch’s settings, what eth-nomusicologists call the “mutable mode” (peremennïy lad) of Russian melismatic songs. The prime examples of “pure” (Italo-)Russian style in A Life for the Tsar are from act 1: Antonida’s cavatina and the first part of the concluding trio, “Do Not Pine, Beloved” (Ne tomi, rodimïy) (example 2.2).
EXAMPLE 2.1
a. Vanya’s song (A Life for the Tsar, act 3)
(As they killed the birdie’s mother. . .)
b. Lvov-Pratsch, Sobraniye russkikh narodnïkh pesen, protyazhnaya no. 21 (possible source of melody)
(Ah, what kind of heart is mine, all despairing . . .)
c. Lvov-Pratsch, Sobraniye russkikh narodnïkh pesen, plyasovdya (dance song) no. 25 (for alternation of three- and four-bar phrases)
The second act is entirely given over to Polish dances. Thereafter the rhythm of the musical contrast becomes more rapid: the Poles’ approach in act 3 is telegraphed by a few strategic allusions to the act 2 polonaise; their colloquies with Susanin both in that act and in act 4 are always couched (on both sides) in stereotyped generic terms. At the tensest moment in act 3, where the Poles forcibly seize Susanin and he cries out “God, save the Tsar!” Polish (triple) and Russian (duple) rhythms are briefly superimposed (example 2.3). The symbolic battle of styles is also played out in the overture, which (contrary to usual practice) was the first number from the opera to be composed.
Derivations from actual folklore in A Life for the Tsar are few. Susanin’s first replique in act 1 is based on a coachman’s song Glinka claimed to have taken down from life,10 while a very famous song, “Downstream on the Mother Volga” (Vniz po matushke po Volge), reduced to a characteristic motif, accompanies the dénouement in act 4 as an ostinato. The bridesmaids’ chorus in act 3 (a brilliant adaptation of an old Russian decorative stage convention to a novel dramatic purpose), while set to an original melody, is composed, as we have seen, in the pentasyllabic hemistichs of authentic Russian wedding songs, which Glinka was the first artist-composer to set in an actual quintuple meter instead of adapting it to a more conventional one. (The chorus is quoted in example 1.1, in connection with Nikolai Lvov’s appropriation of the same meter for poetry.) And yet the result is still an ersatz, of course, a modified form of “Russian” compound duple, exactly as in the famous Allegro con grazia from Chaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. (As in Lvov’s pesennïy razmer or the later kol’ tsovïy stikh of Russian romantic poetry, Chaikovsky, like Glinka, invariably groups his fives as two-plus-three, with a strong sense of two beats to the “foot,” or bar.) Wholly, if very skillfully, feigned are the choruses in act 1, to texts by Sollogub, including the one for boatmen in which an elaborate pizzicato accompaniment in imitation of balalaika strumming (anticipated by Fomin, as we have seen, in Yamshchiki na podstave) cunningly pits the theme of the earlier women’s chorus in counterpoint against the boatmen’s tune. As in Kamarinskaya, the orchestral fantasy that will be the subject of chapter 8, Glinka loved to work his most sophisticated technical tricks on the “naivest” material.
Far more important than the sheer amount of folk or folklike material in the score (meager, and therefore equivocal, in comparison even with the works of certain predecessors, to say nothing of later musicians in the “Glinka tradition”) is the use to which such material is put. This was Glinka’s great breakthrough, as another romantic literary contemporary, Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky (1804-69) was first to discern. What Glinka “proved,” according to Odoyevsky, writing in the Northern Bee (Severnaya pchela, Faddey Bulgarin’s newspaper, the unofficial organ of Official Nationalism), was that “Russian melody may be elevated to a tragic style.” In so doing, Odoyevsky declared, Glinka had introduced “a new element in art.”11
EXAMPLE 2.2. Glinka, A Life for the Tsar
a. Antonida’s cavatina, act 1
(I look out over the open field, my eyes fixed on the distant river... J
b. Trio (Sobinin, Antonida, Susanin) from Susanin’s entrance with theme (act 1)
What this meant was that Glinka had without loss of scale integrated the national material into the stuff of his “heroic” drama instead of relegating it, as was customary, to the decorative periphery (as did Fomin, for example, or Cavos, even at their loftiest). Of the dramatic crux, including Susanin’s act 4 scena in which the national style is particularly marked, Odoyevsky wrote: “One must hear it to be convinced of the feasibility of such a union, which until now has been considered an unrealizable dream.”12 One reason why it had been so considered, of course, was that before Glinka Russian composers had never aspired to the tragic style at all. What made it feasible was that the main characters in Glinka’s opera were all peasants, hence eligible, within the conventions of the day, to espouse a folkish (even an Italianized, urbanized folkish) idiom.
But that hardly made the opera socially progressive, even by the standards of a Nikolai Lvov; for the most advanced of all Glinka’s musicodramatic techniques was one that enabled him to harp from beginning to end on the opera’s overriding theme of zealous submission to divinely ordained dynastic authority. The epilogue, which portrays Mikhail Romanov’s triumphant entrance into Moscow following the rout of the Poles, is built around a choral anthem (Glinka called it a “hymn-march”) proclaimed by massed forces, including two wind bands on stage, to the following quatrain by Zhukovsky:
EXAMPLE 2.3. Superimposed Russian and Polish rhythms (Glinka, A Life for the Tsar, act 3, voice parts only)
Slav’sya, slav’sya nash russkiy Tsar’,
Gospodom dannïy nam Tsar’-gosudar’!
Da budet bessmerten tvoy tsarskiy rod!
Da im blagodenstvuyet russkiy narod!
Glory, glory to thee our Russian Caesar,
Our sovereign given us by God!
May thy royal line be immortal!
May the Russian people prosper through it!
Glinka’s setting is in a recognizable “period” style—that of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kantï, three- or four-part polyphonic songs that were the oldest of all “Westernized” Russian repertories (ironically, and perhaps unknown to Glinka, their ancestry was part Polish), and which in Peter the Great’s time were often used for civic panegyrics, in which form they were known as “Vivats.” The Slav’sya theme is motivically (that is, “organically”) related to that of Susanin’s retort to the Poles (example 2.3), derived from the opening peasant chorus in act 1 (and through that relationship to the opening phrase of the overture; see example 2.4).
But that only begins to describe its unifying role. As Alexander Serov was the first to point out, the Slav’sya theme (which in Nikolayan and Alexandrine Russia became virtually a second national anthem) is foreshadowed throughout the opera wherever the topic of dynastic legitimacy is broached (see example 2.5).13 The approach is gradual, beginning in act 1 with a minor-mode reference to the first two bars of the theme when Susanin (seconded by the chorus) dreams of “A Tsar! A lawful Tsar!” In act 3, when news arrives of Mikhail’s election, paving the way to Antonida’s wedding (for Susanin had forbidden celebrating a joyous family event during the interregnum), Susanin and his household bless their good fortune by falling to their knees in prayer: “Lord! Love our Tsar! Make him glorious!”—and between their lines the strings insinuate the same fragment of the Slav’sya theme, only this time in the major. When later in the same act the Poles demand to be taken to the Tsar, Susanin answers defiantly to an extended if somewhat simplified snatch of the Slav’sya theme, disguised mainly in tempo:
Visok i svyat nash tsarskiy dom
I krepost’ bozhiya krugom!
Pod neyu sila Rusi tseloy,
A na stene v odezhde beloy
Stoyat krïlatïye vozhdi!
Our Tsar’s home is a high and holy place,
Surrounded with God’s staunch strength!
Beneath it is the power of all of Russia,
And on the walls, dressed all in white,
Winged angels stand guard!
EXAMPLE 2.4. Glinka, A Life for the Tsar
a. Epilogue, “hymn-march” (no. 24), voices only
b. Act 1, opening chorus
(In blizzard, in storm)
c. Beginning of overture
Thus A Life for the Tsar is thematically unified in both verbal and musical dimensions by the tenets of Official Nationalism. The irony, of course, is that Glinka adapted the techniques by which he achieved this broadly developed musicodramatic plan from the rescue operas of the revolutionary period and applied them to an opera where rescue is thwarted, and in which the political sentiment was literally counterrevolutionary. No wonder, then, that the opera became the mandatory season-opener for the Russian Imperial Theaters (by law the personal property of the Tsar); and no wonder its libretto had to be superseded under Soviet power by a new one (by Sergey Gorodetsky) that replaced devotion to the Romanov dynasty with abstract commitment to national liberation (led by the popular militia of Minin and Pozharsky) and to an anachronistically secular concept of the Russian nation.14
And no wonder that as early as the 1860s the opera had become an embarrassment to the lately liberalized intelligentsia, and even such an ardent disciple of Glinka as Vladimir Stasov could complain that “no one has ever done a greater dishonor to our people than Glinka, who by means of his great music displayed as a Russian hero for all time that base groveler Susanin, with his canine loyalty, his henlike stupidity [“owllike” in Russian] and his readiness to sacrifice his life for a little boy whom, it seems, he has never even seen.”15
What Glinka did was to draw upon characteristics of all the varieties of indigenous Russian music he had heard from his earliest years, not with the condescension of the sophisticate who wants to be “folksy,” but with the perfectly natural ease of a musician for whom folk-song was as deeply rooted and as valid an experience as more cultivated music.16
EXAMPLE 2.5. Glinka, A Life for the Tsar
a. Act 1, no. 4 (voices only)
b. Act 3, no. 11 (quartet)
This sentence from the first English-language biography of Glinka sums up the conventional viewpoint on A Life for the Tsar (as “first Russian opera”), on Glinka (as “first Russian composer”), and on Russian music as the “West’s” most significant “other.” The view of Russian music as “other” is obviously a Western view (albeit one that easily spreads to Westernized Russians). It is less obvious that measuring the Russianness of Russian music by its folkish quotient is also a Western, not a Russian, habit, and a patronizing one that originates in colonialist attitudes. (Perhaps that is why it is so rife among British writers.)
c. Act 3, no. 12 (Susanin’s arioso)
Unhampered by the prejudice that Russian music must be exotic in order to qualify as authentic, it is easy to see that the difference between a A Life for the Tsar and earlier Russian operas, or between Glinka and earlier Russian composers, had little or nothing to do with the assimilation of folklore. It was obvious even to Glinka’s contemporaries that his folkish quotient was, if anything, lower than the average mark set by his predecessors, especially the ones who churned out the trivial vaudevilles and singspiels that were the bread and butter of the Imperial Theaters.
Their most accomplished representative was Alexey Nikolayevich Verstovsky (1799-1862), whose Askold’s Grave, an ambitious semihistorical opera in four acts (albeit with spoken dialogue), to a libretto by the patriotic historical novelist Zagoskin after his own eponymous novel, had its première a year earlier than A Life for the Tsar and probably deserves recognition as the most enduringly popular Russian opera of the nineteenth century. To the end of the nineteenth century there would be many who claimed that Verstovsky was the more authentically Russian composer, precisely because Verstovsky was more insularly Russian than was Glinka with his ostentatiously virtuosic “European” technique.
Among those who refused to concede Glinka’s preeminence was the bitterly envious Verstovsky himself, who shortly after the 1836 première gave A Life for the Tsar a withering review in a letter to Prince Odoyevsky. His point was precisely that this St. Petersburger parvenu Glinka was no more (and probably a good sight less) Russian than the honest Muscovites like himself and Alexander Alyabyev (1787-1851) who had been slaving in the sweatshop of the Imperial Theaters churning out Russian operas by the bushel. “And lo! the dawn of Russian opera has appeared on the horizon with A Life for the Tsar” he snarled,
while Alyabyev and I are sent to the garrison, for Glinka’s opera marks an epoch on the Russian stage. Thus twenty years’ work on the part of an individual who all that while had striven with all his might to invest the character of National Russian music in European form—all that is not worth a dime. And because of what? Because to you Lord Writers of Petersburg Moscow might as well be Podunk, and anything that might show itself there is in your opinion way beneath mediocrity. The dawn of Russian music, not just Russian songs—but purely national music with all the appurtenances of opera—that’s long been on the horizon. The sun we haven’t seen yet. And it’s hardly going to appear until they all stop turning up their noses at whatever is really Russian and national. I remember Catalani’s and Sontag’s tears when they heard Russian melodies, but it never occurs to any of our singers to sing Grimslava’s song from Vadim or the romance from Tvardovsky or the aria from Askold’s Grave in polite society. I say this not because they are so great but because they are truly pervaded with the characteristics of Russian music. And the melodies in them so pleased Romberg and Schwenke that one of them made a wonderful arrangement of them. I wish you’d listen again to the third act finale of Askold’s Grave. It would shame you and convince you that the Dawn of Russian Music broke for opera in Moscow, not Petersburg. I am the first to idolize Glinka’s marvelous talent, but I will not and cannot renounce my rights to primacy. True, none of my operas contain triumphal marches, polonaises, or mazurkas, but they have their inalienable virtues, achieved by dint of great experience and knowledge of the orchestra. There is nothing in them of the oratorio, nothing in them of the lyric, but these are not needed in opera; every genre has its own forms, its own limits. You don’t go to the theater to pray to God. Yes, and while we’re at it, a lot of it comes from not knowing how to write words. You yourself know how many (or rather, how few) writers we have who know what a musician needs. I do not see this knowledge in Rozen. The time of Italian librettos is past.17
And so on and on. Actually, he’s quite right,18 just as Alexander Serov, then a would-be composer also given to stewing in sour grapes, was right to contend, in his obituary for Verstovsky in 1862, that Verstovsky “strikes chords within the Russian soul that Glinka never touched.”19 It is all correct, and all beside the point.
Glinka’s greatness was recognized from the beginning; and however they admired Verstovsky, their contemporaries unanimously sensed that it was Glinka who represented a “wonderful beginning” for Russian music.20 Far from a matter of Russianness tout court, his greatness was seen as consisting in his unprecedented seriousness, originality, technical virtuosity, and (as a result of these) his viability on the world stage. Glinka did not invent the Russian style, but he made Russian music competitive. Through him, Russia could for the first time join the musical West on an equal footing, without excuses, as a full-fledged participant in international musical traditions, and a contributor to them. The old bromide that Glinka liberated Russian music by turning away from the West has it just backward. Liberation came from facing and matching, not retreating.
And yet both in Russia and in the West, then and since, it has always been important for some to represent Glinka’s greatness in terms of his greater Russianness. Within Russia, this was yet a further manifestation of Official Nationalism. The extract given above from David Brown’s biography was a gloss, amounting to a paraphrase, on a review of A Life for the Tsar by Yanuariy Mikhailovich Neverov (1810-93) that appeared in the Moskovskiy nablyudatef (Moscow Observer) shortly after the première. The author of this article was then a young Moscow dilettante, a protégé of Odoyevsky, whose evaluation of A Life for the Tsar faithfully echoed his mentor’s.21 Neverov himself dreamed of a composing career until Otto Nicolai, to whom he applied for instruction in Vienna, discouraged his ambitions.22 In later life he achieved some prominence as an orientalist and educational administrator, a career for which one had to be a card-carrying Official Nationalist.23 Thus it is not surprising to find raillery, in the part of Neverov’s critique that David Brown selected for glossing, against a want of true narodnosf in Ver-stovsky’s works, despite an abundance of “delightful Russian tunes,” owing to their “arbitrary mixture of arias, duets, and trios of all styles and all peoples in which the listener sought in vain for any unity or dominating idea.”24
It is not the mere presence of Russian melodies, however authentic, that makes for narodnosf, then, but the use of such melodies to evoke an all-encompassing idea of Russia: “images which are purely Russian, native,” as Neverov put it, “all clear, comprehensible, familiar to us simply because they breathe a pure narodnosf, because we hear in them native sounds.”25 But also because “all these Russian images are created by the composer in such a way that in the aggregate, in their cohesion, they have been marshaled against the intrigues of the enemy invader, attempting to enslave the Russian land.”26 Thus Glinka, unlike Verstovsky, is truly narodnïy because he is ideologically, not merely decoratively, narodnïy. His Russians all speak in a single voice. And they speak not only for something but against something as well. Such a basis for approbation follows directly and entirely from the tenets of Official Nationalism, and has nothing to do (as Neverov himself implies in his remarks about Verstovsky) with style per se, or with what an English writer, footlessly omniscient, will characterize as the greater rootedness or validity of the composer’s own musical experiences.
Now the other historical period in which Glinka’s narodnosf was given an ideological spin in Russia was, of course, the Stalinist period, which embodied in so many ways a resurgence of Nikolayan nationalism, especially after World War II, known in Russia, like the Napoleonic Wars that preceded the first Nikolai’s reign, as the Velikaya otechestvennaya voyna, the “Great Patriotic War.” It was during this period, the period of the early cold war, that the jingoistic critical writings of Vladimir Stasov, which strove hard to represent all Russian art as entirely autochthonous, hardened into Soviet scripture and assumed the overwhelming mandatory authority in the secondary literature against which Western writers are willy-nilly forced to react.
The Soviet literature justified investing Stasov with so much official prestige, amounting to a new Official Nationalism, by emphasizing Stasov’s personal relationship with the figures he so tendentiously promoted, in music mainly Glinka and the so-called Five (whose Russian sobriquet, moguchaya kuchka or “mighty little heap,” Stasov had actually coined).27 A Western writer, conditioned by another sort of unconscious prejudice to value emanations from Russia in direct proportion to their perceived autochthonism will be easily taken in.
AN EXCELLENT case in point is the Slav’sya, the “hymn-march,” in the epilogue to A Life for the Tsar. Its status as symbol of the Russian nation came about for political reasons unrelated to its stylistic pedigree, which, as we have observed, is of a distinctly Westernized strain.28 Stasov may or may not have been aware of the old repertory of kantï on which Glinka drew for this monumental number; but he was definitely aware of, and committed to, the preposterous theory that Russian folk music preserved the modes of classical antiquity (a view that may have had its origins in the doctrine of the “third Rome” that asserted Russia’s status as preserver of a Christianity unsullied by either papism or Protestantism and thus rightful heir to the spiritual leadership of the Christian world). Stasov contended that Glinka, by intuition alone, had divined the archaic system that Russian folklore preserved undefiled, and had made it the foundation of his (therefore) wholly autochthonous personal style. His music restores “none other than the system of ancient or medieval modes that Europe has long since forgotten and all other composers have forsaken,” and the proof was the Slav’sya.
“This chorus,” wrote Stasov in the year of Glinka’s death,
indisputably the greatest and most perfect national anthem ever heard in Russia, has such a profound significance for the future of Russian musical art, contains the solution to so many substantial aesthetic and technical problems, that it will surely be the subject of serious specialized investigations. It affords shining proof of Glinka’s genius for the way he instinctively grasped and captured the spirit and character of Russian music; instinctively, because he himself never suspected what he had wrought in this hymn. The Slav’sya chorus consists of several plagal cadences following one another without interruption (for which there are precedents in Chopin: e.g., the Mazurka Op. 30, no. 2, and so on); but the melody that is built on them is a stirring series of notes, moving by step (mouvement par degrés [sic] conjoints), so that out of thirty-four notes that make it up, there are only seven thirds, one fifth, and one sixth. Consequently, we have here a melody created purely in the style of our ancient Russian and Greek church melodies, with a harmonization consisting of medieval plagal cadences! Glinka’s unconsciousness of all this is shown by the fact that in proceeding from the first cadence to the second, he made a single use of what we now call a minor triad (G minor) against the rules of the church modes, but the next time he omitted it and decided instead to make a direct approach from a G cadence to one on A.29
“Doesn’t the harmony sound like a good deal of C major tonic and dominant at the beginning, with a final swing to the dominant?” asks David Brown.30 Of course it does. That is exactly what it is. There was never a Russian harmonic tradition along the lines Stasov suggests; his analysis is pure tendentious invention. But Brown, generously or credulously as it may seem, is disposed to grant that “any Russian view must obviously be treated with respect, for Russian ears are naturally more sensitive to such matters than ours.”31 If Stasov analyzes the music a certain way, that means he “really heard it this way,” and however impossible his assertions may be to confirm empirically, therefore, “we must take these on trust.”32 Also to be taken “on trust” is Neverov’s preposterous claim (one that later Russian composers openly disputed and, in their work, refuted) that Glinka’s recitatives faithfully transmit “the intonation of Russian speech.”33
This apparent naivety has the appearance of openmindedness, but it is actually something more nearly the opposite. It is the result of a predisposition, a prejudice that has rendered the critic susceptible to a propaganda that appeals by design to prejudice. The prejudice, in Brown’s case if not in Stasov’s, is a special instance of perhaps the most pervasive bias in modern Western musicology, namely, the bias that sees only style and structure as “real.” Thus for a modern Western writer, nationalism in music must consist in autochthonous style (and style alone); and such autochthonous style, in the case of a “national” composer, validates his music in a way that the composer personally cannot do.
Indeed, in Brown’s discussion Glinka is actually granted very little in the way of personal control over his style or technique. In a remark evidently intended as benevolent, the biographer allows that “Glinka’s melodic nationalism seems effortless and was, one suspects, quite artless.” He goes on to admonish the reader that “it is important to emphasize this, for an examination of A Life for the Tsar reveals all sorts of small but very real similarities between quite separate tunes.”34
Now a whole school of musical analysis, associated with the Austro-American scholar Rudolf Réti and a pleiad of native or naturalized British disciples including Hans Keller, Deryck Cooke, and Alan Walker, measures the greatness of a composer’s achievement by the extent to which the criterion here adduced by Brown is met.35 Réti was at pains to stress that “at least in the representative works of great musical literature,” this was “essentially a conscious process,” evidence of the composer’s superior command. “The great composers,” he went on, “were fully aware both of the thematic principle and of the technique through which they materialized it. As this consciousness was supported and complemented by a thorough technical training, this transforming of musical ideas into different shapes finally became the composer’s customary way of expressing himself, his natural musical language.”36
At first Brown seems to be ascribing such a shaping consciousness to the composer of A Life for the Tsar:
Now, Glinka was very concerned, as he himself said and as we shall later see, to ensure that the opera made “an harmonious whole,” and he set about this by creating many substantial cross-references between its component parts. Therefore might not a concern to tighten the structure have led him to fabricate these smaller thematic similarities?37
Yet after giving a pair of subtle examples of just the type that Réti and his disciples customarily adduce to demonstrate the conscious shaping powers of a Mozart or a Schumann, Brown decides that “what seems more plausible,” after all, “is that Glinka, by focusing upon a smaller range of melodic types with certain traits in common,” inherited directly and unconsciously from his folk heritage, “made the opera more of a piece than it would otherwise have been,” had he relied (or been able to rely) on the promptings of a personal imagination.38
Consider the implications. A Russian composer in the art music tradition is assumed (or rather, doomed) to create, because he is Russian, in the manner of a peasant singer—not by effort or art but by instinct, as is only “natural for a man born and bred in different cultural surroundings, and inheriting different racial characteristics and attitudes.”39 While one can affect admiration, even a sort of envy, for such an artist on the romantic or neoprimitivist assumption that what is unmediated by civilization is imbued with spontaneous authenticity, such admiration is inevitably laced with condescension. Mr. Natural, with his biologically inherited attitudes, can have only a group identity. Stripped of that identity, he is stripped of all authenticity. When Glinka fails to conform to his English biographer’s model of Russian group identity and group behavior, it is held very much against him, as the remarks quoted in chapter 9 about the character of Ratmir in Ruslan and Lyudmila, Glinka’s second opera, will amply attest.
1 A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestviye iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1971), pp. 160, 163.
2 “Tsirkulyarnoye predlozheniye G. Upravlyayushchego Ministerstvom Narodnogo Pros-veshcheniya Nachalstvam Uchebnïkh Okrugov ‘o vstuplenii v upravleniye Ministerstvom.’” quoted in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), p. 73.
3 Ibid., p. 74; Entsiklopedicheskiy slovaf (Moscow: Sovetskaya èntsiklopediya, 1964), vol. 2, p. 542.
4 Vasiliy Zhukovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v odnom tome (Moscow, 1915); quoted in Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, p. 97.
5 Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, “Zapiski” (Memoirs), in Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1973), p. 266.
6 Hubert F. Babinski, The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 89.
7 Quoted in Alexander Vyacheslavovich Ossovsky, “Dramaturgiya operï M. I. Glinki Tvan Susanin,’“ in A. V. Ossovsky, ed., M. I. Glinka: Issledovaniya i materialï (Leningrad and Moscow: Muzgiz, 1950), p. 16.
8 Ibid., p. 17.
9 Glinka, “Zapiski,” p. 269.
10 Ibid., p. 271
11 “Pis’mo k lyubitelyu muzïki ob opere g. Glinki: Zhizn’ za Tsarya,” in V. F. Odoyevsky, MuzïKal’no-literaturnoye naslediye, ed. G. B. Bernandt (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956), p. 119.
12 “Vtoroye pis’mo k lyubitelyu muzïki ob opere Glinki, Zhizn’ za tsarya, ili Susanin,” in Odoyevsky, Muzïkal’ no- literaturnoye naslediye, p. 124.
13 See Alexander Nikolayevich Serov, “Opitï tekhnicheskoy kritiki nad muzïkoyu M. I. Glinki: Rol’ odnogo motiva v tseloy opere ‘Zhizn’ za tsarya’“ (1859), in A. N. Serov, Izbrannïye stat’i, ed. G. N. Khubov, vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1957), pp. 35-43.
14 Here, for example, is Gorodetsky’s version of the Slav’sya quatrain: Slav’sya, slav’sya tï, Rus’ moya!/ Slav’sya tï, russkaya nasha zemlya! / Da budet vo veki vekov sil’na / Lyubimaya nasha, rodnaya strana! (“Glory, glory to thee, O Russia mine! / Glory to thee, our Russian land! / May our beloved, our native land / Be strong throughout all ages!”).
15 Letter to Mily Balakirev, 21 March 1861; M. A. Balakirev and V. V. Stasov, Perepiska, ed. A. S. Lyapunova, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1970), p. 130.
16 David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 113.
17 A. N. Verstovsky to B. F. Odoyevsky, December 1836; first published in Biryuch (Petrograd: State Theaters, 1921), quoted from Alexander Semyonovich Rabinovich, Russkaya opera do Glinki (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1948), pp. 170-71. Where the translation has “Podunk” Verstovsky had written Chukhloma, a town in the Kostroma guberniya, in the middle of the great Russian nowhere. Angelica Catalani (1780-1849) and Henrietta Sontag (1806-54) were among the earliest European divas to sing in Russia. Vadim and Pan Tvardovsky were earlier singspiels by Verstovsky. The cellist Bernhard Romberg (1767-1841) and the pianist Carl Schwenke (1797-1870) were a popular touring team. For the record—it will become relevant to an argument later in this book—one of the most popular numbers in Askold’s Grave, the chorus of immured maidens in act 3, is in fact cast as a polonaise (albeit without explicit indication).
18 Only where he says, “You don’t go to the theater to pray to God” was Verstovsky dead wrong; it shows that, unlike Glinka, he did not grasp the nature of Nikolayan totalitarianism.
19 A. N. Serov, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2, p. 47.
20 Nikolai Gogol, “Peterburgskiye zapiski” (1836), in Sochineniya i pis’ma N. V. Gologya, ed. V. V. Kallash (St. Petersburg: Prosveshcheniye, 1896), vol. 7, p. 340.
21 Neverov’s basic judgment on the opera is straight out of Odoyevsky: “Up to now we had never heard Russian music in an elevated style; this was Mr. Glinka’s creation” (Ya. M. Neverov, “O novoy opere g. Glinki ‘Zhizn’ za tsarya,’“ in Tamara Livanova and Vladimir Protopopov, Opemaya kritika v Rossii, vol. 1 [Moscow: Muzïka, 1966], part 1, p. 207).
22 Ibid., pp. 206-7.
23 Grigoriy Bernandt and Izrail Yampolsky, Kto pisal o muzi’ke, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1974), p. 233.
24 Quoted from Brown, Glinka, pp. 112-13; italics added.
25 Quoted from ibid., p. 113.
26 Quoted from Livanova and Protopopov, Opernaya kritika v Rossii, p. 208; italics in the original.
27 On this term and its coinage, see R. Taruskin, “What is a Kuchka?” in Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.
28 Further on nonstylistic sources of Slavic musical nationalism, see Michael Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 19th-century Music 10 (1986-87): 61-73. This important article builds in part on an unpublished 1984 paper, “Theme and Prototype in Russian Music” by Malcolm H. Brown, which I, too, gratefully acknowledge for its welcome clarification of issues usually treated in obfuscating fashion.
29 Vladimir Vasil’yevich Stasov, “Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka” (1857), in Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya v tryokh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952), vol. 1, p. 445n.; unlike the Slav’sya, it should be pointed out, the Chopin mazurka to which Stasov refers cadences plagally in the key designated as the tonic by the key signature. (The “plagal cadences” in the Slav’sya are, according to the key signature, on the dominant.)
30 Brown, Glinka, p. 134.
31 Ibid., p. Ill (italics added).
32 Ibid., p. 134.
33 Ibid., p. 121.
34 Ibid., p. 115.
35 The foundational text for this approach to criticism is Réti’s The Thematic Process in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1951).
36 Ibid., pp. 233-34.
37 Brown, Glinka, p. 115.
38 Ibid., pp. 115-16.
39 Ibid., p. 135 (italics added).