PART II

Self and Other

CHAPTER 8

How the Acorn Took Root

OF ALL THE musicians of his generation, only Balakirev knew Glinka. They met around Christmas 1855, the eighteen-year-old Wunderkind from Nizhnïy Novgorod having been brought to St. Petersburg by his patron, Alexander Ulïbïshev, the famous lover of Mozart and hater of Beethoven. The boy was being presented chiefly as a piano virtuoso. As a composer he had as yet little to his credit: two unfinished chamber works, a couple of songs, the beginnings of a piano concerto. His magna opera were two pianistic vehicles: the Fantasia on Themes from A Life for the Tsar—mainly a transcription in the Lisztian fashion of the act 1 trio “Ne tomi, rodimïy” (Grieve not, beloved)— and the Grande fantaisie sur airs nationales russes pour le pianoforte avec accompagnement d’orchestre composée et dédiée à son maître Monsieur Charles Eisrich par Mily Balakirev, Op. 4.¹ These were standard popular fare of the kind that launched any virtuoso’s career. It would be rash to attach any great nationalistic significance to them.²

And surely no such significance was attached, least of all by Glinka. His historiographical image notwithstanding, Glinka cared little for the style russe per se, at least at this late phase of his career (or rather, postcareer, for by 1855 he was no longer composing). Five years earlier he had written to a friend, “I have decided to shut down the Russian song factory and devote the rest of my strength and sight to more important labors.”³ But there were to be no such projects. According to Vladimir Stasov’s testimony, by the time Glinka met the young Balakirev he “was completely immersed in the classics—Bach, Handel, and Gluck.”⁴ At the beginning of 1855 he had written to the poet Nestor Kukolnik, his best friend, that “if suddenly my muse were to bestir herself, I would write something without text for orchestra; but I’m finished with Russian music, as I am with Russian winters” (like many Russian gentlemen of leisure, Glinka wintered abroad).⁵ He was greatly tickled by Balakirev’s Fantasia on A Life for the Tsar and asked to hear it whenever, in the early months of 1856, its author paid him a visit. But that, obviously, was because it flattered him.⁶ There is no record of Balakirev ever having played Glinka his Grande fantaisie on folk themes, although he did play him the first movement of his early concerto the moment it was finished. Glinka’s sister, Lyudmila Shestakova, recorded her brother’s opinions of Balakirev’s talent for posterity, and they are couched in terms of general and quite conventional praise—”a brilliant future,” “a solid musician,” and the like.⁷ Twice Glinka gave Balakirev themes to set as compositional exercises, and in both cases the themes were Spanish, not Russian.⁸ The young man’s success with the first of these assignments occasioned Glinka’s greatest encomium: he told his sister that Balakirev would make a good teacher for her daughter, since in him “I have for the first time found views that accord closely with mine in all that concerns music.”⁹

Then Glinka went abroad, never to return. And the propagandists took over. In later days, when Balakirev had become an embattled symbol of Russian nationalism in music, the early contact with Glinka was played up for all it was worth. “[Glinka] received Balakirev very warmly as a composer, especially as a composer of Russian music “ wrote Stasov in 1882; “[he] was not mistaken in seeing in this youth his heir and successor.”¹⁰ And a latter-day Balakirev disciple published Glinka’s remark about his niece’s musical education, with this significant (and evidently fabricated) addition: “Believe me, in time he will be a second Glinka.”¹¹ These testimonials, which cast Balakirev in the role of ordained prophet of the Russian national school, reflect faithfully the turbulent milieu of Russian musical politics in the later nineteenth century, but they seriously distort the relationship between master and disciple in the light of subsequent events.

The first such event was the first major piece Balakirev composed after Glinka’s death. The Overture on the Themes of Three Russian Folk Songs (usually abbreviated as the Overture on Russian Themes) was, according to the autograph of its earliest version, “begun on 19 September 1857 in St. Petersburg” and “finished in Zamanilovka at Shestakova’s dacha on 26 June 1858.”¹² Conceived as it were within the bosom of the Glinka circle, the overture was tribute to the memory of the great man, in the form of an equally deliberate emulation (the mot juste would be the Russian ótklik, combining response, comment, and echo) of Glinka’s Fantasia for Orchestra on the Themes of a Wedding Song and a Dance Song, entitled Kamarinskaya (1848).

This is the work that is known to all the world as a paradigm—perhaps the paradigm—of burgeoning Russian nationalism in music. Chaikovsky wrote of it, in a phrase that has become a dogma, that the Russian symphonic school was “all in Kamarinskaya, just as the whole oak is in the acorn.”¹³ A Soviet musicologist has meticulously traced the genetic evolution of that oak in a volume of some five hundred pages.¹⁴ And yet, while the historical significance of the work is every bit as great as these testimonials would indicate, Chaikovsky’s simile does not seem quite right. For it suggests a spontaneous, natural germination, while the growth of the Kamarinskaya tradition was very much a cultivation, carefully tended and pruned in its initial stages by Balakirev, both as composer and, later, as leader of his circle. The differences between Kamarinskaya and the responses to it by the Balakirev school are an instructive measure of the difference between national and nationalist art.

KAMARINSKAYA was one of three Fantaisies pittoresques for orchestra that Glinka wrote under the spell of Berlioz and his music, whose acquaintance he had made in Paris in 1844-45. The other two—Jota aragonesa and Recuerdos de Castilla, better known as Souvenir dune nuit d’été á Madrid— were, as was so typical of Glinka’s predilections, of Spanish national character. Clearly it was nationality, not nativism, that mattered to Glinka, as to so many artists of the early and mid-nineteenth century—including, notably, Berlioz himself, with his Marche hongroise and his Carnaval romain. Native or foreign, it was the color that mattered, not the country of origin. What was important was that themes be “characteristic,” that they embody what Glinka called “positive data” (polozhitel’ nïye dannïye) ,¹⁵ and strong national coloring was a convenient way of achieving this. The situation was hardly different from what it had been in the eighteenth century or even much earlier: local color as a minor musical species providing minor musical thrills. The only thing to set the early nineteenth century apart was the greater frequency of its use, particularly in opera. But that reflected above all a change in the nature of operatic plots, settings, and characters. In instrumental contexts, national coloring was merely pittoresque, to use Glinka’s word, an exotic element (even if native) approached simply as the source of musical enjoyment, devoid of programmatic or symbolic content. This was as true of Glinka’s Russian fantaisie as it was of his Spanish pair. On this point he was quite explicit in his memoirs:

At that time [i.e., while in Warsaw in 1848], I noticed quite by accident a kinship between the wedding song “From Beyond the Mountains High” [Iz-za gor, gov vïsokikh, gor], which I used to hear in the country, and the dance song “Kamarinskaya,” which everybody knows. And all at once my imagination took fire, and ... I wrote a piece for orchestra under the title “A Wedding Song and a Dance Song.” I can assure the reader that I was guided in composing this piece solely by my innate musical feeling, thinking neither of what goes on at weddings, nor of how our orthodox populace goes about celebrating, nor of how a drunk might come home late and knock on the door so that he might be let in.¹⁶

The point of Kamarinskaya, then, was not a portrayal of Russian life or a celebration of Russian folklore but a pretext for brilliant orchestration built around a kind of abstract musical pun. Glinka did not start out by looking for some Russian themes on which to base an orchestral fantasy; they came to him unbidden—they found him, as it were. The “kinship” or hidden relationship between the two themes that prompted the composition of the work is set out in example 8.1.¹⁷ The notes marked with asterisks in the dance song (most of them in strong, conspicuous rhythmic positions) correspond with the first six notes of the wedding song.

It is tempting to speculate on how this resemblance first occurred to Glinka. “Kamarinskaya” is one of a well-defined group of Russian folk naigrishi, or instrumental dance tunes. These typically consist of a short (often three-measure) phrase repeated ad infinitum as the basis and framework for an open-ended series of extemporized variations, played by wedding bands, or simply by a muzhik on a balalaika or a concertina, to accompany a strenuous and often competitive type of male dancing (v prisyadku, in a squat) well known in the West as “typically Russian,” thanks to its exportation by professional folk-dance ensembles (see figure 8.1).¹⁸ The principle of ostinato, so important in Russian art music, stems from these dance-until-you-drop naigrishi.¹⁹ As we know from the recollections of his contemporaries, Glinka was fond of emulating the practices of wedding bands by improvising accompaniments to the “Kamarinskaya” tune, seated at the piano, accompanied by a partner, Chopsticks-fashion. Stasov, for one, reported that he “would keep on playing the tune for him at the top of the piano, and often asked him to repeat this or that variation (the last or next-to-last) which he had played to us. But often he had already forgotten them, and instead of these, his fantasy invented still more new ones—without end.”²⁰ Perhaps it was while thus diverting himself one day that Glinka unexpectedly found himself playing “Iz-za gor, vïsokikh gor,” a tune he had long known and loved, as we know because he had previously incorporated it into his “Wedding Song” to a text by Rostopchina (1839).²¹

EXAMPLE 8.1. Folk themes in Glinka’s Kamarinskaya

a. Wedding song

b. Dance Kamarinskaya

FIGURE 8.1. Two views of the “Kamarinskaya” dance from nineteenth-century Russian woodcuts (lubki). From Tsukkerman, “Kamarinskaya” Glinki (Moscow, 1957), pp. 353, 369

DIAGRAM 8.1. Glinka, Kamarinskaya, form diagram

The way Glinka’s orchestral fantasy is constructed out of the two songs is summarized in diagram 8.1. The two themes are first given in stark contrast, like a conventional introduction and allegro. But all at once, right in the middle of things, the fast theme is magically transformed into the slow one, by means of the progressive revelation of their “kinship,” as demonstrated in example 8.1. It is an admirably executed maneuver, which extends over thirty-one measures, beginning at rehearsal no. 6 in the score. Its main events are summarized in example 8.2.

This feature, along with the virtuosic handling of its rather modest orchestra, has earned Kamarinskaya its well-deserved reputation for masterly craftsmanship. Less often noted but perhaps even more remarkable is the way Glinka derived his introductory and transitional passages from the melody of the wedding song by extracting motives from it. There are three of these, labeled x, y, and z in example 8.1, and each of them is exploited at some point for transitional and modulatory purposes. The opening is built entirely on a sequential treatment of y, which is led to a surprising conclusion on B. This prepares, at short range, the first downbeat harmony of the wedding song (see example 8.3a). At the long range it is even more meaningful, as we shall see.

EXAMPLE 8.2. Glinka, Kamarinskaya, transition to the wedding song after figure 6

EXAMPLE 8.3. Motivic derivations in Glinka’s Kamarinskaya

The transition from the wedding song to the dance song is effected by a neat contrapuntal juxtaposition of motives x and y (example 8.3b). And note how the Bt of the introduction is taken up again here by means of motive x and resolved to the dominant of the key of the dance song. The tonal progression is in fact a projection of the wedding song incipit. The last time x is sounded (in the bass), it is limited to three notes, the resolving A being withheld; twice the motive is reiterated in this guise, and then the resolution is made through an interpolated lower neighbor, G. This double-neighbor progression in the bass is then transformed chromatically to furnish the little turn figure that introduces the dance song—another instance of the tightly coordinated interplay of melodic and harmonic events.

The most significant of these events takes place in the next transitional passage—the retransition back to the dance song after the reprise of the wedding song. Here Glinka uses motive z to lead to an F, which is then provided with another turn figure, derived from the same motive (see example 8.3c). This identifies the F immediately as the opening note of the dance song and therefore as the fifth of the tonic scale. A modulation has thus been achieved with marvelous economy to the unexpected (but, as we have seen, hardly unprepared) key of Bl?. The reprise of the dance song having been made in the twice-adumbrated key of the flat submediant, the final triumphant return to D major is effected by the same bass resolution we observed previously in example 8.3b, derived from the incipit of the wedding song, x (see example 8.3d).

The underlying tonal progression that lends contrast and a heightened structural unity to the dance song variations is thus shown to be structured around the opening motive of the wedding song. Here is a hidden “kinship,” indeed! Such a thorough interpenetration of melodic and harmonic structures is the kind of thing one is used to finding (and therefore seeking) in Beethoven, perhaps, but hardly in the work of provincial autodidacts. The fact that the themes on which this elegant construction was based happened to be Russian folk tunes, it should be clear by now, was a secondary characteristic of the work, in terms of both its conception (as reported by Glinka in his memoirs) and its execution (as revealed in the foregoing discussion).

Yet Kamarinskaya was a watershed in the history of musical folklorism for all that. For it took not only the whole of its thematic material from folklore but also, to an unprecedented degree, its structural modus operandi. The three-measure naigrïsh motive is repeated without significant structural change some seventy-five times in the course of the two sections that are based on it. What changes is the “background,” to use the term often found in the critical literature: kaleidoscopically shifting instrumental colors, harmonizations, countermelodies. Kamarinskaya, almost as if by accident, accomplished the feat of creating for itself a novel formal procedure both original and “organic,” and one, moreover, hardly at all indebted to “German” symphonic methods. The significance of the work, which far outstripped its composer’s modest intentions, lay precisely here, in its fortuitous yet symbiotic fusion of national thematic material and sui generis (or to put it as Herder might, urwüchsige) form. For writers like Stasov, it became the very paradigm of svoyeobraznosf, a Slavophile term roughly equivalent to Herder’s Urwüchsigkeit, which became a critical watchword among champions of the Russianness of Russian music and of the Balakirev school.

But svoyeobraznosf has its price: it is by definition unrepeatable. It is obvious that the special features that made Glinka’s fantasy a masterpiece belonged to it alone, and could not be appropriated except in a patently epigonal way. So when Balakirev came to render homage at its shrine, he wrote a piece that differed from Kamarinskaya as significantly as it resembled it. And the differences had largely to do with reconciling Glinka’s innovatory procedures with the canons of “German symphonism.”

THERE IS considerable irony in this, since what made Balakirev and his circle a truly nationalist phenomenon lay in large part in their principled opposition to musical “Germanism,” as embodied chiefly in the person and activities of Anton Rubinstein and in the organizations he founded, the Russian Musical Society and the St. Petersburg Conservatory (established in 1862). Rubinstein, a virtuoso of international fame and a composer of German schooling, saw the future of Russian music in terms of professionalization under the sponsorship of the aristocracy and the stewardship of imported teachers and virtuosos. In the same year that Balakirev met Glinka, Rubinstein had published an article in the Vienna Blätter für Theater, Musik und Kunst called “Russian Composers,” in which he first outlined this Peter the Great-like program for Russian music and first hinted at his lifelong equation of Russian musical nationalism with dilettantism, even in Glinka.²² Although even Rubinstein’s worst enemies recognized his patriotic motives,²³ and although it was also universally acknowledged that Rubinstein, both as lobbyist and as role model, was largely responsible for creating the social and institutional means through which a professional musical life might flourish in Russia, his words met with a chorus of indignation. In this chorus Russian composers insulted by his remarks, including both the aging Glinka and the youthful Balakirev, were joined by all manner of nationalists and Slavophiles who were particularly vocal in Russia at just this moment, thanks to the Crimean War. It may be said with some justice, therefore, that Russian musical nationalism, as a self-conscious artistic tendency, was touched off by this article by a musician for whom music was “a German art,” and in whose opinion “a deliberately national art. . . cannot claim universal sympathy [but] awakens an ethnographical interest at best.”²⁴

The leaders of the anti-Rubinstein backlash were Stasov and Balakirev, the former assuming the role of public propagandist,²⁵ the latter that of musical functionary and educator. It was in the spirit of opposition to the German-dominated professionalization of St. Petersburg musical life, with its strong aristocratic and establishmentarian underpinning, that Balakirev gathered around him his famous “little band” of musical mavericks and autodidacts, and joined forces with Gavriyil Lomakin to organize the Free Music School as a rival and an alternative to both the Russian Musical Society and the Conservatory at once.²⁶ And it was no doubt partly in a spirit of rejoinder to Rubinstein’s views on the inevitable immaturity and provincialism of national instrumental music that Balakirev wrote his Overture on Russian Themes of 1858 in precisely the way he did.

Unlike Glinka, Balakirev did go looking for his themes; the determination to write a symphonic work on Russian folk songs preceded the specific embodiment. The three songs he chose were all available by 1857 in published anthologies (this had not been true of the themes in Kamarinskaya), and this, presumably, was where Balakirev sought and found them. Example 8.4 shows the three themes as they first appear in the overture.²⁷ The criteria for their selection are obvious, if one knows Kamarinskaya, and show how sedulously Balakirev sought to model his work on Glinka’s. The overture is set in a slow-fast introduction-and-allegro scheme corresponding to that of Glinka’s “Wedding Song and Dance Song.” Moreover, the pair of tunes that together constitute the thematic material of the central allegro, though they are finished and symmetrically structured melodies rather than naigrishi, are both built up out of three-measure rhythmic periods exactly analogous to the “Kamarinskaya” motive (these are indicated with brackets in example 8.4). This enabled Balakirev to achieve a headlong ostinato character just as unremitting as Glinka’s—in fact more so, since there is no interrupting return to the slow tempo; instead, the slow theme returns briefly at the end as a reprise, rounding the composition off with a whiff of nostalgia and a suggestion of ternary form. The body of the overture consists of a span of some 360 measures, expressed in the form of 120 three-bar ostinato cells (mostly grouped further into six-or twelve-bar units corresponding to the structure of the themes: cf. diagram 8.2 on page 130).

EXAMPLE 8.4. Folk songs in Balakirev’s Overture on Russian Themes (1858)

The tonal plan of the overture reflects Kamarinskaya as unmistakably as does its rhythmic structure. The same tonal areas are used in the fast central portions of both works (if we discount the return to the slow tempo in Glinka’s, which, as we have seen, has no direct counterpart in the overture): two sharps, with a central modulatory swing to two flats. Balakirev’s retransition, moreover, is based on a sequential extension of the bass  progression that had been so strikingly employed by Glinka: compare examples 8.5a and 8.3d.

As to differences, the most obvious of them also turns out to be the crucial one. Balakirev’s piece makes use of three folk tunes, where Glinka had used only two. A glance at the keys of Balakirev’s allegro themes reveals the reason. In B minor and D major respectively, they are the first and second themes of a sonata design, the very format Glinka had so resourcefully skirted in Kamarinskaya. Just how the sonata-allegro form is overlaid to the ostinato procedure derived from Kamarinskaya is shown in diagram 8.2. Key relations are the usual ones: the second theme comes back in the tonic major in the recapitulation, preparing the way for the reprise of the introduction; the development is the pretext for the excursion into Glinka’s flat submediant.

The interesting problem was how to achieve a sense of developing form out of a procedure as static and sectional as ostinato. So attention is particularly drawn to the unstable sections: the bridges, transitions, and of course the development. At least three techniques can be identified, all of them with ample precedent in Kamarinskaya. One is the kind of sequential harmonic pattern, often accompanied by syncopation that slightly blurs the three-bar rhythmic units, already illustrated by example 8.5a. Another is the extraction of motives from the themes. There is only one full-fledged example of this in the overture, but it is far more systematically deployed than anything in Kamarinskaya, in keeping with Balakirev’s general expansion of form over that of his model. From the first eight notes of the allegro’s first theme, Balakirev derives a motive, x, out of which he constructs a fanfarelike “preface” that opens the overture, preceding the introduction proper (example 8.5b). This motive and its immediate extensions provide Balakirev with very pliant material for use in the development section (the passage cited in example 8.5a is in fact derived from the extensions). In another guise, minus the repeated notes, it forms the exquisite “dissolve” by which the allegro gives way to the coda (i.e., the reprise of the slow introduction). Here, moreover, we encounter a unique motivic expansion of the third phrase of the allegro’s second theme, labeled y in example 8.5c.

EXAMPLE 8.5. Motivic derivations in the Overture on Russian Themes

The remaining technique is that of contrapuntal juxtaposition of themes and motives. The one significant instance of this in Kamarinskaya has been given in example 8.3b. In Balakirev’s overture there are many more, some of them quite clever. In the retransition, fragments of both allegro themes are combined over a dominant pedal (example 8.5d). And somewhat later, in the course of the recapitulation, the two halves of the first theme are telescoped (example 8.5e).

Balakirev’s Overture on Russian Themes can thus be viewed as a kind of principled advance over his model both as regards sheer dimensions and as regards symphonic character and procedure. The paradoxical aspect it seems to present in its apparent rapprochement with German convention falls away if seen in the context of the historical moment. In its symphonic aspects the overture can be seen as an attempt to beat Rubinstein at his own game, or at least to demonstrate that Russian national character need imply no loss of scale or of technical sophistication—precisely what Glinka had demonstrated for opera in A Life for the Tsar. The work, moreover, may be seen as a conscious attempt to lay the cornerstone of a “school,” something Glinka manifestly was not trying to do in Kamarinskaya. So where Glinka had aimed at nothing higher than a musical witticism, albeit the witticism of an inspired and masterly craftsman, Balakirev needed to aim at a statement of manifest “importance.” And where Glinka could afford to indulge himself with a work that was sui generis in every particular, Balakirev was attempting to establish a genre, and that meant observing and handing down conventions.

DIAGRAM 8. 2. Balakirev, Overture on Russian Themes (1857-58), form diagram

But however all that may be, Balakirev’s overture was still a work based on, and appealing to, “innate musical feeling,” as Glinka had written of Kamarinskaya. There was still no hint of a program; the national character remained a purely stylistic phenomenon. As a somewhat lengthy parenthesis, more or less the same might be said of the three fairly lumpish Fantaisies pittoresques for orchestra that Glinka’s brilliant response to Berlioz elicited as response in turn from Alexander Dargomïzhsky. All of them bear comparison to Kamarinskaya: they are all in introduction-and-allegro format, and they all incorporate national material, two of them native. The “jocular fantasy” (fantaziya-shutka) Baba Yaga (1862), subtitled “From the Volga to Riga,” (S Volgi nach Riga), bears no real program, despite the titular reference to the traditional Russian witch. The idea of her flight is merely the pretext for a musical travelogue that takes us from the heart of Russia, over land and sea, to the German-speaking Baltic capital—geographical stages represented by the famous slow folk song “Vniz po matushke po Volge” (Downstream on Mother Volga), the very one Glinka had already used, far more imaginatively, to carry the dramatic turning point in A Life for the Tsar; by ostinato variations on a Smolensk tune, “Ukazhi mne, mati, kak belïy len slati” (Show Me, Mother Dear, How to Spread Linen), suitably provided with some weird “empirical” harmonies and strained orchestral effects to depict the Baba Yaga on her broomstick; and by the bürgerliche Lied, “Anna-Maria, so gehst du doch hin.” Stylistic contrasts, amounting to incongruities, provide what jocularity there is to be found in this inept and disjointed piece. It was an idea Glinka had thoroughly exploited, and far more seriously, in A Life for the Tsar, with its Russian and Polish scenes and confrontations. Dargomïzhsky’s Kazachok (1864), subtitled “Fantasia on the Theme of a Little-Russian Dance,” is an out-and-out copy of Kamarinskaya of which the main section, an allegretto, is a set of ostinato variations on a Ukrainian naigrish. Like Kamarinskaya a “changing background” piece, it nonetheless fails to generate, much less maintain, a comparable level of musical momentum, owing largely to the fact that the naigrish on which it is based is a phrase of two-plus-two measures, lending the variations a deadly foursquareness of design from which Dargomïzhsky had not the resources of harmonic or instrumental invention to rescue it.²⁸ The Finnish Fantasy (Chukhonskaya fantaziya, 1867) was written later and is a more accomplished piece than the other two. Its thematic material, however, is non-Russian, showing Dargomïzhsky to have shared Glinka’s fairly indiscriminate predilections where national character was concerned.

But none of Dargomïzhsky’s overtures had anything to contribute to the growth of a nationalist school. They are essays in musical comedy and “low” style, aesthetically akin to the realistic genre romances of Dargomïzhsky’s late years. From the crucial point of view of craft and professionalism they can bear comparison neither with Glinka nor with Balakirev. They are the work of an amiable “gentry” dilettante, the very epitome of what is meant by a “regional” composer, and could only add grist to Rubinstein’s ideological mill. Yet however dubious their merits, Dargomïzhsky’s fantasias, along with the works by Glinka and Balakirev that we have examined, constituted the whole repertoire of “Russian” orchestral music as of 1864.

IN THAT year Balakirev’s second Overture on Russian Themes appeared, a work that marked as great an advance over his first in formal scope and symphonic procedure as the first had marked over Kamarinskaya. At the same time it exhibited a far greater determination on the composer’s part to purify the national character of his style. In their symbiosis these two traits marked a new stage in the emergence of oak from acorn and led inevitably to a genuine sense of programmatic content in the music. All three elements were profoundly and complexly interrelated, and in their interrelationship added a new ideological dimension to the concept of musical nationalism—one far more deserving of the name than any previous one had been.

In the years immediately following the composition of the first overture, Balakirev had made a close study of Russian folk song with an eye toward its creative exploitation. Dissatisfied with the quality of existing published collections, and perhaps stimulated by the recent collecting and editing efforts of the so-called pochvenniki (“men of the soil”), Balakirev made his own collecting expedition along the Volga in the summer of I860.²⁹ The songs he then collected were issued in his epoch-making volume of forty arrangements, the Sbornik russkikh narodnïkh pesen of 1866.

From the point of view of incipient musical nationalism the most significant aspect of the collection was the technique of harmonization Balakirev worked out. He sought and found a method that preserved, more faithfully than any previous one, two particular aspects of the folk original: the diatonic purity of the minor mode—both the natural minor and what Balakirev christened the “Russian” minor, the Dorian mode as popularly conceived—and the quality of tonal “mutability” (peremennosf), as it is called, whereby a tune seemed to oscillate between two equally stable points of rest, as it were two “tonics.” The latter often coincided with the common-practice relationship of tonic to relative minor or major (cf. the tonal relationships in the exposition of the first overture); but just as often it involved the lower neighbor to the tonic in the minor mode, what common practice defined as the flat seventh. In almost all prior collections of folk songs, and in most art music based on folk tunes, these features had been obscured by the use of the harmonic minor and of secondary dominants. Both these devices Balakirev virtually banished from his harmonizations.³⁰

The first fruit of Balakirev’s collecting and harmonizing activity was not the publication of 1866, however, but the second Overture on Russian Themes. Like the first overture it employed three folk songs, but this time they were all songs the composer had personally collected. Example 8.6 gives the tunes as harmonized in the 1866 anthology, along with a fourth theme used in the overture, which Balakirev had composed himself while vacationing in the Caucasus in the summer of 1863.³¹

Although—and this should be emphasized—the harmonic style of these settings was Balakirev’s personal invention, it is instantly recognizable to us today as generically “Russian,” thanks to its thorough assimilation into the later compositional practice not only of Balakirev himself but that of his followers Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, and Borodin, not to mention such postkuchkist epigones as Glazunov, Lyadov, and Lyapunov. The most immediately striking characteristic is the avoidance of dominant harmony—this at a time when advanced Western (read: Wagnerian) harmonic practice was based on ever more emphatic dominant prolongations. The setting of theme I (in “Russian,” or Dorian minor), on which Balakirev based the slow introduction of his second overture, is particularly resolute in this regard. The low Cs of the melody are all harmonized with minor V chords, and the final cadence invokes the major IV. Also noteworthy is the articulation of the chordal accompaniment, which emphasizes in quasi-cadential fashion every arrival at the low C, which is the peremennosf tone (i.e., the “alternate tonic”).

EXAMPLE 8.6. Themes from Balakirev’s second Overture on Russian Themes (1863-64). Reproduced from his anthology Sbornik russkikh narodnïkh pesen (St. Petersburg, 1866)

It is instructive to compare this harmonization with those of the themes that had furnished the slow introduction to Kamarinskaya and to Balakirev’s first overture, for by doing so we may observe how deliberate a cultivation this “neo-Russian” harmonic style was. In example 8.7, Glinka’s wedding song is given first as he harmonized it in 1839 for his song “Northern Star,” and then as it is first harmonized in Kamarinskaya (its first statement there being all unisono). These settings derive much of their charm from the use of chromatic auxiliary tones. This harmonic feature is exploited with especial assiduity in the Kamarinskaya version, producing an effect in the second and third measures (the chromatic pass between A and G in both directions in the middle voice) that Gerald Abraham pinpointed over sixty years ago as one of “The Elements of Russian Music,” at least Russian music of this particular vintage.³² It arises not out of any response to the nature of the original melody, however, but as an outgrowth of the use of applied dominants, something Balakirev, as we have seen, tended to eschew.

EXAMPLE 8.7. Glinka’s harmonizations of the wedding song

The harmonization of the bïlina melody in the slow introduction to Balakirev’s first overture is still very much within the Glinka tradition, though it gives evidence of an original and sensitive ear (and of things to come). Example 8.8 gives all three statements of the melody, at least in part, for each contributes something of harmonic interest. The melody uses six tones, equivalent to the major scale minus the seventh degree. But this is merely a structural equivalence, not a functional one, for the tune ends not on what would be the tonic of that putative major scale but rather on the lower fifth degree. Common practice dictates that this tone be treated as a dominant, and that is how Balakirev in fact harmonized the melody on its second and third appearances (examples 8.8b and c, which are immediately consecutive in the overture). In example 8.8c, he actually tacked on a cadential phrase (bracketed in the example) to steer the tune back to the proper tonic. In example 8.8b, the ending of the melody is unretouched, but the harmonization clearly identifies the concluding note as the dominant (the French sixth preparation, the cadential suspension).

The first statement (example 8.8a), however, is magical and prophetic. There are no full chords, and the two-part harmony is fraught with a delicious ambiguity. What sounds (and looks) like a sustained dominant pedal in the violins—an effect plagiarized in many later Russian pieces, perhaps most famously in Borodin’s In Central Asia of 1880—is never resolved as such but instead is reapproached in a fashion that stabilizes it, so that one doesn’t know whether to interpret the pair of chords at the end as iii-V in B major or as vi-I in a Mixolydian F(t. This ambiguous, skeletal harmony seems to be an attempt, and an inspired one, at rendering a style of folk harmony that must have been quite familiar to Balakirev from his daily aural experience in Nizhniy Novgorod (the so-called podgoloski, “undervoices”) but that would not be reflected in the published repertoire of “scientific” folk song transcriptions until Yuliy Melgunov’s first collection (1879). Also related to podgoloski is the way the little horn and clarinet phrases in the seventh and eighth measures foreshadow in diminution the motion of the “harmonizing” violin line, as shown by the brackets in the example. Add to that the instrumental color, which seems an imitation of such peasant wind instruments as the rozhok (“shepherd’s horn”) and the svirel’ (panpipes), and one has a measure of Balakirev’s unprecedentedly open-eared approach to the tonality and the sonority of Russian folk song.

EXAMPLE 8.8. Balakirev’s harmonizations of the bïlina theme

What was a unique and exceptional passing phenomenon in the first overture became the rule in the second, and even began to govern long-range tonal organization. Like the wedding song in Kamarinskaya, the slow theme of the introduction in the second overture begins with an all’unisono statement, but the final pair of measures is fully harmonized. The whole gesture is then immediately repeated, forming parallel periods (example 8.9). The cadence of the first period is harmonized very much like the setting in the folk song anthology of 1866 (cf. example 8.6): a plagal cadence through a major IV, evoking the “Russian minor.” The second period has a different termination, however. The pair of horns picks up the A (the lower neighbor, or peremen-nost’ tone) on its first appearance, and the continuation is transposed down a step so that the At is tonicized at the end, again through a plagal—that is, dominantless—cadence. Thus the tonal “mutability” of the original melody is reinforced through a tonal progression in the overture. To a degree unprecedented in music Russian or otherwise, tonal properties of folk music have been allowed to govern those of art music.

EXAMPLE 8.9. Balakirev, second Overture on Russian Themes, mm. 5-25

In keeping with his general avoidance of dominant harmony in the minor mode, Balakirev does not employ a single authentic cadence over the course of the introduction, only plagal ones. And these are often deployed in chains suggesting the use of a term like “applied subdominant,” as at the very end of the introduction, in which a progression along the “circle of fourths” leads back from the peremennosf tone (A) to the tonic for the final cadence: A-E-B

Like the first overture, the second is cast in the form of a sonata-allegro embedded within a larger ABA form, effected by a concluding reprise of the introduction as coda (see diagram 8.3). And here, too, the principle of pere-mennosf affects the tonal plan. Whereas in the first overture Balakirev’s formal procedure had created no tonal ambiguity, because the key of the introduction and that of the “first theme” had been parallel tonics (B major/minor), he now invoked a “Lisztian” third relation between the B minor of the introduction and the D major of the first theme. Thus a sonata form in D is ambiguously embedded within an ABA structure in B. These are—not at all by accident, of course—the very keys on which the famous modulation in Kamarinskaya had turned, and as a matter of fact the transition from the end of the introduction to the beginning of the sonata-allegro is patently modeled on that modulation, with the highly characteristic difference that Balakirev goes directly from ii₃⁴ to I, eliding out the dominant harmony and (by touching G in the bass) turning the progression in effect into a plagal cadence. Compare example 8.10 with example 8.3d.

The peremennost’ -like “stalemate” effect between the regions of B and D is enhanced by using Bt minor as the key of the second theme (theme III) and its parallel major as the key of the closing theme (theme IV). Balakirev symmetrically completes the key scheme, moreover, by starting the development section in F# major: a full rotation of major thirds is thus achieved.³³ Structurally important dominant relations occur only twice: in the preparation of the second theme in the exposition, and in the retransition to the recapitulation. Yet even in those places peremennosf relations play a part, for in both cases the dominant pedal is approached by the use of theme I, harmonized as in its second appearance in the introduction, with tonic progressing to lower neighbor, which then functions as dominant.

But alongside this “declassicalization” of key relations—something that was going on in the West as well, along different lines—there is a remarkable growth in symphonic style, measured (as the nineteenth century measured it) in terms of motivic development and “thematic dramaturgy.” As example 8.6 shows, from each of his themes Balakirev quite systematically extracted at least one motivic cell to furnish material for transitions and development (they are labeled p, q, r, and s). Thanks to the greatly increased reliance on this technique, the second overture contains a far greater amount of tonally unstable, dynamic writing than the first, full of excellently sustained tonal tensions and free at last from the stranglehold of ostinato phrasing, which had been practically the sole means of propulsion in the first overture (as it had also been, of course, in Kamarinskaya). The phrase structure of the second overture is newly pliant and unpredictable. All themes are presented Beethoven fashion, with momentary departures leading back to climactic statements.

DIAGRAM 8. 3. Balakirev, second Overture on Russian Themes (1863-64), form diagram

EXAMPLE 8.10. Balakirev, second Overture on Russian Themes, transition to the Allegro

And as has often been observed in the literature, Balakirev’s motivic work is exceedingly resourceful and sophisticated, especially as regards contrapuntal juxtapositions. These often involve combinations of one or another of the extracted motives with theme I, which functions throughout the overture as a kind of motto, somewhat on the order of the wedding song in Kamarinskaya.³⁴ An example from the development section shows two linked instances of the procedure. The first of them maps a collage of motivic fragments onto a “Dorian” plagal progression of the type established in the introduction; the second is for its time (and place) a remarkably linear bit of writing (example 8.11a).

The very end of the overture is another memorable collage: an extension of theme II leads to a final poignant recollection of motive q (and even the final pizzicatos are thematic: cf. m. 4 of theme II), the whole attended by recollections of theme IV in the form of the harp accompaniment and the use of Lydian Etjs. If these collages seem merely “decorative,” compare example 8.11b, showing the modulatory bridge from the first theme to the second in the recapitulation. This is a “functional” passage if ever there was one, serving admirably the symphonic requirement of linkage.

In his second Overture on Russian Themes Balakirev did what many then (and even now) considered the impossible: he constructed an extended, sustained piece of symphonic music wholly out of folkloric material. Unlike Kamarinskaya or the first overture, the piece is ample, even imposing in its dimensions and its complexity of design. No longer is there any trace of ostinato variation in its structural scheme, though its line of descent from Kamarinskaya could not be more direct, and though there remain countless details of scoring, harmony, and general facture betraying its indebtedness to Glinka’s example.³⁵ But Glinka’s whimsicality has been replaced by an urgent earnestness of purpose. And where the older composer had sought to entertain, his disciple now seeks to impress with his powers of construction and to exalt with his sense of climax and peroration. Kamarinskaya and the first overture had remained close in concept to their sources: their impulse and “content,” quite simply, had been song and dance. The second overture marked such an advance in the symphonic dimension and variety of pacing, such a radical reweighting of structural priorities in favor of transition and development, departure and arrival, as to amount to a difference not merely in degree of technical mastery (for Glinka’s could hardly be excelled) but in actual kind.

EXAMPLE 8.11. Balakirev, second Overture on Russian Themes, from the development section

Indeed, the second overture’s dominant impression is that of narrative, or what Balakirev later termed “instrumental drama”—the first such piece to have been completed by any Russian save the Germanophile Rubinstein. And when such a composition is based upon “characteristic” material of any kind, the question immediately raised is not “What is it?” but “What’s it about?” Or, to make this rather loose thought somewhat more rigorous, in terms of Meyer’s well-known formulation: the “kinetic-syntactic” processes of Balakirev’ s second overture are so highly developed as inevitably to lend a “connotative” dimension to the national material.³⁶ The piece seems no longer to be a Fantaisie pittoresque guided solely by “innate musical feeling.” It means something; it is in some sense—but what sense?—a statement about Russia.

This impression, already strongly conveyed by the qualities of the second overture’s structure and style, is amply confirmed by the work’s compositional and publication history. Yet even here we shall confront some paradoxes—paradoxes that suggest that the programmatic quality is in fact an absolute, with an a priori existence independent of the specific programmatic content. This programmatic element—brought about by the conjunction of a highly elaborated and kinetic structure with a highly characteristic thematic content—was, moreover, an essential contributing factor to Balakirev’s authentic nationalism.

THE PERIOD of exacerbated musical politics immediately preceding the founding of Rubinstein’s Conservatory in 1862 coincided with what was generally a turbulent moment in Russian political and social life—the aftermath of the Crimean War and the multiple far-reaching reforms of the early reign of Alexander II. A typical incident of those years was a series of student demonstrations at the beginning of the 1861—62 academic year that led to a great number of arrests and the temporary closing of the three leading Russian universities, those at St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kazan (where Balakirev had briefly studied). From his London exile the “radical democrat” Alexander Herzen greeted this outbreak of political activism among the youth of Russia with an enthusiastic editorial in his émigré journal The Bell (Kolokol), entitled “The Giant Wakes!” The article ended with an impassioned call to the students at the shut-down institutions:

In Russia the universities are closed, in Poland even the churches have been shut down, defiled by the police. There is neither light of reason nor light of religion! Where would they thus lead us in the dark? . . .So, where will you turn, brave youths, you who have been shut out from your studies? Where, indeed?

Listen closely, since darkness does not prevent hearing: from all sides of our enormous fatherland, from the Don and from the Urals, from the Volga and the Dnepr a moan is growing, a rumble is rising—it is the beginning of a tidal wave which is boiling up, attended by storms, after a horribly fatiguing calm. To the people! With the people!—That’s where you belong.³⁷

Stasov, who as an official of the St. Petersburg Imperial Public Library had privileged access to censored literature, was a regular reader of Herzen’s Ko-lokol, and its active tribune among his circle of intimates. In the early sixties, he bombarded the young Balakirev with radical reading matter, and for a time the latter was so receptive to it as to have actually contemplated an opera on a subject drawn from Chernïshevsky’s “nihilistic” novel What Is to Be Done?³⁸ According to a letter often quoted by Soviet historians, Stasov associated the conception of Balakirev’s second overture with their reading “The Giant Wakes!” together, and in particular with Herzen’s image of the rising tidal wave.³⁹ Nor is there any reason to doubt that this was the case; the reference occurs in a private communication in the form of an allusion to a mutually remembered event. And Balakirev had himself gone “to the people” the year before and “listened closely” to their folk-musical utterances. To associate musical populism with political liberalism had natural attractions for a young maverick musician who was engaged in battle with a musical establishment dominated by the aristocracy and staffed chiefly by Germans. The image of the rising wave may well have played a part in predisposing Balakirev’s musical imagination toward the dramatic and dynamic character by which his second overture so conspicuously differed from his first.

Indeed, and perhaps ironically, it was the thought of Herzen’s wave of popular unrest that first aroused Balakirev’s interest in Beethoven—the fount and origin of “German symphonism”—as a model. Soon after reading “The Giant Wakes!” Balakirev wrote to Stasov of his discovery, at a soirée at Cui’s, of Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture. “I’ll tell you its program,” Balakirev promised, rather enigmatically. “Very interesting! There is even a boiling tidal wave attended by storms.⁴⁰ Despite this evident enthusiasm, Balakirev seems to have done nothing further about the project of setting Herzen’s wave to music for a year and a half after writing this letter.⁴¹ When the overture was first performed, moreover, neither Alexander Serov’s with-eringly unfavorable review nor Cui’s predictably enthusiastic one made any reference to programmatic content, aquatic or otherwise.⁴²

But when in 1869 Balakirev finally published the work, five years after that first performance, he called it a “musical picture” and gave it the patently programmatic title 1000 Years. This alluded to the recently celebrated millennium of the quasi-legendary founding of the Russian state at Novgorod by the Varangian Prince Rurik in A.D. 862. No evidence survives to suggest that either Balakirev or Stasov had any such idea in 1862, nor did Balakirev provide any clue in letter or preface to the specific relationship between title and music in 1869. But some indication of what he (or Stasov) may have had in mind can be found in a letter in which Stasov described to Balakirev a proposed design for the title page of the published score:

On the left there will be a drawing of “primeval Russia”—Moscow, or perhaps one of the autonomous princely cities; and finally, as if disappearing in the distance, “modern times”—some city, a rushing locomotive, telegraphs, some new buildings (only, it goes without saying, not the Senate and not the Admiralty).⁴³

This is pretty far from a rising wave of popular discontent. In fact it rather flies in the face of the previous conception, putting meliorism in place of social criticism. Nor is there anything in the score to connect with such a program, since none of the themes is any more archaic or modern than any of the others. Stasov, it is true, made a rather blatantly ex post facto attempt in an article of 1882 to justify the program of 1000 Years by fixing upon what we have called theme IV, the one composed by Balakirev himself (“the emerging new life is expressed in an enchanting, truly inspired melody of wondrous beauty”).⁴⁴ But the dodge is transparent, and one can readily agree with one Soviet writer, who finds in the second overture “neither drama nor history; it is merely a picture, a picture of Russia as seen through the eyes of a ‘man of the sixties’ [i.e., a progressive thinker], one who has felt the powerful strength, the spiritual beauty and the poetic gift of the ‘awakening’ populace”⁴⁵—an interpretation that takes the putative inspiration via Herzen quite nicely into account without pressing too insistently for specific programmatic content.

So why the change of title? Conceivably it was requested by the publisher, but it more likely reflected a change of heart. The nervous breakdown that interrupted Balakirev’s career took place right around this time, and was coupled with his well-known spiritual crisis and the attendant shift in his political sympathies. In fact, the vicissitudes of the second overture’s program were only beginning. Upon his return to musical life in the 1880s, Balakirev reissued a number of early works in revised editions. 1000 Years was one of these. It was retouched (rather inconsequentially) in 1884 and brought out by Bessel in 1890 with a new designation—”symphonic poem,” a new title—the old Slavonic “Rus’ “⁴⁶ and a new and detailed program, quite explicitly (if mendaciously) set out in a preface (signed and dated 14 February 1886), as follows:

The unveiling in 1862 in Novgorod of a monument to the Russian millennium was the occasion for the composition of the symphonic poem Rus’, which was originally published by the local music dealer A. Johansen under the title 1000 Years: A Musical Picture. As the basis of the composition I selected the themes of three folk songs from my own anthology, by which I wished to characterize three elements in our history: the pagan period, the Muscovite order, and the autonomous republican [udel’ no-vechevoy] system, reborn among the Cossacks. Strife among these elements, expressed in the symphonic development of these themes, has furnished the content of the instrumental drama, to which the present title is far better suited than the previous one, since the author had no intention of drawing a picture of our thousand-year history but only a wish to characterize some of its constituent elements. In republishing this work with the firm of Bessel and Co., I have reorchestrated it and significantly amended it.⁴⁷

But all that was really amended was the program; the music was hardly touched. And the amendment amounted this time to a volte-face. Far from either a social protest or a melioristic panorama, we are now faced with a Slavophile glorification of Russian antiquity, particularly of those quasi-communal forms of social organization that were maintained avatarlike by the Cossacks, for which they were admired by pan-Slavists and reactionaries, and for which they were reviled by every progressive or liberal element. And Balakirev went even further. In the last edition of the score to come out within his lifetime (Zimmerman, 1907), he amended the sentence beginning “Strife among these elements . . .”to read: “Their strife, culminating in the fatal blow dealt all Russian religious and national aspirations by the reforms of Peter I, has furnished the content of the instrumental drama.”⁴⁸

What an anomaly this is: from its putative beginnings in Herzen, the ideological content of Balakirev’s overture (or picture, or symphonic poem) has swung 180 degrees to the right. For so had his outlook: from a “man of the sixties” the composer had become a xenophobic reactionary of the Nikolai II era. He even went so far as to claim, in a letter to a Czech Slavophile acquaintance, that his intention in composing Rus’ had been “to depict how Peter the Great killed our native Russian life.”⁴⁹

Now there is if anything even less in the actual thematic content of the second overture to support the specific program of Rus’ than there is to support that of 1000 Years. Both programs were concocted ex post facto. But while they cannot be reconciled ideologically either with each other or with the original stimulus in Herzen, all three contents have in common a principled commitment to native, not merely national, character as a source of artistic inspiration, and beyond that, to the use of such material as a kind of civic deed. And all three ideological contents require for their musical support the highly kinetic symphonic form Balakirev called “instrumental drama.” All three interpretations of the music of the second overture might seem equally plausible, without considering the history of the piece. But applied to the first overture, which lacks what I have called the programmatic quality, all would appear equally absurd. So the radical expansion of form Balakirev achieved in his second overture can be seen now as an effort to accommodate an ideological, not merely evocative, content. And this effort was demanded by a commitment to artistic nationalism that the aristocratic composer of Kamarinskaya not only lacked but despised, and one, moreover, that anticipated—and how ironically, given Balakirev’s eventual politics!—the arts policies of the Soviet state. Nor is this the first time the antecedents of Soviet aesthetics have been located in surprisingly un-Marxian terrain.⁵⁰ Glinka’s acorn has yielded some strange and bitter fruit.

BUT ALL that is quite another story. Balakirev’s Russian overtures, particularly the second, were hardly devoid of more immediate issue. The two members of his circle who shared his gift for instrumental composition took them repeatedly as a model. Closest of all was the Overture on Russian Themes, Op. 28 (1866), by the twenty-two-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov. It is practically a plagiarism: scored for almost precisely the same orchestra as the second overture, it is cast in precisely the same form, sonata-allegro on two themes framed by a slow introduction and postlude on a third. It relies in its development section on the same contrapuntal-collage techniques, and is even based on a third-relation as tonal axis (except that it goes in the opposite direction: D—F instead of D-B). Even in so mature a composition as the “Russian Easter” Overture (Svetliy prazdnik, 1888), Rimsky followed the Balakirev model with scarcely a departure. One might also mention the first movement of his Symphony no. 1 (1862), in which the tune “Down by Mother Volga” is given a very kinetic treatment, or even the first movement of his Symphony no. 3 in C (1873), in which Rimsky used a symmetrically third-related key scheme adapted from Balakirev’s second overture: in the exposition the second theme comes in E major, and it is recapitulated in Ah.

We have already noted the similarity between the beginning of Borodin’s In Central Asia and the introduction to Balakirev’s first overture. The sustained dominant pedal in the high violins persists (with one brief departure) for some ninety measures, finally giving way to a texture of sustained winds over rapid pizzicato strings. This latter instrumental idea was employed by Balakirev in both his overtures: in the first at rehearsal no. 4, in the second at two measures after no. 1. It was so widely copied thereafter as to become a veritable style russe cliché. The culmination of Borodin’s “musical picture” (for that is what he called it, after 1000 Years) is a contrapuntal combination of the two main themes, the first of which, moreover, is always presented in key rotations by thirds.

In a famous letter to the singer Lyubov Karmalina, Borodin averred that among the members of the quondam Balakirev circle “individuality is beginning to gain the upper hand over school.”⁵¹ In spite of this, his Central Asia, written several years after the letter, shows the extent to which Balakirev had in fact succeeded in establishing a school with his Russian overtures. And for all Balakirev’s xenophobic rejection of the West, the soil he tended would have remained barren without the fairly liberal application of German fertilizer. The impulse to write an imposing symphonic work based on Russian folk songs is at least as much a Westernizing impulse as a nationalistic one, else why not leave the folk songs to the folk? In a sense it was the very opposite of what Herzen had called for. Balakirev had not gone “to the people.” He had brought the people into the high culture, embodying their musical artifacts in works meant not for them but for an educated urban elite, whose criteria of musical value and importance (like Balakirev’s own) were irrevocably formed on the instrumental music of the German classics and of such moderns as Schumann and Liszt. Their methods and techniques of formal construction and thematic-motivic elaboration were what gave Balakirev the equipment he needed to turn Glinka’s sprouting acorn into a rooted tree.

The final irony is the rapidity with which the oak became petrified. As early as the 1890s followers of Balakirev’s methods had turned his style into a rigidly formulaic, superprofessionalized canon, fostered by the conservatory under Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, and by the lavishly endowed publishing house, concert series, and annual prize competitions underwritten by Mi-trofan Belyayev. Balakirev himself, owing to the interruption in his career and his subsequent commitment to musical as well as political reaction, became his own chief epigone.

In the 1860s and 1870s, however, the ambivalence of Balakirev’s position was for the most part lost on his fellow kuchkists, especially the remaining pair, Cui and Musorgsky, who were vocal composers at heart. They saw only the battle against the short-range enemies, “rootless cosmopolitans” and colonizers like Rubinstein and Serov. There is a rather puzzling, if seldom noticed, reference to Balakirev’s second overture near the end of a very long letter that Musorgsky wrote to him about Serov’s Judith. The letter is dated 10 June 1863, about a month before Balakirev began concentrated work on the piece. The part that is relevant to our present concern runs as follows: “Will you finish your Russian overture by winter? I would like very much to hear it. I feel that I will love it above all your other works; judging by what I already know of it, it will be very much to my taste, and besides it is the first thing of yours untainted by Germany.”⁵² But what could he have known of the work? Clearly, nothing more than the themes (and only the ones collected along the Volga at that; the original theme IV had not yet been invented), and perhaps something of the style of their harmonization. This much, certainly, was anti-German—and was in fact pronounced ganzfalsch by a German professor in Prague.⁵³

But in the light of the finished product, especially when compared to Kamarinskaya, Musorgsky’s pronouncement is fairly risible. And when Cui asserts, in his review of the second overture’s first performance, that it was “completely novel in form,”⁵⁴ one feels one is confronting “kuchkism” in the quick: the critic’s attention, like Musorgsky’s, is entirely on the piquant details, not on the underlying structure. (One could say as much about the composer of William Ratcliff.) For form was the one area in which Balakirev was far from an innovator. He was a consolidator, a synthesizer who at last managed to reconcile Russian themes with what Musorgsky derisively called “German transitions.”⁵⁵ By these efforts and by the example of his overtures he made the soil of Russian instrumental music fertile. Without him the acorn might have remained an acorn.

¹ Eisrich was Balakirev’s piano teacher in Nizhnïy Novgorod; through him the boy had made the personal acquaintance of Ulïbïshev and also his first acquaintance with Glinka’s music. It was at a concert directed by Eisrich that Balakirev heard “Ne tomi, rodimïy” and was moved to make his transcription. See A. S. Lyapunova and E. E. Yazovitskaya, Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1967), pp. 15-16.

² Compare, for example, the Rondo brilliant for piano and orchestra, Op. 98, by Hummel (on whose famous septet Balakirev modeled his early octet), composed for a Russian tour in 1822. Its main theme is a Russian folk song, “Zemlyanichka yagodka” (Little Raspberry), which Hummel found in the same source that had served Beethoven for his Rasumovsky quartets, the Sobraniye narodnïkh russkikh pesen (1790) of Lvov and Pratsch. In the course of his international career, Hummel was obliged to favor his audiences with variations and rondos on English, Scottish, German, and Dutch tunes, not to mention his Hungarian Dances, Op.23, or his German Dances with Battle Coda, Op. 25. Cf. the worklist by Joel Sachs in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. 8, pp. 785-88.

³ Letter to Vasiliy Englehardt, quoted in Boris Asafyev, Glinka (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1947), p. 267.

⁴ Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 90.

⁵ M. I. Glinka, Pis’ma i dokumentï (Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 2) (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1953), p. 509.

⁶ “Ne tomi, rodimïy,” it might well be noted, was by no means among the most obviously “national” numbers in A Life for the Tsar, anyway. As already observed in chapter 2, it is cast in the style of a bïtovoy romans, or salon romance, of a type very popular in Russia in the early nineteenth century, but of miscegenated Russo-Italian character. For more on the style of such pieces, see “‘Little Star’: An Étude in the Folk Style,” in R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 38-70.

⁷ Lyapunova and Yazovitskaya, Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev, pp. 24-25.

⁸ The first was the basis for Balakirev’s Fandango-Etude for piano, completed 14 February 1856; the second was given to Balakirev on Glinka’s departure from St. Petersburg on 26 April of that year, and became the basis for the orchestral Overture on a Spanish March Theme (1857).

⁹ Lyapunova and Yazovitskaya, Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev, p. 30.

¹⁰ Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, p. 90. Italics added.

¹¹ Grigoriy Timofeyev, “M. A. Balakirev,” in Russkaya mïsl’ (1912), quoted in Edward Garden, Balakirev (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 31.

¹² E. L. Frid, “Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo,” in Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev: Issledovaniya i stat’i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1961), p. 93.

¹³ Diary entry, 27 June 1888. Quoted in David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 1.

¹⁴ Viktor Tsukkerman, “Kamarinskaya’ Glinki i yeyo traditsii v russkoy muzïke (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1957).

¹⁵ Cf. Glinka to Kukolnik, 8/18 April 1845: “In Spain I will set to work on my proposed [orchestral] fantaisies—the originality of the local melodies there will be of significant help to me, the more so as ... my unbridled imagination needs a text or some positive data” (Glinka, Pis’ma i dokumentï, p. 276).

¹⁶ M. I. Glinka, “Zapiski” (Memoirs), in Polnoye sobraniye sochiveniy: Literaturnïye pro-izvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzika, 1973), p. 333. The reference to the drunk alludes to the way the critic Feofil Tolstoy (Rostislav) had sought to “explain” the repeated-note brass figures at rehearsal nos. 12 and 13 to the Empress Alexandra.

¹⁷ The source of the wedding song “Iz-za gor, gor visokikh” is Glinka’s own notation in his memoirs. The traditional dance song “Kamarinskaya” was in widespread dissemination.

¹⁸ An interesting selection of naigrishi transcribed by various folklorists is given in Tsukkerman’s book (see n. 14), pp. 92-111. A striking field recording of a wedding band extemporizing at full tilt on a naigrish called Timonya (a close relative of the tune Glinka used) may be heard in the set Muzykal’nïy fol’klor narodov SSSR, issued in conjunction with the VII International Music Congress in Moscow, 1971 (Melodiya D-030833-36).

¹⁹ And as I have shown elsewhere, the Dance of the Earth in The Rite of Spring is also based on a naigrish. See my “Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33 (1980), esp. pp. 533-43.

²⁰ Quoted in Brown, Mikhail Glinka, p. 273.

²¹ This song is also known as “Northern Star” (Severnaya zvezda). The version of the folk tune in it, though in a different key, is note-for-note identical to the one in Kamarinskaya and was evidently the source for the latter.

²² Cf. Lev Aronovich Barenboim, Anton Grigoryevich Rubinshteyn, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1957), pp. 181-84. These sentiments were echoed and even intensified in Rubinstein’s notorious squib “On Music in Russia,” written for home consumption and published in January 1861 as propaganda for the conservatory. Cf. Barenboim, Anton Grigoryevich Rubinshteyn, pp. 236-39.

²³ Cf. Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, pp. 82-84.

²⁴ Anton Rubinstein, Muzïka i yeyo predstaviteli (Moscow: P. Jurgenson, 1891), pp. 40, 83-84.

²⁵ See especially his vociferous answer to Rubinstein’s “On Music in Russia,” entitled “A Conservatory in Russia” (Konservatoriya v Rossii), which appeared in the conservative paper Severnaya pchela on 24 February 1861. Some extracts are given in Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, pp. 82-83.

²⁶ For details of the Rubinstein-Balakirev rivalry, see Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), chapter 4.

²⁷ Theme I, Bïlina (Pesnya pro Dobrïnyu): Mikhail Stakhovich, Sobraniye russkikh narodnïkh pesen, vol. 3 (Moscow: M. Bernard. 1854), no. 1: “A white birch bends toward the ground, where the grass lies silky ...” Also used by Grechaninov in the opera Dobrinya Nikitich.

Theme II, Khovorod (ceremonial dance): Lvov and Pratsch, Sobraniye narodnïkh russkikh pesen (St. Petersburg: Top. Gornago uchilishcha, 1790), no. 62. “A birch tree stood in the field, all leafy it stood ...” Also used by Fomin in Yamshchiki na podstave. Glinka in the Tarantella for Piano, Chaikovsky in the finale of the Symphony no. 4, and Grechaninov in the Russian Folk Dances, Op. 130.

Theme III, dance tune: Daniyil Kashin, Russkiye narodnïye pesni, part 3 (Moscow: Se-livanovsky, 1834), no. 98. “Quite early last evening I sat down to a feast, a merry get-together ...” Also used in the fourth tableau of Petrushka.

²⁸ Kazachok may even have taken a leaf from Balakirev’s first overture; its slow introduction is preceded by a fast flourish.

²⁹ For a consideration of the pochvennik collectors and their impact on art music, see R. Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, 2d ed. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994), chapter 4.

³⁰ For illustration of these points, and for further detail on Balakirev’s harmonic practice after 1860, see Taruskin, “Little Star,”pp. 57-68.

³¹ I (introduction): Svadebnaya (wedding song) from the Nizhnïy Novgorod guberniya, Knyaginsky district; Sbornik russkikh narodnïkh pesen, sostavlennïy M. A. Balakirevïm, no. 1. “There was no wind, then all of a sudden it blew ...”

II (first theme): Khorovodnaya (round dance) from the Samara guberniya, Stavropol district; Sbornik, no. 2. “I’m off to Constantinople . . .”

III (second theme): Khorovodnaya from Pramzin in the Simbirsk guberniya; Sbornik, no. 22. “Merry Kate, brown-eyed Kate, dance round the room, stamp your little feet ...”

IV (closing theme): original tune, transcribed from the score. Balakirev’s authorship is attested by a presentation inscription to Stasov; see Frid, “Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo,” p. 140.

³² Music and Letters 9 (1928): 51-58. Kamarinskaya features this device very prominently indeed (see, for example, the bass between rehearsal nos. 14 and 15), and even Stravinsky makes pointed reference to such usages in the Danse russe from Petrushka—which, one should recall, is an evocation of St. Petersburg in the 1830s (see the passage seven measures before no. 43). But cf. the “orientalist” usage discussed in the next chapter.

³³ Something similar had occurred in the development section of the first overture, which was based on symmetrical minor-third relations: Bk G minor, and Dk Cf. diagram 2.

³⁴ The most palpable borrowing of this kind from Kamarinskaya is the unexpected return of theme I as bridge to the second theme in the exposition.

³⁵ To cite one last example of this indebtedness: Balakirev makes his transition from the sonata-allegro to the coda (reprise of the introduction) by invoking Glinka’s dropping semitone progression (cf. example 8.3d), approaching B minor from D major (in ⁶₄ position) through its relative D. relative D.

³⁶ Cf., inter alia, Leonard B. Meyer, “Universalism and Relativism in the Study of Ethnic Music,” Ethnomusicology 4, no. 2 (1960): 49-54.

³⁷ “Ispolin prosipayetsya,” Kolokol, no. 110(1 November 1861), reprinted in Alexander Herzen, Sochineniya, vol. 7 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1958), p. 392.

³⁸ Cf. letter of Balakirev to Stasov of 27 April 1863 (Lyapunova and Yazovitskaya, Miliy Alekseyevich Balakirev, p. 90).

³⁹ Letter of 11 October 1869. A. S. Lyapunova, ed., M. A. Balakirev i V. V. Stasov: Pere-piska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1970), p. 270.

⁴⁰ 4 January 1862 (ibid., p. 181). According to the editorial notes to the correspondence, Stasov red-penciled at this point in the margin, “Beethoven was a prophet!” (ibid., p. 408).

⁴¹ The first extant sketches for the overture were jotted down in July 1863. Cf. Lyapunova, Balakirev i Stasov: Perepiska, p. 420.

⁴² For Serov’s review see A. N. Serov, Kriticheskiye stat’i, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg: Tip. Depar-tamenta udelov, 1894), p. 2020. Cui’s is in César Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1952), pp. 18-19.

⁴³ 17 December 1868 (Lyapunova, Balakirev i Stasov: Perepiska, p. 262). In the end this design was rejected in favor of a more conventional Russian landscape.

⁴⁴ Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, p. 95.

⁴⁵ Frid, “Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo,” p. 136.

⁴⁶ Not Russia, as it is usually rendered in English. Balakirev was quite explicit on this point in a letter to Stasov of 8 February 1886, in which the proper wording of the French titular material was discussed. “Shouldn’t the Slavonic Rus be translated into the Latin Russia (on the order of Liszt’s Hungaria)! Otherwise, if we translate it as Russie, it will mean ‘Rossiya’ [i.e., the modern name for the country], which I do not want” (A. S. Lyapunova, ed., M. A. Balakirev i V. V. Stasov: Perepiska, vol. 2 [Moscow: Muzika, 1971], p. 82). In English, of course, “Russia” should be avoided for the same reason that “Russie” is to be avoided in French. Best leave the title untranslated.

⁴⁷ Quoted from Lyapunova, ed., Balakirev i Stasov: Perepiska, vol. 2, p. 279.

⁴⁸ Quoted from Frid, “Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo,” p. 132.

⁴⁹ To. I. Kolaf (1907). Ibid.

⁵⁰ For a consideration of the Tolstoyan background of much Soviet aesthetics, see my review of Molchanov’s The Dawns Are Quiet Here in Musical Quarterly 62 (1976): 105-15.

⁵¹ 1 June 1876. S. A. Dianin, ed., Pis ma A. P. Borodina, vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1936), p. 107.

⁵² M. P. Musorgsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1971), p. 70.

⁵³ Cf. the letter from Balakirev to Musorgsky 11/23 January 1867, quoted in Garden, Balakirev, p. 57.

⁵⁴ Izbrannïye stat’i, p. 18.

⁵⁵ Cf. his letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 5 July 1867, in which he described his St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain: “The general character of the thing is heated, there are no longueurs, transitions are compact, without German preparations, which lightens things considerably” (Literaturoye naslediye, vol. 1, 87).