PART II
2
Really, a man of forty-four, a paterfamilias in this out-of-the way district, playing on the violoncello!
—Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children (1861)
Medical student Evgeny Bazarov, the original nihilist and one of the great characters of Russian fiction, felt both surprise and contempt for a middle-aged landowner and serf owner fiddling his life away on a country estate. The cello that found its way out onto the steppe to the modest gentry mansion of Nikolai Kirsanov made him an apt emblem of the myriad real-life serf-owning “fathers” who took their pleasure in the arts and brought the arts into the countryside. But Bazarov and his friend, the cellist’s son, as students and “new people” of the late 1850s, had no time for silly pleasures—especially ones so remote from the raw life of the peasantry. The words quoted above from the novel Fathers and Children—quietly menacing in their quizzical tone—prefigure those hurled forth during the Russian Revolution when radicals promised to liquidate the “landowner culture” (which is where Lenin deposited opera). To Bazarov, the older man’s cello playing seemed more scandalous than his begetting a child with a youthful serf mistress. Bazarov aimed his dart not at the exploitation of humans to gain pleasure in music, for Kirsanov did not own a serf orchestra, but at the act of taking solitary high cultural enjoyment deep in the provincial backwoods.
How differently resonate the atrocity stories about serf musicians of the period. In one oft-cited account, a serf owner sent his serf violinist to Italy for further study and the violinist returned a virtuoso. At an evening party, the master had the musician play a Viotti violin concerto; but as each guest arrived, the host commanded the violinist to begin from the beginning. After three hours of continuous play, the violinist asked if he could rest. The master, outraged by the "capriciousness" of the serf, threatened to have him whipped. The unfortunate man fled to the kitchen, took a hatchet and chopped off his right index finger, uttering the words: “Maudit soit le talent qui n’a pu me mettre a l’abri des traitemens d’un esclave.” The story was retold and embellished many times. One version relates that the serf was actually flogged in front of the guests, and chopped off all the fingers of his left hand. But in any version, the focus is on the misuse of power rather than on misbegotten exotic pleasure.1
The vignettes may serve to remind us that in the twilight years of serfdom, music was very much part of Russian life, though many Western, and even Russian, accounts of culture ignore it. “In the first half of the nineteenth century, music practically did not exist in Russia,” wrote an official of the Russian Musical Society in 1909.2 The frequent invocation of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky’s opinion of Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskaya as the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russia’s music grew reinforces the myth. Russian and Soviet music scholars knew well the “missing story” of Russian music in the Glinka and pre-Glinka eras, but they often deified icons such as Glinka and read all culture through a star-shaped prism. The works and the tastes of common folk and the “progressive” intelligentsia were worthy of attention, while alleged “reactionaries” and obscurantists—tsars and magnates—got short shrift.
The Russian Ear
Music functions in a social field: audience, “ideology,” a distribution system, the critical establishment, the works, their creators and performers, and the physical setting of performance space. The story of the fluid and changing relationships between private, social, and public spheres of musical life begins with the smallest space within the private sphere—the home, haven to family and the domestic muse. One might get the impression from textbook coverage of the last decades of serfdom that educated Russians heard only drill-field commands, salon gossip, poetry, chancery talk, and some underground political discourse. Melodic sounds have been somehow filtered out of history even though towns, villages, and estates resonated with church bells, chimes, sacred choral singing, folk songs, romances, and classical music of every sort. Machine music erupted from the hurdy-gurdy; the Viennese Phys-harmonium that played simplified overtures, marches, and symphonies; and a Kalaidaccousticon on which one could “compose” a million waltzes. Soviet popular treatments stressed the ubiquity of music in early nineteenth century Russia—workplace, humble cabin, highway, drawing room, and lofty salon—but often ignored two great sites of musical life: the imperial court and the village church.
Alain Corbin has evoked the rural bells of France as an engine of memory, an auditory sign of community and the solemn punctuation of the everyday. What he calls the “campanarian sensibility” partook of the “social circulation of emotions.” In Russia, the feelings evoked within an “auditory landscape” fed the extraordinarily wide taste for musical sonorities that marked burials, weddings, alarms, victories, or moments in the sacred calendar. Village bells also melded “country” associations with elegiac longings—the familiar Russian toska, whether linked to a dying love, a lost way of life, or faded youth. Emanating from sleigh or church tower, bell-like images and rhythms informed a great many folk tunes and composed songs in this era, and formed a key element in taste formation and in the community of pleasure among Russians of all stations.3 Inside many gentry homes, one could hear European art music. Since the symphonic classical canon that charted a line of greatness from Haydn to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn was not yet in place, composers now rarely heard such as Herold, Spohr, and Spontini still competed with the giants. The music found its way to homes through a dazzling array of piano arrangements, variations, transcriptions, fantasies, improvisations, and other adaptations of symphonic and theater music—Russian and foreign. To this must be added Russian genres of folk song adaptations and “folk song” compositions (including some by foreigners), Ukrainian and Gypsy melodies, military marches, and the patriotic songs of 1812 and after.
The song genre known as “romance” (romans) that ruled in home and recital room embraced a wide range of styles, some approaching the quality of art song or lied, others marked by greater emotional self-indulgence. Specialists call the Russian popular or urban love song of the time a bytovoi romans—a song about everyday life. Of the dozen or more best-remembered practitioners of this genre, only the major composer Mikhail Glinka is generally known outside Russia (fig. 7); but his output—though of high quality—enjoyed less repute than that of now more obscure figures: Verstovsky, Alyabev, Varlamov, Gurilev, Dubuque, and the Titovs.4 Like other cultural freight that rolled into Russia all through the eighteenth century, the romance quickly took on native coloration. Free with grammatical rules and generous with diminutives in lyrics emulating peasant speech and singing, the Russian romance of nature or of love is gentle, sentimental, a bit elegiac—and seldom cruel or vulgar. The principal pool of verse drew from folk forms or from the poets of the day. Thomas Hodge has eloquently described the musical-literary intercourse: the poet writes, the composer sets, the song is published, performed, and adapted. The great poets of the Golden Age—Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Lermontov, and the rest—had their works set to music; and their verses helped to shape the lyrical beauties of the music itself. A few who preferred “real” poetry scorned the romance genre as dubious fluff for the society woman of low taste. Pushkin initially vowed not to write verses for a composer—even the admired Rossini—but then softened and wrote for Glinka and other composers.5
The variegated body of music moved around the country through the agency of people, pianos, and print. Sheet music began flowing out of the notation typographies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The flood of song sheets, books, albums, and notes appended to journals offered arranged folk music and composed “Russian” songs side by side with such works as Giovanni Paisiello’s Miller's Wife. Voice, piano, guitar, and violin arrangements in every style and genre appeared in shops on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky, Malaya Morskaya, and Millionaya streets. Troubadour du Nord, Odeon, Minstrel, and Northern Lyre became, like bookshops, centers of conversation about music and theater. Though a few provincial towns had music shops—Voronezh among the oldest—Petersburg remained the hub of musical distribution. The poet Pëtr Vyazemsky wrote from Moscow to a friend there: “Send my wife everything there is for the piano from the opera Der Freischütz: waltzes, marches, overtures, and so forth.” Paralleling the oral transmission of folk songs, the urban print network made works available to taverns, road houses, merchant and artisan quarters, as well as wealthy gentry homes. In 1831, a baron commissioned from the Bernard shop waltzes for his musically inclined fiancée. The demand rose for martial, court, funeral, and dance music—polkas, gallops, waltzes, and ballroom steps. Romances and Italian arias proved to be more marketable than the sheet music of Glinka.6
German piano makers arrived in the middle of the eighteenth century; many settled on Petersburg’s Vasilevsky Island and established businesses on or near the Nevsky. One of the first opened in 1809 in Engelhardt House, a site of symphonic concerts. Early keyboard forms and designations—clavecin, virginal, spinet, claviciterium, cembalo, clavicimbal, Flügel, harpsichord, clavichord—gave way to the pianoforte which could control volume and sustain notes. In modern Russian parlance, the grand or royale came in three sizes—home, salon, and concert; the upright is called pianino. Imported Viennese instruments came into fashion in the late eighteenth century, priced from two hundred to a thousand rubles. Ludwig Kostner advertised his products by quoting Mozart who endorsed them as “the most perfect pianos.” The Russian public could buy instruments in music shops, piano makers’ shops, and furniture stores. Russians and foreigners opened piano factories starting in the reign of Alexander I. The renowned Liechtenthal fled to Russia when crowds wrecked his business during the Belgian revolution of 1830.7 The Italian composer, performer, and entrepreneur Muzio Clementi, who traveled through Europe demonstrating his piano models, became one of their most effective marketers in Petersburg. He arrived in 1802 with a young Irish pianist in tow—John Field—who soon abandoned the demonstration bench and took Europe and Russia by storm as a virtuoso. One of the best ways to sell pianos was to perform in public, and this Clementi and Field did in elegant Petersburg salons. Their sojourn had a dual effect: Clementi made piano sales rise; Field’s huge popularity caused a rush of European and Russian pupils to the capital which a musical wag dubbed "pianopolis."8
Keys to Intimacy
“My pupils,” wrote a piano teacher at the Maidens’ Institute in the distant Siberian town of Irkutsk, ''fanned out all over eastern Siberia, bringing with them to these nearly empty wastelands a love of refinement."9 Long before it intrigued and annoyed Turgenev’s Bazarov, the “love of refinement” in “empty wastelands” had become a feature of the inner life of educated Russia even in places remote from “society.” The network of instruments and notes that radiated outward from the capitals paralleled the thick literary journals as a shaper of cultural identity, and musical performance became an instrument of emerging civility. The everyday practices of music en famille exposed people, mostly gentry, to a variety of musical experiences, encouraged their training, and attuned them to the wider social sphere of musical salon and club and to the public sphere of concerts and musical theater open to all. The home, as the nucleus of musical experience in nineteenth-century Russia, also had a narrowing effect on musical life. The privateness of performance and listening fortified a view of the household as the center of cultural life among those who could afford to sustain it. An otherwise comic episode during a Franz Liszt concert of 1843 makes sense in the light of this persisting attitude. After wining and dining the great Hungarian virtuoso and hearing him play in their homes, a group of music-loving grandees in Moscow took him to the concert hall and tried to sit on stage with the pianist as he played and to do so without paying.10 Their essentially personal and proprietary view of the pianist as their guest and friend made them loath to sit with the public.
One normally thinks of the royal court as the site of monarchical spectacle rather than as a domestic cultural milieu. It was both of these and a center of musical activity—however socially exclusive. Richard Wortman has described in detail the genuine emotional intimacy of the court and family scenes of Nicholas I,11 resembling in its bourgeois piety that of other mid-nineteenth-century families—royal or otherwise. The new sensibility matched a partial and complex shift away from eighteenth-century “classical” values and styles in fashion, art, literature, and life. General Alexei Lvov (1798-1870), composer of the tsarist national anthem, attests to the sometimes exalted character of this private sphere in his recollections of musical moments in the vast eleven-hundred-room Winter Palace. About twice a month in the 1830s, Lvov wrote little pieces for a chamber ensemble, with the empress at the piano, Tsar Nicholas on cornet (he did not read music but had a good ear and lip), and various accomplished amateur courtiers: Matvei Vielgorsky on cello, one of the Apraxins on bass, and Lvov on violin, with the voices of courtiers Mikhail Vielgorsky, a Volkonsky, a Bartenev, and a Borozdin. These performances ceased in 1837 after a palace fire. Lvov accompanied the royal daughters’ voices on violin and put on miniature choral performances. Once, soon after the composition of “God Save the Tsar” (1833), the empress invited Lvov and a small gathering to sing it pianissimo. When the tsar descended to the small chamber and heard it, tears of joy began to flow. This expression of intimacy in art is worth stressing since the general image of Nicholas is that of an iron drillmaster who as a child preferred the drumbeat to music and the dance.12 Nicholas never became a great concertgoer, but as an adult his musical interests transcended the regimental band.
The Winter Palace and its appendages served as important sites of music performance, aside from the extravagant musical shows begun in the eighteenth century. Pavlovsk, the last of the great suburban palaces after Gatchina, Oranienbaum, Peterhof, and Tsarskoe Selo, was given to Paul by Catherine the Great in 1777 on the birth of his son, Alexander. Paul preferred Gatchina which he ran like a military base, but his widow Maria Fëdorovna (Sophia Dorothea of Würtemburg) turned Pavlovsk into a center of solo and chamber music played by professionals and amateur courtiers in the years 1801-28. A keyboard pupil of Dmitry Bortnyansky, she held concerts in the elegant Grecian Hall of the palace and patronized musical training for aristocratic girls. Tsar Nicholas I’s wife, Alexandra Fëdorovna, had as court pianist the renowned Adolphe Henselt. Although these lofty places were altogether closed to the general public, their owners enriched the musical scene by patronizing foreign and Russian musicians, some of whom were willing to teach and to concertize. Out of a dynastic environment of the 1850s came the first feasible impulse for the professionalization of music: the court of Elena Pavlovna, patron of Anton Rubinstein.13
As elsewhere in Europe—aristocratic or "bourgeois"—the gendering of musical performance meant that a young lady’s voice and piano playing could entertain guests and enhance courtship potential, in addition to adding cultural glitter to the home. Few Russian novels about the gentry failed to feature a piano performance or song by a young marriageable girl. “In every family with girls they play and jingle the piano without mercy,” wryly commented the Northern Bee in 1852. “In such families, they dance to the piano. Consequently, everywhere 'from the walls of Moscow to Peking’ they must have sheet music.” Like the ball, home performance nourished chaste interaction between the sexes, the compliments and blushes being as much a part of the performance as the movement of the hands or the vocal chords. For their daughters, mothers preferred preludes, nocturnes, and songs over excessively complex pieces. Performing Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata might violate the cult of domesticity which stressed piety, purity, submissiveness rather than complex creative activity. The view of playing the piano at home as something less than intellectually serious both gendered that art and demoted it.14
A social historian of Russia wrote that the “exaltation of the female domestic sphere derived from an idea of the family as an oasis of purity, a source of civility, and a refuge from official society.”15 In this fertile site for social and cultural interplay, private playing—as opposed to performance in concert—served as the lesser vehicle of musical expression analogous to the literary album, a private genre of largely feminine expression and the pendant to the male universe of belles lettres. Gitta Hammarberg has shown how the home album enlivened a flirtatious play with people and with literature; and how the sentimentalized content of albums—private communications, poems, reflections—implied a female reader of “idylls, eclogues, elegies, and songs,” the intimate lyrical genres. Musical albums with romantic titles such as Erato, Jasmine and Rose, Gift, and Lyre of Grace offered tender love songs directed to the “fair sex.” In the musical parallel, the piano bench offered a fine base of coquetry not only with men but also with “serious music.” A minor 1833 novel about Tula provincial life makes a character primp her daughter specifically for courtship with the piano.16
In the complex gendering of piano playing, mostly males became the composers and public performers, but the private/public line remained sufficiently blurred that women could sometimes appear in “society” at the keyboard without losing face: Catterino Cavos—imperial music director early in the century—once had teams of pupils of the Catherine Institute for noble girls perform on multiple pianos an arrangement of Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture. In a public concert of 1853, at least nine of the sixteen pianists on eight pianos doing a version of Rossini’s Semiramide overture were female. The fact that out of this widespread piano training emerged virtually no concert careers for women derived not from lack of talent but from social conventions and expectations. Well-born girls should reach a skill level matching social position; to go beyond this required a measure of physical exertion (through practice) and creative power that would challenge both gender and class norms. Thus, in the musical economy, learning and attainment were diverted into the home rather than into the public domain. Males had it both ways. Smitten by the idea of playing as an intimate social art, gentry boys of both capitals scurried to take lessons after the luminous Russian debut of John Field. Army officers of all ranks could be found playing socially. The aristocrat Mikhail Buturlin described the vice governor of Orël Province playing four hands with the brigadier of an encamped garrison. And a relative once said to Mikhail Glinka: “Besides enjoying [music] itself, your piano playing may help you meet pleasant, indeed useful people.” Glinka catapulted far beyond the relative’s dreams: the piano greatly enhanced his social position and his love affairs—though not his married life.17
The piano in early nineteenth-century Russia acted like a technology of diffusion equivalent to radio, television, and the internet in our time. Original pieces made famous on the boards of a recital hall or opera stage by foreign or domestic stars were marketed to the provinces where they fed an interest not just in the instrument but in the whole literature of concert hall and theater. The traveling governor and litterateur I. M. Dolgoruky in 1810 claims to have found pianos even in the remote corners around Pskov, Smolensk, Crimea, Nizhny Novgorod, and Perm. Pianists on the provincial town circuit always had a pack of arranged highlights from the current Italian or German opera in their bags.18 Most people who heard symphonic or opera music heard it first, or only, in piano transcriptions.
The presence of music in the home thickened the atmosphere of sentimental romanticism that infused literature at the time. So did travel, an activity that often involves an emotional reaction to new experiences. “There is nothing more touching,” wrote the literary traveler Prince P. I. Shalikov in 1805, “than the languid sounds of a piano played by a tearful woman during the quiet and tender moments of the evening in a secluded chamber bathed in pale moonlight.” We moderns may need to take a breath after this, as did most of Shalikov’s contemporaries. Shalikov (1767-1852) heard in the music’s blend of joy and sadness an echo of the human condition. The assimilated son of a Georgian prince who had fought in the Turkish wars developed in retirement a lavish affection for the tender beauties of “nature, spring, innocent love,” and all things sentimental. He published The Ladies’ Journal in Moscow in the 1820s and 1830s, a light miscellany of Paris fashions, fiction and poetry, album entries, and songs—all done up in the idiom of kindness, tender love, devotion, mercy, and charity. Shalikov reported sometimes gushingly on recitals, feuded regularly with other music commentators, and soon became the target of ridicule for his ultrasentimentalism. The crueler ones also mocked his hunchback, wand-like thinness, green spectacles, and picturesque apparel. Shalikov, a musical amateur, wrote verses to be set by the ex-serf composer Daniil Kashin; and he published the earliest songs of Alexander Alyabev. The formidable critic V. F. Odoevsky, a much more learned amateur, considered Shalikov musically illiterate.19
Shalikov's reading of musical affect resonated among many of his generation. The stirring power of music in the home brought nostalgic reminiscence in old age to the noblewoman Alexandra Shchepkina. Her father, sometime marshal of the nobility in Voronezh Province, purchased a small serf ensemble of six musicians who played dinner music and truncated versions of opera overtures at holiday parties. Shchepkina recalled her sister’s piano proficiency in large-scale classical works and the sweltering atmosphere induced by sentimental music in the early 1830s. The sister once triggered the tears of a recently widowed young cousin by playing elegiac music that offered consolation and release. To the memoirist, domestic music meant an initiation into ''the sorrows and fate of life."20 Such testimonies to the effect of music do not abound in print, but some visual evidence suggests its emotional role: for example, P. A. Fedotov’s 1849 portrait of the young Nadezhda Zhdanovich at the piano (fig. 8). A regimental comrade of the painter had two daughters who loved literature and art. Nadezhda, presented as a model of delicacy, warmth, and intimacy, is clearly posed, almost as in a photo sitting. She is also poised—full of quiet dignity, and ready to turn and strike the keys with a captivating blend of assumed solemnity and a childish lightness of being. Out of the picture comes an unmistakable note of serenity, comfort, pleasure—and the special aura of one partaking of art in the sanctuary of the home.21
The guitar, less versatile than the keyboard but portable and cheap, enjoyed the widest use of all musical instruments in Russia. By the nineteenth century it had almost lost its vulgar association with the Gypsy camp, and made it to the concert stage as well as to homes, salons, and taverns. The guitar did not escape criticism: A. A. Vetrov, writing in Repertoire in 1853, called it the instrument of southern climes, appropriate to Don Juan, Count Almaviva, and serenades beneath the moon with a summer breeze in the rose garden—but not to the concert stage. And indeed, after the great flourishing of high-art guitar music by Fernando Sor and Carl Maria von Weber, the guitar stayed mostly on the popular stage and at home. There it served as ideal accompaniment for that era’s romances, folk imitations, and urban popular songs. The guitar flourished more openly in Moscow than in St. Petersburg and came to be seen as a man’s instrument. Apollon Grigorev recalls passing the guitar from hand to hand at his gatherings. Guitarists in the old capital, S. N. Aksënov and M. T. Vysotsky, taught princes, counts, students, merchants, and even Gypsies how to play it.22
The first private music tutors of the mid-eighteenth century, Germans and other foreigners, included a few women. Demand exceeded supply by the early nineteenth century and Russian music teachers multiplied. A Russian woman of noble birth announced her skills in 1805 in the St. Petersburg Gazette. Live-in governesses and tutors often doubled as music instructors. Piano tuners, builders, and salespeople gave lessons on the side, as did composers such as the serf Daniil Kashin who advertised lessons for people of all classes, without charge for the poor. How-to books included a fraudulent item called Masha's Secret, or How to Play the Piano. Pupils of the most celebrated teacher of the time, John Field, included professionals and ordinary enthusiasts: Glinka, Verstovsky, Dubuque, the serf Finogen, the Pole Antoni Katski and dozens of gentry sons and daughters—but not, as legend has it, Maria Szymanowska, Anton Rubinstein’s teacher Alexandre Villoing, or the playwright Alexander Griboedov.23
Aside from students in the Theater School and the Academy of Arts where a certain level of professionalism ruled, pupils took music lessons in almost every kind of school, from the military Cadet Corps to the aristocratic Smolny Institute for young ladies. Less well-placed children in orphanages took up music in order to become teachers and governesses in service to the upper classes. The poets Lermontov and Zhukovsky dabbled in music in their school years. At the noble pension attached to the Petersburg Pedagogical Institute Glinka took his first serious lesson. Moscow University and its attached schools abounded in musical education, offered by Kashin and several Italian teachers. At the Law school, the Prussian pianist Henselt taught the budding composer Alexander Serov and the future cultural critic Vladimir Stasov. (Tchaikovsky, who entered the school later, missed this great teacher.) Training spread to the new universities and to small-town schools. The pension of Nezhin where Gogol studied had its own symphony orchestra. An observer in Nizhny Novgorod noted few society homes where girls did not play piano. Music and musicians found their way into the back regions. Around 1825, an ailing conductor from St. Petersburg, who had come to Tikhvin Monastery a hundred miles away to pray and recover, gave violin lessons to a peasant boy and then presented him with the instrument (soon ruined from road travel). The Smolny graduate Varvara Bykovaya, who taught music there from 1836 to 1855, became that proud teacher mentioned above who saw her pupils transformed into Kulturträger in the Siberian wild.24
If later in the century, as Marcia Citron has pointed out, the domestic milieu occupied a lower plane on the musical-spatial hierarchy than public concert spaces, the reverse held true in early nineteenth-century Russia. And if, with Bourdieu, we agree that residence provides geographical capital, and that habitus—a predisposition to certain behavior connected with the habitat it-self—then the noble women’s seat at the keyboard reflected both. Music and foreign languages were not merely educational outcomes or social skills. For some women all through the century—and even beyond—they were vital elements of identity as well as survival mechanisms after the Revolution by gentry families who, living under the Bolsheviks, were unable to perform any other kind of work.25
Orpheus in the Salon
Yury (Georg) Karlovich Arnold (1811-1898), Russian composer, theorist, and critic, has been described by a Soviet writer as ''one of the first Russian scholars to attempt to clarify the connection between musical art and social life."26 Arnold—of nonnoble Russified German stock—got a jolting experience in this line when he first arrived at the musical salon of Prince Vladimir Odoevsky in the late 1830s. Announced by the butler as “Mr. Arnold” into a company of princes and counts, he was greeted by Princess Odoevskaya not with the usual proffering of the hand but with a frosty nod. Arnold silently decoded this gesture quite bluntly as: “you are a nobody.” He then stepped into the next room where Odoevsky and other musicians gathered on a friendly and lively informal footing. This was hardly class struggle in the drawing room, a theme often extracted from the awkward behavior of such nonnobles as Dostoevsky glowering in a corner or Belinsky fuming over an elitist social perspective. Yet an undeniable tension between guild and beau monde, creative enthusiasm and social rigor, often filled the spaces where music-making met polite society. Ardor and intensity were among the principal markers that distinguished the outward behavior of members of the intelligentsia and would-be artistic professionals on the one hand from the avatars of high society on the other.27
Among the legion of culturally eclectic salons, several possessed a distinctly musical orientation. In regular gatherings, performance alternated with talk about current musical life. Vocal and piano music predominated, though the wealthier salon hosts could mount chamber recitals and even symphonic concerts. The salon expanded musical experience from the intimate family to the social sphere of invited company. As intelligenty and raznochintsy began appearing in aristocratic salons more often in the 1830s and 1840s, space tended to divide socially into constituencies, or “fronts” in Erwin Goffman’s terminology.28 The “outsiders” and their socially superior sympathizers could retreat into an adjoining room and turn the conversation from “society” (beau monde) to society (obshchestvo) and to intellectual topics such as music or literature. In doing so, they would raise the emotional temperature of their speech and deploy a more expressive body language. When the subcircles overlapped or mingled, discomfort arose like the kind experienced by Yury Arnold.29
In later years, the critic V. V. Stasov spoke caustically but accurately of “aristocratic arbiters in matters musical—two counts (Vielgorsky), one prince (Odoevsky) and one general (Lvov).”30 General Lvov’s socially exalted salon dedicated to music met in his Petersburg home on Caravan Street off the Nevsky, in the cultural heart of the city. Because of his proximity to court circles, his talent, and his fanatical dedication to symphonic genres, Lvov figured large in the musical life of his time, however reactionary he seemed to more liberal contemporaries. An accomplished amateur violinist, Lvov played privately for friends, since he was not permitted to perform in public due to his high rank. In the 1860s, deafness set in for Lvov, a decade before he passed away. From 1835, he presented weekly string quartets at home in a small music room with his fellow amateurs and aristocrats, the Vielgorskys, the fledgling Alexander Serov, and a few professional musicians (fig. 9). Using trained players in amateur groups—known in England as “stiffening”—was a common practice. By one account, an atmosphere of reverence for the music prevailed, paralleling the passionate talk in literary and philosophical circles. Fragmentary information on attendance suggests that this salon differed in social makeup from the elegant soirées that Lvov would normally attend as a high-ranking official and courtier. When Lvov mounted symphonic concerts for a broader public in the grand hall, Tsar Nicholas sometimes appeared in the same room as lowly clerks.31
The brothers Vielgorsky (the preferred spelling; originally Wielhorski) resembled the better-known Faddei Bulgarin and Osip Senkovsky in being wholly assimilated and successful men of Polish origin. Their father had served as a diplomat at the court of Catherine II. Both brothers achieved some distinction in music: Matvei (1794-1866) as a cellist; Count Mikhail Vielgorsky (1788-1856), a high-ranking court dignitary, as an amateur singer, violinist, and composer of romances, a symphony, and an opera (fig. 10). He had studied harmony, counterpoint, and organ with foreigners in Russia, and composition with Luigi Cherubini in Europe. Mikhail as a young man had befriended Beethoven to whose music he was fiercely dedicated. Tsar Alexander I banished him for a time due to his Masonic activities and a secret marriage to his sister-in-law soon after his first wife’s death and he spent some years on his estate near Kursk. When Tsar Nicholas pardoned and befriended him, Vielgorsky returned to a brilliant court career. Mikhail Vielgorsky cast a broader social and musical net than did Lvov. His public outreach is revealed in a welter of diplomas and records of memberships and honors bestowed by Russian and foreign learned and artistic societies—including the Academy of Rome. Among other things, Vielgorsky belonged to a relatively unsung circle who raised money to free talented serf artists and musicians.32
Through the 1830s and 1840s, the salon and music center in the magnificent Vielgorsky home on Mikhailovsky Square (fig. 11) played host to the most celebrated musical visitors to mid-century Russia: Liszt, Berlioz, the Schumanns, and Pauline Viardot among others. Vielgorsky, as a patron who booked European talent into Russia through personal connections, played an unpaid role that was enriching the impresarios of the era such as Johann Peter Salomon in London. (Vielgorsky did however receive at one point an annual fifteen-thousand-ruble state subsidy to entertain and audition foreign artists.) According to the violinist N. Ya. Afanasev, Vielgorsky’s salon was the only gateway to a musical post in the capital. As a locus of major musical events, Vielgorsky’s home was an unofficial concert hall of the capital. There as many as three hundred guests could hear the works of the classical Viennese symphonists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including the Russian premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1836. There Glinka rehearsed parts of A Life for the Tsar in 1836 with the help of Prince Yusupov’s serf orchestra. And there Robert Schumann conducted one of his symphonies in 1844. Because of the attendance of Gogol, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Lermontov, Odoevsky, Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, and Bryullov, a contemporary dubbed Vielgorsky’s home “a lively and original multifaceted academy of the arts.” Berlioz called it “a little ministry of fine arts.”33
According to the suspiciously precise estimate of Vielgorsky’s son-in-law, the writer Count Vladimir Sollogub, 75 percent of the time spent in social occasions in the salon was devoted to musical performance two or three times a week. Although conversation was almost always conducted in French, all sorts of people gathered there for the music, the billiards, the talk. Sollogub, in a bit of instant sociology, divided the company into “the two elements: society people and art people.” Vielgorsky’s snobbish wife remained oblivious to the lower-ranking visitors. Acting as what sociologists now call “gatekeepers,” female heads of aristocratic households held sway over etiquette. The host himself moved easily among all the guests. Returning from a formal court function, the count would doff his dazzling uniform embellished with sash and stars, don a simple coat, mingle with everyone, and charm them all. Though very close to the royal presence, he was known to comport himself equally to people of all classes. A certain egalitarian atmosphere noted in some memoirs prevailed.34
Vladimir Odoevsky (1804-69), descended from Kievan princes on his father’s side and from peasants on his mother’s, studied music at a Moscow lycée and busied himself in law, education, and charity. While he delved into numerous intellectual crannies, Odoevsky’s passion for music made him one of the first generation of Russian music critics as well as an original writer. Patrician friends smiled ironically at his versatility and encyclopedic knowledge. Odoevsky, aware of his “otherness” in society, put it into his fiction. He consorted with nongentry intellectuals and artists “of various ranks” who visited his home in a near alliance—so to speak—of the noble superfluous man and the emerging creative intelligentsia. His musical and literary Saturdays on the fashionable Millionaya Street near the Winter Palace and later on the Fontanka ran from 1826 to the late 1840s. Though he avoided high society balls, Odoevsky remained very much the prince who went around town with liveried lackeys on his coach.35 The issue is not consistent social identity or style, but the high-born amateur’s skill at negotiating through social ranks and so helping to fashion a musical community. Avdotiya Panaeva observed that the blue bloods at the Odoevskys gathered in the salon room around the tea table where the hostess was serving; in the study huddled the host and the intelligentsia. The members of the less exalted classes awkwardly crossed the salon on their way to the study and were followed by derisive smiles and glances through lorgnettes of counts and princes.36 This was the social minefield that Yury Arnold walked through. Once out of it, he found a more congenial harmony and more or less equality in the musical enclave.
In this era, literature, ideas, and music could pull people of different social standing together in salons. Their well-meaning hosts were “conciliatory” as opposed to “exclusive” aristocrats, in the terminology of Ernest Bramsted’s discussion of nineteenth-century German society and fiction. The former were men of title open not only to science and the arts as serious endeavors but to their purveyors and creators as well. But it was not easy to bridge the chasm of social mores and the contrast of manners, dress, and even topics of talk. In Russia, the nongentry’s malaise in the midst of “good society” is well documented. Wealth alone was no ticket to acceptance. A high-society figure, on seeing the son of a rich tea merchant family, V. P. Botkin, at his mother’s soirée, expressed surprise: “Are you buying tea from him?” he asked. “No,” she replied,“ I am serving him tea.” Vielgorsky, Odoevsky, Lvov, and other musical patrons were caught between their genuine love of music at its root—performance and composition—and the strongly entrenched belief in their circles that for ladies and gentlemen art was something to be consumed and not created or performed, since these acts were considered labor or service. And, as in other societies, a certain aura of unmanliness might have lingered around serious engagement in the arts as well.37
The Kukolnik “musical-literary evenings” that began around 1836 take us to a different world from the salons described above, though there was some overlapping attendance. Vielgorsky, Lvov, Odoevsky, and other salon grandees lived and entertained within the magic residential triangle noted in chapter 1. Their gorgeous homes, mansions, and apartments invited a certain restraint in social intercourse. At the Kukolnik brothers’ large but not opulent flat on Lantern Lane down among the city’s twisting canals, revelry ruled. One of the hosts, Nestor (1809-1868), gained much fame in his day for patriotic plays, novels, and tales. His evenings (and all-nighters) became notorious in musical history for allegedly pushing the composer Mikhail Glinka into decline. Called by one scholar “a Petersburg Bohemia of the 1830s-40s,” they offered guild pleasures to a guild of artists: ritual, excess, male bonding, and conviviality that sometimes turned into drunken orgy. The first cellist of the opera, Franz Knecht, encountered at the Kukolniks an atmosphere of musical frenzy: ''Aber diese Russen! Aber so Enthusiasmus."38
Even rowdy bunches have hierarchies. At the center stood the troika or Brotherhood (fig. 12): dramatist Kukolnik, composer Glinka, and painter Karl Bryullov, already famed for his 1833 canvas, The Last Day of Pompeii. They saw themselves as embodying the arts of Russia and were so depicted in a cartoon of the time. The formulation probably derived from Theophile Gauthier’s anointing of Victor Hugo, Hector Berlioz, and Eugene Delacroix as the trinity of the arts in France. To put it kindly, history has not been as good to Kukolnik as to the other two. An outer circle included Kukolnik’s brother, Odoevsky, Belinsky, Bulgarin, and others. The bigger parties pulled in dozens of regulars and newcomers. People like Osip Senkovsky and even the policeman Leonty Dubelt would appear, along with a motley assortment of editors, hack writers, professors, artists, publishers, and booksellers. The Kukolniks’ flat combined a fluctuating marketplace of inspiration with a whirlpool of social intercourse, gossip, intrigue, and gargantuan drinking. At the twice-weekly gatherings, Glinka sang in a much-admired voice. The Brotherhood was a male refuge for Glinka who was on the verge of divorce. He claimed that his wife thought more of ball gowns and carriages than music, and resented his waste of expensive notation paper when he was writing his first opera, A Life for the Tsar. Such anecdotes all originate from Glinka and his male friends. Soviet scholars repeated them and passed lightly over the multiple sexual liaisons of the father of Russian music.39
At one of the evenings in 1842, attended by Mikhail Vielgorsky, Sollogub, the composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky, and a large crowd on hand to honor Franz Liszt, Glinka made a little speech explaining that the artists of this world ''are one big family, a Gypsy Bohème, and that the king of this Bohème in our time is none other than Liszt."40 Glinka’s remark, often quoted but little examined, throws some light on the social context of music-making in midcentury Russia. The reference to Gypsies was not simply metaphoric. The Russian public at that moment had a craze for Gypsy songs and the spirit of freedom and abandon they seemed to represent. At the Brotherhood, the guitar assisted the flow of Gypsy music. Glinka himself instructed one of his singing pupils on the “intonation of the steppe” or Gypsy inflection. But in his tribute to Liszt, Glinka was also alluding to the figurative urbanized “Gypsy camp,” the Bohemia of artists, marginals, and members of the underlife of Paris and other European cities. Liszt, who mingled with kings and princes, seemed to represent precisely the freedom which allowed both disreputable revelry (or the look of it) and the anchor of beau monde respectability. The Brotherhood was more open than the salons of the upper spheres; but it was also selective, and the inner circle expelled other guests prior to its own midnight performances and carousing. Kukolnik’s literary chauvinism and his closeness to the trinity of conservative journalism (Bulgarin, Grech, Senkovsky) gave him a coloring of middle-class patriotism, a rather crude cultural version of “official nationalism.” Glinka, a court appointee at the Capella and a celebrity of upper circles, could find release in the relative social freedom and high-temperature uproar of the Brotherhood. How and if this environment affected Glinka’s creativity remains an open question. The common belief that it damaged him as a composer cannot be taken at face value.41
This brief tour in no way exhausts the musical salons of St. Petersburg in this era. The poets Anton Delvig and Vasily Zhukovsky, the younger Gedeonov (his father headed the Imperial Theaters), and Fëdor Tolstoy of the Academy of Fine Arts all offered music in salons or soirées as part of their cultural life, as did the composer Dargomyzhsky and Ekaterina Karamzina. John Field dominated in personal appearances at musical evenings. Close behind came the sparkling figure of Maria Szymanowska-Wolowska (1789-1831), daughter of a Warsaw brewer, whose own daughter married the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Szymanowska, though patronizingly dubbed “a Field in skirts,” was a prolific composer in her own right and introduced Polish motifs to St. Petersburg audiences. After touring Europe and Russia, in the late 1820s she played Petersburg salons attended by literary and musical notables. The child prodigy Anton Rubinstein launched his career in private salons.42
Moscow musical salons developed their own shape. The most brilliant of them belonged to Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, daughter of a distinguished diplomat. She formed a “close friendship” with Tsar Alexander I who took her with him to Europe during his wartime and postwar travels. In the 1810s and 1820s she managed to study music with François Boiledieu in St. Petersburg and Paris and befriended Rossini. Volkonskaya, a cultural phenomenon in her day—poet, composer, contralto, courtier, and salon hostess—wrote an opera, Joan of Arc, recited Racine, and was dubbed “the Corinne of the North” (from Mme. de Staël's 1807 novel). Her social rank prevented her from becoming a successful professional performer. Tsar Alexander reprimanded her for her ventures into the world of opera—although at the Congress of Verona, he was delighted by her staging for an elite group of La bella molinara by his favorite opera composer, Paisiello. In 1829 she emigrated to Rome and became a Catholic.43
In the late 1820s, the elegant Volkonskaya assembled the Moscow beau monde, the local intelligentsia, and creative artists in a brilliant blend of readings, concerts, and opera. In her friend Buturlin’s words, she ruled Moscow. On first meeting Pushkin, Volkonskaya sang one of his verses set by composer Osip Jeništa, a form of artistic coquetry that she brought to perfection. Fellow aristocrats and a few Italians joined her on stage, assisted by some choristers from the theater in a performance of, among other things, Rossini’s Tancredi, an opera then much in vogue. Her success stemmed in part from the presence of a large Italian colony in Moscow, many left over from the 1812 invasion. A somber shade fell over Volkonskaya’s salon after the suppression of the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Her sister-in-law, Maria Volkonskaya, came to visit on the eve of her departure for Siberia to join her convict husband, Sergei Volkonsky. It was the last high cultural soirée that she ever saw, but not the last time she would hear classical music: Zinaida had a small clavichord strapped to the vehicle that would convey her to Siberian exile. Adam Mickiewicz, a regular at the soirées, was one of the few to note the enormous contradiction between their atmosphere and the fact that the hostess was the owner of thousands of serfs.44
The violinist Afanasev claimed that no less than fifteen Moscow homes hosted chamber evenings in 1828, a practice that grew with the decades. In the early 1850s, Evdokiya Rostopchina’s Saturdays welcomed casual visitors from “the lower classes” and at her evenings could be seen the circle of budding Moscow writers known as the Young Editors of The Muscovite. In that decade Moscow began to witness a vibrant cultural flowering among the wealthier merchants, a class still despised by aristocrats and intelligentsia as vulgar and retrograde. Scholars have written at length of the generous patronage by some of the more enlightened merchants of schools, publishing, theater, and most famously art. A remarkable memoir by another violinist, V. V. Bezekirsky, describes musical Moscow, with regular quartet evenings in the merchant homes of A. A. Karzinkin, an amateur violinist, M. M. Varentsov, and F. V. Perlov, with playwright Alexander Ostrovsky as one of the regular attendees. But Moscow had nothing like the Tafelmusik enjoyed regularly in the homes of the merchants of Frankfurt, Hamburg, and other German cities of the time; or the myriad middle-class musical salons in London, Paris, and Vienna.45
Scattered references to provincial salons give few details. N. Ya. Afanasev, a native of Perm in the far north, named a half-dozen families together with exiled Poles who in the 1820s held musical evenings in a little town of four streets in the middle of forests and fields. Of a different magnitude was the home of the Nizhny Novgorod critic, composer, dramatist, translator, and patron, A. D. Ulybyshev (1794-1858). Raised in Germany, he served in many ministries and retired at age thirty-six. While a member of the Green Lamp society—a satellite of the Decembrist movement—Ulybyshev wrote a utopian sketch called “The Dream.” His later years were devoted almost wholly to music. An autodidact violinist and musicologist, Ulybyshev published one of the first serious analyses of Mozart’s music. His obsession with music and his sharp tongue apparently rubbed off on his protégé, Mily Balakirev, founder of the circle that became the Mighty Five. Ulybyshev’s Nizhny Novgorod home hosted a vigorous musical life—part salon and part concert hall where large-scale works got a hearing.46
What did salons do for musical life in Russia before the great transformation of the 1860s? As a larger version of the family music circle, the salon perpetuated the private consumption of music—by invitation only. But, to a greater extent than purely domestic gatherings, salons reverberated with self-conscious collective musical discussion and enthusiasm. They inspired budding composers and performers. One Russian scholar not given to excessive piety has recognized the musical salon of this era as a site for the “celebration of life,” a hothouse of romantic sensibility that actually melted icy social forms. The social composition of structured musical evenings made them into sites, to borrow language from a social historian, with “porous and indeterminate boundaries,” full of ambiguity springing from the persistence of “hierarchical relations and socioeconomic disparities.” Even in the most tight-lipped drawing rooms, blunt-edged music lovers “from below” found expressive scope. Gentry-intelligentsia salons were thus Orphean in the mix of social psychologies, the mythological Orpheus having blended the restraint of Apollonian reason with Dionysian energy.47
Salons represented an important phase in the transition from private to public spheres in the musical life of the country. From them sprang initiatives for concerts in a public sphere which attracted multicolored crowds—a pluralistic milieu that generated its own tensions. Given the absence of a conservatory, the metropolitan salons, musical evenings, and schoolroom learning together constituted an archipelago of musical culture and a vast clearing house of musical talent and pleasure. However amateurish their coloration, Russian salons—like those in Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere—constituted a musical infrastructure, one might say a collective “night school” or “adult education” class where elites and their raznochintsy protégés and friends studied, talked about, performed, and gained a taste for serious music. Not the least of its functions, the salon provided the milieu for alliances and conversations that sometimes led to the manumission of talented serf musicians. The misplaced contempt for upper-class dilettante music-making, though from differing perspectives, voiced by Anton Rubinstein, V. V. Stasov, and others would long obscure the legitimate value of the music salon for Russian culture as a creative bridge between the domestic sphere and the public arena of concert life.48
Serf as Musician
Beyond the salons stretched a vast sea of serf-made music. Ranking very high in the spirit of domestic theatricality that possessed so many gentry lords stood Count Pavel Skavronsky, a well-known patron of the arts, Italianophile, and music lover—nay, worshiper. In St. Petersburg and in Italy where he spent most of his brief life, the young count—whom the gossipy homosexual Vigel called effeminate—forbade spoken conversation beneath his roof and required his house serfs to address him in operatic recitative which he composed for them! One must imagine them-in the manner of Bellini, Donizetti, or Rossini—singing him such lines as “would the master like to have the samovar put up for tea?” or “Your excellency’s carriage is here.” Skavronsky’s grotesque musical regimen, aside from being the quaint practice of a Russian eccentric, vividly demonstrated to what extent cultural pleasure could be intermeshed with proprietary power. The dress ball and manorial theater in the eighteenth century brought instrumental ensemble music into the countryside. The shortage of trained Russian actors, musicians, singers, and dancers led to the practice among the great magnates on the more opulent estates and in lavish town mansions of deploying trained serfs for musical and theatrical entertainment and for their own and their neighbors’ cultural enrichment. Starting in the capitals, domestic theater and music spread to provincial towns and estates from the last quarter of the century to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, reaching a peak in the decades before the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. Serf orchestras and choirs, small or large, could be found even in some modest manor houses. One estimate of the serf orchestra total counts more than 310. Solo singers and players sufficed for landowners unable to afford ensembles.49
In small private salon settings, amateur performers, visiting professionals, and listeners, though of divergent social backgrounds, could act, talk, and perform as equals, or at least play at the fiction of egalitarian social intercourse. The language of music possesses no class inflections, and playing it requires a unified set of gestures where manners and mannerisms hardly counted. The farther from the arena of politesse and the less prominent the verbal exchange, the lower the tensions among the men and women of different stations. As in any human activity involving disciplined cooperation—war, labor, performance—those of rank must adapt to the leveling it creates. Once we introduce serfs into the social equation, however, the rules change drastically. On hundreds of estates in town and country, serfs were very much a part of that equation—as performers for and sometimes with their owners in “orchestras.” The Russian word orkestr could denote anything from a large ensemble to three players. Prince Dolgoruky applied the term to the violinist, cellist, and cymbalist in the home of a Polish landowner in Ukraine in 1817; and Lermontov in 1840 complained about a “featr” (theater) in Cherkassk that featured an “orchestra” of four clarinets, two double basses, a fiddle, and a drum.50
Similarities between serf musicians and serf actors in their cultural, social, and moral milieux will become apparent in later chapters. But important differences remain. A certain amount of technical training was essential for instrumentalists and singers, more so than for actors; and musical ensembles, more numerous than theaters, were cheaper to maintain. Owners occasionally loaned their players to a landowner who had a serf theater but no musicians. Practically all serf instrumentalists—solo, chamber, or orchestra—were male. This suggests that if a master pursued sexual contact with them, he would probably try to hide it. I have found no example of homoerotic relations between serfs and masters, though a number of highly placed homosexuals are on record in this era. Nor do the annals reveal a Russian Potiphar’s wife or a Lady Chatterley seeking the favors of a male serf musician. It would be unwise to exclude these possibilities, given the power possessed by serf owners. The famous ex-serf actor Mikhail Shchepkin related a tale of an orphaned general’s daughter who fell in love with a serf violinist in the quartet at her gentry foster home. Unable to marry, they attempted a double suicide by shooting each other: her gun misfired, his killed her, and he died under the lash.51
Russian estates abounded in enserfed men and women born with natural talent or genius regardless of education: architects, painters, sculptors, musicians, singers, dancers, actors, and even engineers. Owners identified gifted house serf children or, like the owner of the serf Savva Purlevsky, pulled the most promising village youth into house service as musicians or lackeys. Accomplished trainees were bought and sold. A landowner advertised the sale of a fifteen-year-old bassoon player with a bass voice, in a batch with other servants. The training varied according to the wealth of the owner: at home with Russian teachers (including serfs and masters) or resident foreigners; or study in a provincial town, the capitals, or even Europe. Few could, with Count Orlov-Chesme, bring two artists and a clarinettist to Leipzig with him for lessons. Most settled for home tutors. Like missionaries following assault teams, German music teachers had begun infiltrating Russia in the eighteenth century and the fleeting references to “music schools” indicate no more than teams of teachers assembled for the musical training of serfs. The sourpuss German music teacher joined the various light-headed or light-fingered foreign tutors as types in Russian literature. A peasant character in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter recalls a German teacher of olden times who had “pretentiously” and unsuccessfully sought to dine at the table with the master and was put in his place. In the same author’s Nest of Gentry, set in 1842, self-image and social identity became blurred for the melancholy Saxon music teacher, Christoph Lemm. In a bizarre allegedly real-life case, a Polish musician hired in the 1790s to train the house serfs of a Kostroma landowner instead incited them to a revolt which was suppressed. The vengeful owner had the teacher jailed and his stringed instruments destroyed for good measure. In the face of arrogant owners, music masters had to play humble or risk being fired, like the tutor in a brilliant 1859 tale by Karolina Pavlova who is dismissed precisely because he shows his erudition.52
Some serf boys, tired of rote instruction, would ask to be returned to the plow. The father of Prince Kropotkin, the prophet of modern anarchism, had a twelve-to-fifteen-piece band composed of servants who played music in the evenings and were often loaned out to neighbors in the Old Equerries Quarter of Moscow. When one of the kitchen serfs refused to learn an instrument, the father sent him into the army. Teaching by the stick—a natural mode in a culture of corporal punishment—might transform a peasant or lackey into a passable musician in a few months. The great war hero General Suvorov strictly supervised by mail the instruction of the serf singers and musicians on his many estates. When a serf was earmarked for training with no consideration of talent, he was sometimes beaten regularly until mastery was achieved, a fact reported by a foreign visitor at a provincial estate in 1829-30. A village priest related that a Saratov seignior had the habit of calling out the name of anyone who sang off key during the serf choir dinner serenade: the serf would redden, report to the stable for a whipping, and then return to the choir. The rod continued to hover long after training. Afanasev, on being lured from the Imperial Theater orchestra to the Shepelev estate, promptly ended the existing practice of corporal punishment in his orchestra of fifty and chorus of thirty-five to forty members, retaining only fines and the seigniorial jail.53 By contrast, no female domestic servant was ever harmed for any misstep at the Kireevskys’ Dolbino estate, where music and dance were common.54
A few landowners breached the dignity barrier by conducting their own ensembles. But learning and displaying this skill before company was a bit too close to creating the declasse effect of acting on stage. When the eighteenth-century magnate N. P. Sheremetev played in the orchestra alongside his serfs and under a serf conductor, his guests did not like it and told him so. Russian servants, like those elsewhere, performed according to social cooperation and rules; their owners consumed according to conviviality and etiquette.55 Rich owners could employ a foreign conductor—thus replicating a pattern familiar in estate management, the army, and the bureaucracy (and later in many factories): an outsider—often foreign—mediating between privileged and un-free or lower-class Russians. Manorial conducting could be a stepping stone. One German serf orchestra conductor later founded several orchestras in around Kazan Province. Ludwig Maurer (1799-1878) worked for V. A. Vsevolozhsky; and the Austrian, J. J. Johannis, for Prince Yusupov and Alexander Panchulidze, Saratov governor and passionate patron of the arts. Maurer and Johannis later led Imperial Theater orchestras.56 But the position of the typical German conductor was ambiguous. Even among the grandees of central and western Europe the kapellmeister long felt the weight of informal servitude. The great Haydn served for a generation as a live-in composer and conductor who wore livery and slept in servants’ quarters on the estate of the powerful Hungarian magnate Count Esterhazy. In Russia, many an estate conductor dined alone—too lofty to eat with the servants, too lowly to sit at table with the gentry folks.
Opinions about the skill of serf players ranged from pretty awful to mostly mediocre with some brilliant exceptions. A few ensembles attained great proficiency and the Imperial Theater more than once purchased troupes of singers, dancers, and musicians from landowners. In a story by Ivan Panaev, a rural gentry host surprises his guests, newly arrived from St. Petersburg, with a hidden orchestra playing the overture to Le Calife de Bagdad and says to them: “Admit it. You did not expect, I think, that there could be such surprises among country bumpkins.” Grandees such as the Sheremetevs and the Yusu-povs could mount entire ballets and operas with first-class orchestras. Prince Potëmkin in the eighteenth century bought from Field-Marshal Razumovsky a superb fifty-piece orchestra for 40,000 rubles. Another landowner allegedly purchased one violinist for 20,000 rubles. In the early nineteenth century, the Chernyshevs had a serf orchestra on their Orël Province estate conducted by a foreigner, which Buturlin ranked with the best theater orchestras in the capital. At the Yurasovsky estate in the same province in 1828, a forty-four-piece serf orchestra, costing 37,000 rubles (including the families of the players), performed opera, ballet, and choral music. In the neighboring province of Kursk, Prince Ivan Baryatinsky, an amateur composer, kept a well-trained classical orchestra of forty to fifty players at his palatial manor house, Marino, backed up by a library of over five hundred scores with works from Mozart to Donizetti. The wealthy P. G. Galagan at his Degtyar holding in Ukraine heard Beethoven rendered skillfully by his serf orchestra led by a German and assisted by a serf as first violinist who had trained in Dresden.57 G. S. Tarnovsky’s Chernigov Province serf ensemble, considered poor by one visitor, was apparently good enough to rehearse Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. But visitors to estates all too often complained about substandard craftsmanship, particularly excessive volume which was apparently seen as a virtue: a noble recalls dining in the 1850s to a loud ensemble of ''violins, drummers, and dukhobors"—the last being a pun combining a religious sect with players who fought with their wind instruments.58
In the late eighteenth century, a market of over one thousand serf musicians provided hire for as many as fifty monthly balls in Moscow. A commercial sanatorium on a Moscow Province estate advertised in 1817 that guests would be serenaded daily by music played by serfs and conducted by a German. P. I. Yushkov, a big landowner, had three homes in Moscow; another in St. Petersburg; ten thousand serfs, including two hundred house serfs; and a well-trained serf orchestra, choir, and horn band. Legendary for his midnight balls, all-night music, and three-day galas, in 1811 he held eighteen balls in three weeks. Glinka heard Yushkov’s serf orchestra in St. Petersburg in the 1820s as part of his musical education. P. A. Sobakin, an old-time landowner dressed in the mode of Catherine II, owned estates in Novgorod and Orël. In his Moscow residence, he maintained a superb serf orchestra. The more serious manorial music lovers offered irregular private concerts with outreach to neighboring gentry. A. A. Pleshcheev alternated concerts and operas with cello recitals on his Orël estate. The Vielgorskys mounted a great Beethoven marathon in the middle of Kursk Province in the winter of 1822-23 consisting of thirty-three concerts during an intense four-month cycle. Performing were the hosts, neighboring gentry, hired German professionals, and serf musicians from the Chernyshev, Teplov, and Baryatinsky orchestras. This highly miscellaneous crew performed—in addition to works by Mozart, Boccherini, Cherubini, Méhul, and Rossini—seven Beethoven symphonies.59
Choral music occupied an important place in the Russian musical landscape, quite aside from what was sung in regiments and churches. It has been claimed that in Tula Province, every landowner had at least ten or so musicians, including choristers, and that nobles joined in with folk choirs. Ukraine had become the traditional recruitment region for boys’ voices from the time of Empress Elizabeth when grandees from the south brought them to the capitals. Well into the nineteenth century, scouts—including Glinka—would comb Ukrainian provincial estates, towns, and churches for boys, mostly serfs, to be bought for private manor houses and the Court Capella. Most serf choirs were little more than simple clutches of peasants brought in to serenade the guests with folk songs for hours while standing in the doorway during dinner. In Ivan Krylov’s mocking fable, “Musicians,” the serf chorus produces noise like screeching animals. Manor house guests liked dinner music and often sang at table themselves if nothing else was available. More ambitious classically trained ensembles took on opuses of great complexity. High-ranking families such as the Sheremetevs, Golitsyns, Yusupovs, Vorontsovs, Volkonskys, Kurakins, Lopukhins, Galagans, and Tarnovskys maintained choirs that sang a capella or with orchestra in works ranging from folk to liturgical and opera. The last two landowners regularly took their serf choirs to the Contract Fair in Kiev. In the 1830s, Prince Pavel Lopukhin, at his luxurious castle in Korsun, directed and composed, and sometimes shamelessly inserted Italian arias into his compositions.60
Among the earliest of the grandees to indulge in this musical form, the Sheremetevs of Moscow ranked high. Nikolai Petrovich’s huge pool of estates and serfs provided singers who, when their voices changed, were sent home with a bonus or made clerks on his various estates. The chorus, comprising mostly Ukrainian serf recruits, was led by such eminent figures as Antonio Sapienza and the serfs Stefan Degtyarëv and Gavriil Lomakin. Lomakin (1812-85), the son of the steward on a Kursk estate of D. N. Sheremetev (or by some accounts Sheremetev’s natural son), went to St. Petersburg as a boy soprano soloist in 1822 and was later freed and appointed conductor. A key figure in the founding of the Free Music School—the "anticonservatory" of the 1860s—Lomakin eliminated Sapienza’s Italianate style, corrected the choir's accumulated errors, and turned it into a marvelous instrument of sixty voices which earned plaudits from Liszt, Berlioz, Viardot, and the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov for its performance of Russian liturgical and eighteenth-century European choral music.61
Unlike the Sheremetev choir which remained inaccessible to the public, that of Prince Yury Golitsyn (1823-1872), originally composed of serfs and eventually of hired professionals, performed in England in one of the first international displays of Russian culture on the concert stage. It began with a chorus of thirty men that grew to a force of 150 men and women. At age nineteen, Golitsyn, who had studied with Lomakin and with European teachers, organized his serf ensemble and conducted it publicly in the capitals and other Russian cities. This body was among the first to make folk music adapted for choir available to a wide public. An inveterate spendthrift, Golitsyn squandered huge sums on his chorus. When he went bankrupt and failed to sell the choir to the imperial court, he dissolved it in 1857. Because of his closeness to Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary exile, Golitsyn was expelled from the capital and fled to London in 1860 where he conducted concerts of Russian music in St. James Hall. There he also produced a Herzen Waltz, an Ogarëv Quadrille, and, as the new age was dawning in 1861, an orchestral fantasy entitled Liberation to mark the freeing of the serfs that year.62
The Russian horn orchestra (fig. 13) illustrated remarkably how theatricality and the display of power often intermixed with love of music and entertainment. Its popularity began in the extravagant era of Catherine II among big magnates such as Razumovsky, Potëmkin, Stroganov, and I. M. Dolgoruky who possessed both a horn band and a symphonic orchestra. The landowner Naryshkin’s early nineteenth-century horn choir had forty-two live “keys,” players with horns, the longest of which was about four feet. Though each player blew only one note, they could perform overtures to Boiledieu’s Le Calife de Bagdad, Rossini’s, Semiramide, Méhul's Joseph in Egypt, Cherubim’s Les deux jours, and Spontini’s Fernand Cortez. These works of the first decades of the century were all written in what may be called the Paris-Italian style, by no means simple band music that one would expect horn players to take into their repertoire. Rossini’s alternating staccatos and lentos and his accelerandos and crescendos are well known. Boiledieu’s overture is a translucent piece of music, elegiac in spite of its comic subject, with a gauze-like tracery that seems unplayable except by strings. The largest horn band on record consisted of ninety-one instruments of varying length, covering four and a half octaves and played by forty players. It is staggering to think that such a band could seriously render this kind of music. Yet the Russian musicologist Yury Arnold and the German composer Ludwig Spohr admired the astonishing musicality of the players.63 Other observers were less kind. De Passenens asserted that only slaves could be brought to play a single note; and the poet Derzhavin scorned the bands as a low entertainment of overindulgent aristocrats. The horn band declined along with estate theater and disappeared after the introduction of the valve trumpet.64
Those noblemen who organized and watched with sheer amusement as dozens of men alternated their notes in a complicated score clearly enjoyed a certain sense of power and command. In this sense, the horn orchestra resembled the human toy soldiers on drill parade estates—a nostalgic surrogate for real power. Though he had no horn band, the military martinet and chief administrator of Tsar Alexander I, Alexei Arakcheev, maintained a serf orchestra and choir at Gruzino, his utopia-like estate where geometric order reigned supreme. The players presented dances, marches, serenades, Russian songs, overtures, arias, and operas—including Martin y Soler’s The Tree of Diana and Mozart’s Magic Flute. All the servants, dependents, military personnel, and other subordinates fell under the eye of this strictest of taskmasters who oversaw their manners and costumes. He and his mistress displayed inordinate harshness to their underlings for which she paid with her life in a brutal act of murder. The eccentric whim of a master sometimes verged on madness: the Kursk nobleman P. A. Denisov, when in a bad mood, had his entire orchestra perform on their knees or had them pull his sleigh.65
Pleasure-inducing music had its price for the owner as well. The labor of house and field serfs cost nothing of course, but some owners paid wages to their serfs as an incentive and gave gifts to favored players and singers. Instruments, notes, and training had to be paid for. The more elaborate establishments with concert chambers and theaters found their musical offerings much in demand by neighbors and friends, and their hospitality thus expanded: their owners invited guests or transported entire serf orchestras to a friend’s estate for extended periods, as did a landowner in Orël and Glinka’s uncle in Smolensk. The practice of maintaining serf orchestras and choirs could be ruinous. Prince Odoevsky, financially squeezed, sent his orchestra players as serfs on obrok to support him. Others took them to fairs and charged admission. Insolvency commonly resulted in dissolution or sale. Chronicles in the first third of the century contain purchase records detailing the unloading of singers, dancers, and entire orchestras onto other landowners or the Imperial Theater complex. A lord’s profligacy often caused misery for his serfs who might be sold, split up, or sent as soldiers. As early as 1806, long before the general dissolution of serf orchestras, they were already being mocked in Alexander Shakhovskoi’s opera, The Love Post, which satirized all kinds of manorial productions. Remarkably, serf orchestras continued right up to the end of serfdom itself and long past the point when owners were disbanding their serf theaters.66
Serf musicians paid in a different coin. The fact that orchestras and quartets sometimes mingled serfs with landowners in performance did not affect the relationship between master and servant during the twilight years of serfdom. Masters used their musicians in various ways. Prince Vyazemsky, for example, in order to economize, had his fiddlers and flutists double as buffet waiters and attendants. At Koshkarev’s estate in Nizhny Novgorod Province, lackeys, huntsmen, and musicians rotated their jobs. Field-Marshal Suvorov sent his musicians into the fields when harvest hands were needed. A story by Mikhail Zagoskin poked fun at some landowners who assigned instruments to men according to physical qualities: the double bass for a tall serf, the bassoon for one with a good set of front teeth. The oft-cited French expatriate, de Passenens, recounts that masters would select serf children and simply say to them: “you, you’ll play bassoon, and you clarinet.” In the 1820s on one of the Kurakin estates in Orël Province, musicians and singers worked also as servants and laborers in the manorial garment factory. Doubling was common: Prince Baryatinsky had some of his serfs trained as musicians and as floor polishers—human tools who skated across the parquet with brushes tied to their feet (a token of demeaning labor highlighted in the Soviet film of 1934, Chapaev).67
Like other serf artists, musicians experienced a variety of fates. In a minor success story, the first violinist of Strakhov’s band, after his master’s death, made his own career as orchestra leader in Kazan and Simbirsk.68 Better known is Daniil Kashin (1770-1841), an energetic pioneer of Russian music, though his early life is still shrouded in obscurity. One of G. I. Bibikov’s serfs, he managed to study in St. Petersburg with Giuseppe Sarti. In Moscow, Kashin became the conductor of Bibikov’s serf orchestra—all the while in bondage. At age twenty, he was already the versatile author of overtures, concertos, choral works, romances, and opera; at thirty he was freed with the assistance of the poet Sergei Glinka and two actors from the Imperial Theater system. Kashin concertized, conducted, and composed as a freed serf after 1799. Long before the advent of Mikhail Glinka, Kashin turned his ear to coachmen’s songs of the high road, peasants in the fields, and Gypsies in performance; he gathered folk songs, arranged them into romances, wrote patriotic occasional music in 1812, and did variations on folk songs—all of which endeared him to Russian nationalist intellectuals. Like most of the composers who collected and arranged folk material, Kashin reworked it in the European musical vocabulary in which he been trained. This versatile man was one of those few who emerged from estate bondage to breathe the air of freedom.69
The more complicated case of the violinist I. I. Semënov illustrates the ever-present tensions inherent in the process of liberating talent from serfdom. Vyazemsky and Mikhail Vielgorsky made an agreement with the violinist’s owner, Prince Alexei Kurakin (d. 1829), to release him for a fee. But, irritated at all the buzz in Moscow in 1824 about this event, Kurakin changed his mind and returned the ten thousand rubles paid for Semënov's freedom. This was one of several cases where the owner interpreted public knowledge of such transactions as pressure and became indignant that other people could influence the disposal of his personal property. Semënov was freed in 1834, a few years after his master’s death, and soon became the concertmaster of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater orchestra. In 1836, he appeared solo on the Engelhardt House concert stage. The public delayed applauding for a moment before releasing a stormy ovation and—breaking with custom which encored only actors and singers—brought the ex-serf back to play again. Although a dozen or more ex-serfs had performed in public by that time, the public was still apparently rhapsodic over the spectacle.70
Since memoirs of serf musicians are rare, information about them is found largely in second-hand observation by outsiders. A serf flutist, Alexei Chemerovtsov, who deserted his master and lived for eighteen years in Europe, left a deposition describing the unbearable humiliation of his parents. In 1814, moved by patriotic impulses, he gave himself up and was returned to Russia to an unknown fate. The literature on the suffering of serf musicians is affecting, but not very large. Atrocity stories were recycled many times. But the fact remains that their protagonists suffered a particular psychological agony. By training and occupation they were pulled out of one environment and placed in another, from kitchen or field or stable to a world of high culture and refined taste. This could, if the landowner chose to reverse the path, result in arrested development or the enchainment of talent. Alexander Herzen, one of the preeminent foes of serfdom, reported the case of two highly trained serf brothers, a cellist and a violinist, on the Smolensk estate of P. K. Vonlyarlyarsky. When the cellist attained some notoriety in the capitals, he was peremptorily recalled by his master and forbidden to leave the estate (as was his brother) on pain of exile. The owner, hearing rumors of an offer to buy the cellist’s freedom, declined any offer. The murder of the elder Count Kamensky of Orël Province in 1809 has been attributed to two of his violinists whom he sent to Leipzig for training where they enrolled in a curriculum of freedom as well as music. On their return, according to hearsay, Kamensky still beat them for minor infractions. They stole into his bedchamber by night, and reproached him for wresting them from their natural environment into the free air and then plunging them back into slavery. The two serfs then chopped their master in pieces.71
The gentry memoirist Elizaveta Vodovozova (1844-1923) has left an account, full of dismal irony, of Vaska (no other name) a serf musician belonging to her father, the landowner Tsevlovsky. Vaska once heard a gentry woman playing a Chopin nocturne, memorized it, and played it on the violin. His owner loaned him to a neighbor (probably N. B. Golitsyn) whose wife, a foreigner, deepened his musical knowledge and offered to purchase him for further education. But Tsevlovsky declined and ended the serf’s musical training by putting him to work in his estate theater as prompter, actor, soloist, and musical director. When in 1848, cholera took away the master, his widow had to retrench and put house servants on either obrok or field work. Vaska, aged thirty, no longer suited for either and mocked by his fellow peasants, sought release from the plow. Vodovozova’s mother became annoyed by Vaska’s “pretensions” as a musician and by entreaties couched in the high rhetoric he had learned in her husband’s theater. Vodovozova indicates between the lines that her mother was taking out her anger at her husband’s theatrical extravagance on an innocent participant. She threatened to send him to the army but instead made him a coachman. Vaska’s only sympathizers were the children of the manor, including the narrator. Eventually, Vaska was purchased for fifteen thousand rubles by the neighbor’s widow who took him to Moscow and freed him. Vaska worked for a time in a Moscow theater orchestras, then went abroad and disappeared. Vodovozova’s mother, despite the enlightened atmosphere of the household, simply could not fathom why her neighbor would buy and free a serf. In a remarkable passage, Vodovozova recalls the tearful farewell when Vaska and his wife departed into freedom, to the equal astonishment of the other serfs.72
The house serf Finogen, son of a cook, had trained on piano with John Field and Daniel Steibelt, spoke four languages, and served as pianist, conductor, and teacher on the estate of a Smolensk landowner and music lover. Neighbors paid Finogen well for the private lessons he gave, but he was isolated both from society which did not receive plebeians and from his fellow serfs. The humiliation of Finogen, an avid reader, reached the limit when he had to seek permission from the mistress of the house to borrow a book from the manor library and was punished for breaches of the rules. Then came a familiar episode: the master agreed to free the serf upon his death, but his executor colluded with the widow to suppress the document. The suit went to court and Finogen had to pay five thousand rubles of his savings to free himself. Ruined financially, he turned to drink, and died in poverty and obscurity in Moscow.73
The father of the literary historian and censor Alexander Nikitenko was one of N. P. Sheremetev’s Ukrainian serf boy singers whose overexposure to high culture turned into a source of constant agony once he was returned to a menial job on a provincial estate. Alexander, who eventually won freedom and became a government censor, described Sheremetev as a despot corrupted by wealth, sated and bored, and “drowning in luxury.” Out of the same milieu came the composer Stepan Degtyarëv (Degterev, 1766-1813) who, though living in bondage until he was in his thirties, built for himself an impressive musical career. Born in Kursk Province, at age seven he sang in the Sheremetev choir and became choirmaster and conductor of his private orchestra. Degtyarëv trained with Sapienza at the Sheremetev estate school, and, like Kashin, with Sarti. Called the Russian Haydn, he won renown as a composer of mostly choral works, the most famous of which was Minin and Pozharsky, or the Liberation of Moscow (1811), the first oratorio on a Russian national theme. It cleverly invoked the early seventeenth-century Russian heroes who had rallied an army to free Moscow from an invading Polish force—an early example of “restaging the Time of Troubles” for patriotic effect that took hold in drama at the same time. Degtyarëv's composition, ornate and triumphant in the manner of his teacher, alluded to the current Napoleonic menace and foreshadowed the imminent occupation of Moscow again after two centuries. However great Degtyarëv's renown, his master continued to tyrannize over him and keep him enserfed for most of his life. When Degtyarëv's longing for freedom was stalled, he turned to drink.74
In these, and in victim tales about serf actors and painters, ruination by alcohol recurs as a frequent theme. Its conveyors simply take it as a given that bondage and mistreatment caused destructive drinking among creative serfs. But how does one determine that causation? Drinking strong spirits was endemic in rural Russia among free peasants, state peasants, and serfs alike—as well as the urban lower and middle classes and many among the upper reaches of society. Further complicating the problem is the fact that performing serfs (and performers in general) were especially prone to drink. In one example among many, the governor of Vyatka Province, Kirill Tyufyaev—notorious in Herzen’s vilifying memoirs—once planned a grand ball in honor of the visiting tsarevich (later Alexander II). In order to keep the musicians from becoming drunk he had them jailed on the day of the ball, taken from their cells directly to the Gentry Club, and locked in their seats for the duration of the ball. Herzen saw this as social atrocity; the governor as a sensible measure based on experience. The terms “abuse” and “overuse” of liquor are elastic terms and hard to evaluate; it is even harder to measure the role of drink in the disappointments and personal sufferings (and triumphs) of serf musicians and other artists.75
But it is not just the number of abused victims or their level of self-indulgence or even the mechanism of their exploitation that marked serfdom as a scourge. It was embedded in the very culture of unfreedom, the dark shadow of uncertainty, whim, or malicious decision by a lord who could alter—and ruin—someone's life. Of all the forms of servitude, domestic serfdom, in the view of the great reformer-in-exile Nikolai Turgenev, was “the most hideous and repulsive.” The historian Michael Confino ranked household service along with removal to another village and recruitment into the army as the great disasters of peasant life (though evidence suggests that factory servitude was worse). Serfs in the manor house lost their previous economic identity and mentality. They produced nothing and were relatively unproductive in their service. Uprooted from the village and planted among aliens—their masters—musicians and artists were thus doubly alienated: as house serfs estranged from the village; as trained artists, from their fellow domestic servants to whom they often felt superior. The Tsevlovsky serfs, who had loved Vaska the Musician when he played folk tunes at peasant weddings, mocked his “sawing on the violin” when he became a domestic musician.76
The lush flowering of sentimentalism in literature, often associated with humanitarianism, coexisted with serfdom because the machinery of teary empathy for the wronged worked best when the victim was far away. With a flash of clarity rare in such memoirs, Shchepkina declared that people of her class in the 1820s and 1830s, though governed by sentiment and love, failed to extend these feelings beyond their own family and close friends. Only a Christian sense of charity for the poor tempered their severity to underlings. Kropotkin, though often subjective on these matters, rightly noted how members of his class could be reduced to tears over a French novel and in the next minute punish a serf. Karamzin and his readers who wept for the fate of “Poor Liza” mistook the tale as an aberration rather than as an almost unavoidable offspring of servile relations. The sense of inflated pride in owning somebody else’s talent could blind a master to another’s pride or sensitivity. Prince Dolgoruky, writing in 1817, described a serf-owing acquaintance who appeared promptly at 6 P.M. in the hall of his home, greeted his female dancers by name, struck up the band, and sat in leisure, “dreaming himself to be some kind of Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.” Pride in a sense became a commodity, an object of competition, and in that struggle, the self-pride of the serf artist had to defer to the landowner’s pride of ownership.77
It is fitting to recall that one of the most affecting treatments of bondage in all of Russian literature revolved around a manorial serf musician. The author Nikolai Pavlov (1803-64), known best as the husband of the writer Karolina Pavlova, was a literate “insider” who lived his first eight years as a serf, son of a house serf. As a free adult in 1835 Pavlov wrote “Name Day”—a narrative with a shocking final twist—to describe how enslavement brought psychic pain when its bearer encountered book learning, musical art, and love. The house serf protagonist can find no character resembling “himself” in the books that he chances to read; they are all free. Trained to entertain the master, the serf reveals a musical talent that is doomed by a cramped existence. His woe is exacerbated by a hopeless love affair with a neighboring gentry girl. The cruel mechanisms of fate lead him to dreams of cutting the throat of his master who gambles him away to another lord, in real life one of the great anxieties of peasant existence. Instead he flees, is captured, and sent into the army. Mirabile dictu, he finds there a haven from the unbearable inner conflicts of private servitude and indeed finds success on the battlefield, honor, and promotion.78
Out of the Forest: Glinka
“The people create the music,” wrote Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857), Russia’s first recognized secular art music composer of greatness; “and we [composers] merely arrange it” (fig. 14). These words are inscribed in metallic letters in the lobby of the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow; they are uttered as a theme (though never demonstrated) in the tendentious 1952 Stalinist film, Glinka, the Composer, a movie that helped shape subsequent popular Soviet discourse about Russian composers;79 and they have been repeated with nauseating regularity in virtually every Soviet treatment of Glinka. The composer certainly stood at the confluence of several Russian musical and social rivulets of the time. Domestic playing fed the musical life of the nation and was in turn fed by the circulation of a large and diverse body of genres through tutoring, sheet music, instruments, visiting artists, salons, and serf orchestras. In and out of the home, one could hear solo or group singing of folk songs. This environment shaped not only Glinka’s creative life, but also the lives of Russian composers who grew up in this era but became famous only near the end of it or in the decades following serf emancipation in 1861: Dargomyzhsky (born 1813); Serov (1820); Anton Rubinstein (1829); Borodin (1833); Cui (1835); Balakirev (1836); Musorgsky (1839); Tchaikovsky (1840); Rimsky-Korsakov (1844). The oldest, Dargomyzhsky was close to fifty and the youngest, Rimsky-Korsakov, seventeen when serfdom and the creative system around it came to an end.
The genius of the composer Glinka found nourishment in an entire range of musical sounds and forms from peasant songs to European orchestral works. As a child on the family estate of Novospasskoe in Smolensk Province, he apparently could distinguish the bell ringing of every church in the vicinity which alternately used the dominant chiming modes (raspevy) of the time: Smolensky, Tikhvinsky, and Vladimirsky. Bell sounds were especially audible and evocative in the hushed surroundings of the countryside: Novospasskoe lay, as it still does, very deep in the woodlands. And, like Pushkin, Glinka supposedly absorbed national folk culture from his peasant nanny, though there is little notice of it in his memoirs. Glinka recounts that as a child he drank in the tunes of Smolensk Province and that they helped shape his musical consciousness. He clearly drew from folk songs sung by serfs and the road songs of coachmen, but the process of “imbibing” the music of the narod (the popular masses) was not as unconscious or mystical as the mythology would have it.80
The memoir of one of Glinka’s serfs, Alexei Netoev, dictated a quarter-century after the composer’s death, offers some insight into Glinka’s mode of adaptation—the conscious borrowing of peasant tunes by an already accomplished composer. Though containing errors and crudities, Netoev’s account convincingly describes—in the accents of a loyal servant in old age—the cultural exchange between educated master and talented servant. He recalls how the young Glinka loved to watch and join in peasant dances, songs, and revelry (there is no mention of him carousing with the peasants—though he became a prodigious drinker as an adult). On returning from Petersburg as a grown man, Glinka befriended his serfs, the Netoev brothers: Alexei, a violinist, and Yakov, a cellist and contrabassist. Glinka took Alexei to the capital for further musical training and Yakov remained Glinka’s valet. The composer borrowed songs, phrasing, and styles from the serf and in return paid for music lessons to increase his skills. On his visits to Smolensk Province in the years 1828-47, Glinka mingled with peasant musicians from other landed estates. He went round the villages, and invited peasant girls to his home where he transcribed their singing into piano arrangements. He also formed serf choirs and orchestras. Ethnographic research reveals that most of the folk songs that Glinka incorporated into his choral and orchestral work—and even his songs—were simply copied directly by him when he was already an adult composer.81
Glinka has never been accused of plagiarism, any more than has Beethoven, who used Russian folk themes in two of his quartets, though Glinka has often been presented as a lone figure in a more or less deserted field. There is nothing surprising about Glinka’s musical sources in the backwoods of Smolensk; after all he drew also from the environs of St. Petersburg, Finland, Orël Province, Ukraine, and the Caucasus as well as from Poland, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Some commentators saw folk structure—sharp contrasts of mood, tempo, volumes—in Glinka as opposed to mere copying of folk songs. But, as Gerald Abraham pointed out many years ago, Glinka and others of this era did not use folk harmony. Though the early influence of village folk songs on Glinka is undeniable, so are many other sources, including classical music that he heard at home. His mother played Mozart on the harpsichord. He heard barcaroles and “the mighty peal of heavy German waltzes.” He was also thoroughly trained by Siegfried Dehn and other European masters and was thus wholly familiar with the music of German, French, and Italian composers of the age.82
What astonished Glinka most and clearly shaped his later work were the styles and repertoires of his uncle’s serf orchestra. Shmakovo, the uncle’s home, was one of those magnificent piles of the Catherinian period—at the zenith of gentry luxury—immense and ornate with galleries, ballrooms, dining halls, a theater where plays and concerts where performed. During Glinka’s childhood, it retained only a remnant of fading grandeur, the serf orchestra, which the uncle would bring to Novospasskoe about twice a month, sometimes staying over for days at a time. If the acoustics were as good then as they are now in the wooden manor house, the experience must have been a revelation. The programs included overtures and symphonies by the Parisians Cherubini and Méhul; the Germanic masters, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; the noted German cellist Bernhard Romberg, and the Russianized German conductor, Ludwig Maurer. When they played classical music and orchestrated folk songs, the young Glinka would join the band and learn to play different instrumental parts. For Glinka, who jokingly called a collection of canaries his “serf orchestra,” serf musicians supplemented in childhood the auditory richness of church bells and peasant singing on his estate. Glinka’s first spark of inspiration came from the serf orchestra and then from folk song. He needed both to achieve greatness; otherwise, surmises Ugo Persi, he might have become another imitator of Western music or a romantic folk song collector. Glinka’s childhood exposure to orchestral music was not exactly a model for other future composers of greatness. The young Rimsky-Korsakov heard only piano and a few instruments of itinerant musicians in the quiet little northern town of Tikhvin. But when he heard in St. Petersburg the works fully orchestrated that he had played again and again in childhood, he was enraptured and later became one of the paramount symphonic orchestrators of all time.83
The British scholar Stuart Campbell aptly speaks of the “fragmentary quality of musical life” in this era, the awareness of which accelerated concertizing.84 The conditions were vastly improved by the establishment by Anton Rubinstein of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the St. Petersburg conservatory a few years later. Campbell’s comment applies to the public sphere, particularly concert and theater performance of serious music. But fragmentation is a relative thing and is not the same as weakness or absence of musical life. The public symphonic concert scene was indeed modest, compared to that in the German states and other European countries of that era; but opera and ballet flourished grandly in the capitals and the provinces. All genres were constantly expanding, and this expansion owed much to the constant sustenance of music in the home, where musical sounds not only sensitized the minds of composers such as Glinka but also trained the “Russian ear” to the rich possibilities of music that would come in the following generation to conquer masses of listeners all over the world.