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In Search of a Concert Hall

All the arts have their own magical effects on us, but not a single one of them reaches into the innermost feelings of our soul so deeply as music, and especially music cleansed of any adulterations, music without verses, without dances, without spectacles, music powerful in itself, in the romantic sphere of the ideal, that is—music expressed in the symphony!

—M. D. Rezvoi, 1841

Mikhail Glinka broke the barrier to Russian secular art music; it fell to Anton Rubinstein to build a permanent institution on which it could rest. This required concert facilities, a public attuned to musical masterpieces, and a central educational establishment. The last named, in the form of a conservatory, arrived last. The other two unrolled slowly, beginning at the turn of the century three decades before Rubinstein was born. But, if the evolution of public musicality beyond the private sphere of home and salon walked a vexed and uneven road, that road was rich in musical experience and, for the historian, full of stories about how it intersected with society. To the extent that the concert hall served as a training ground for the musical ear and an instrument of cultural identity, listeners gradually learned to shed visual, dramatic, and other extramusical associations integral to song, opera, ballet, and melodrama in order to experience the relatively abstract instrumental music of symphony and chamber concerts and solo recitals. James H. Johnson has shown that among Paris audiences in this period, listening habits shifted from scenic and textual guidance to an engagement with sonorities, forms, and harmonies, from “thinking of hunts, battles, and queens to focus on purely musical logic.” The social dimension of this shift saw an increase in audience etiquette and a reduction in coughing, conversation, and movement in the hall. Johnson shows how this shift simultaneously made for a more individualized consumption and a new sense of shared aesthetic experience—amounting almost to piety. The concert milieux in Paris eventually ceased being minicourts or houses of fashion and became ''temples of art."¹

How soon did Russians heed the words of army engineer, amateur painter, composer, and cellist M. D. Rezvoi, who in the quotation at the head of this chapter praised ''music without verses, without dances, without spectacles"?² Though not wholly answerable, the question is worth pondering. A study of concert programs, reinforced by contemporary observations, indicates that through most of the early nineteenth century, quiet reverence and concentration on the “long line” offered by entire symphonies did not come easy to most Russian concertgoers. The operatic voice soared in popularity over the orchestra, as did shorter instrumental works over longer ones. People tended to talk more during instrumental playing. To put it another way, public space long remained beholden to the habitus of private space; the concert programs—though grander in scale—still partly matched the mixed-genre evenings of salons and other home performances. Yet toward the end of the period, some evidence emerges of a mood change. Glinka, well aware of old habits, showed delight at audience reaction and attentiveness to his Kamarinskaya, an early example of orchestrated Russian thematics. Odoevsky, at an 1847 concert, noted with glee the public’s keen reception of a Berlioz program. In 1859 he claimed that “the artistic sensibility of our public is growing more and more.” The composer Alexander Serov, who could be haughty as a critic, in 1856 happily reported a postconcert conversation with a merchant who, in spite of some confusion about genres, had become a great enthusiast.³

It would be useless to attempt to reconstruct a hierarchy of listening modes such as that proposed in a rather schematic way by the twentieth-century social philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno, with its “structural listener,” “good listener,” “cultural consumer,” and so on. Critics then and now bemoaned audiences’ eclectic tastes. Lamenting hybrid performance practice, Eleanora Fradkina in 1994 reprinted the program of a Philharmonia concert of March 1859. The first half: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, an aria from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the "Sanctus" from his Missa Solemnis, an excerpt from Wagner’s Tannhaüser, and the finale of Glinka’s Life for the Tsar. The second half: the last two movements of the Beethoven concerto, an aria from Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, a solo piece for the Ophicleide, an aria from Halévy's La juive, and the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Fradkina, reflecting both a twentieth-century elitism and a Russian purist version of it, shudders over the division of the violin concerto, the little “doses” from opera, and the intrusion of a “dessert”: the Ophicleide, a popular brass instrument invented in 1817 (not 1821, as she says). Fradkina is dismayed that such a serious conductor as Carl Schuberth (1811-1863) offered this pot-pourri. But Schuberth could feel the pulse of his audiences. This meant getting them to the hall, and pleasing while “uplifting” them—a strategy that has been used by conductors, when suitable, right up to our own time. Schuberth may have shared the tastes of Glinka and Odoevsky; but he also knew the tolerance level of the public.⁴

Russian concert audiences hardly differed from those of Europe at midcentury. They could noisily request the encore of a movement or section, and the conductor could accommodate or not.⁵ Only rarely did scandals erupt. The most serious, and hilarious, occurred in Petersburg in 1855 or 1856 at a Gentry Club Philharmonia concert of the music of Alexandre Lazareff, conducted by himself. Lazareff, billed as a “noted Russian composer,” but one unnoted in the annals of Russian music, issued calling cards with the device “ami de Rossini”; he later wrote a book comparing himself with Beethoven. After the first set, Odoevsky, choirmaster Gavriil Lomakin, and the composers Serov and Dargomyzhsky were up in arms. Serov mounted a chair and shouted angry words at the conductor-composer; the two men hurled things at each other; the audience—divided in sympathy—howled, and the orchestra engaged in cacophony. The police arrested the combatants and a half-dozen others and the concert ended in infamy.⁶ This and a few other minor skirmishes constituted exceptions in the otherwise placid progress of symphonic performance in public. The Lazareff affair—in no way comparable to the radical premieres of Victor Hugo’s Hernani or of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring— resulted simply from the disgust of musical esthetes at apparently bad music played by a very bad conductor. The problems faced by lovers of symphonic music in Russia ran much deeper—even to the lack of a permanent venue or fixed orchestra. The present-day Philharmonia, firmly anchored to its home and fully attended, is a far cry from its ancestor.

Philharmonia and Capella

The Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia is among the most photogenic concert sites in the world. Documentary and feature film makers have for decades panned across the symmetrical seating of the parterre, the Corinthian columns, the great organ behind the stage, the balcony. The interior geography has not changed much in a century and a half, and the civic austerity introduced in Soviet times cannot hide the fact that this was once a ballroom. Its balcony—where Liszt, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky have stood—was designed for a dance orchestra. Old woodcuts and photos capture the former versatility of its private and festive character: potted palms, garlands of flowers, chairs removed for dancing or a charity bazaar (fig. 15). These pictures eloquently depict the Great Hall as the spatial heart of collective gentry life.⁷ When the Gentry Club of St. Petersburg in 1836 first rented the hall to the Philharmonic Society, that hall—which in 1943 would serve as a virtual emblem of the city’s wartime spiritual survival—was the playpen of aristocrat pleasure. The power of the capital’s corporate gentry class at mid-nineteenth century and the grandeur of its headquarters stands in contrast to the then relative insignificance of the Philharmonic Society that would some day give the hall its name (fig. 16).

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society or Philharmonia, no latecomer on the European scene, emerged in 1803, a decade before the British Philharmonia and several decades before those of Vienna and Berlin. But the chronology is misleading. A “Philharmonia” is an organization that offers concerts to the public (or part of the public) on a regular basis. In this, Russia lagged behind Europe. The long haul in establishing regular concert life in western Europe began in the 1670s and was mostly complete by 1800 in all but official nomenclature. Russia—in the familiar telescoping process of late borrowing and rapid adaptation—squeezed through this stage in the half-century between the founding of the Philharmonia in 1802 and of the Russian Musical Society in 1859. Russia borrowed European patterns that had emerged ad hoc. Christian dogma prohibited theater productions during the Lenten season, theater being seen as a sensuous pleasure—like meat and sex. Since music was not so vilified, Lent became the original concert season. Jean-Baptiste Lully in Louis XIV’s France pioneered in nurturing the public’s appetite for nontheatrical music. His followers in eighteenth-century Paris began the Concerts spirituels in 1725. Concertizing took place at the Leipzig Cloth Hall (Gewandhaus), in Vienna, and in Britain from the 1760s onward. Imported into St. Petersburg from these traditions were the absence of a permanent location and a regular conductor, a preponderance of amateur musicians, and the rarity of rehearsals. As the century turned, figures such as Spontini, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Spohr in various ways infused their orchestras with discipline and professionalism. Control and standardization via metronome and a podium conductor gradually eroded improvisation. All over Europe, audiences of courtiers and magnates widened to include a large urban public. Groups that were broad in terms of repertoire, audience, and the use of professional musicians challenged the older elitist societies dominated by aristocrats.⁸

In addition to the customary shortages plaguing European concert life—of skilled players, interested audiences, and available space—Russia faced a particularly heavy foreign domination of its orchestras and the absence of those European musical infrastructures created in previous centuries. At the start, the St. Petersburg Philharmonia was an outpost of Germanic musical culture in terms of patrons, musicians, and repertoire. It hardly differed from music societies in Riga and other Baltic German centers. With little outreach and no chain of local singing and orchestral societies and schools to feed it, the Philharmonia did not act as a central nervous system of early nineteenth-century Russian concert life, for there were few outlying limbs with living nerves connected to the center. But it certainly launched the enterprise from which other efforts grew. Petersburg’s and Moscow’s public concert life in the 1770s began modestly. Prior to that, performance of classical music was almost strictly confined to court circles and the aristocracy. The prerevolutionary historian N. F. Findeizen cites only a handful of public concerts from the 1740s to the 1760s in St. Petersburg. During the last quarter of the century, gentry clubs, musical “kloby,” and private theaters grew apace—especially after the gentry reforms of Catherine II. Some of the antecedents were elaborated private salons turned into concert space: a Musical Club in St. Petersburg, founded in the 1770s lasted until the end of the century; a Musical Society met at the Buturlin family home in the 1790s. What the listeners heard in these places was the kind of serious music sweeping Europe at the time: symphonies by German masters, and oratorios and masses written by now relatively forgotten Italian and German composers, together with such canonical masterpieces as Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (1736), Mozart’s Requiem (1791), and Haydn’s Creation (1798).⁹

One the eve of the Philharmonia’s founding, the musical scene in the Russian capital came under the scrutiny of the German Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), ranked in his day alongside Beethoven, Kreutzer, and Viotti as a major composer for the violin. A popular conductor, said to be the first to wield the baton, Spohr made contacts mostly with foreigners—Germans from Baltic towns and Petersburg, as well as Clementi, Field, and the crowd at the (French-speaking) Burgerclub. But Spohr was present at the Creation, so to speak; he played in the inaugural Haydn concert of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia in March 1802. In the previous autumn, a banker to the court of Tsar Alexander I, Baron Alexander Rahl (Rall), held one of his regular music evenings, where a recent returnee from Europe described the enthusiastic notices that Haydn was getting. So great was the reverence in this circle for Haydn, then at the peak of his European fame, that the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society was launched that night in his honor. A Haydn concert was planned and its organizers—mostly Russian Germans—became the founding members of the society. Composed of musicians from court theaters and patrons, including Yury Vielgorsky—father of Mikhail and Matvei—the society’s twofold mission was to awaken in the public an interest in classical music; and to assist financially the widows and orphans of deceased musicians. Thus the motto: ''To Comfort the Living."¹⁰

The four performances of Haydn’s Creation on March 24 and 31, 1802, formed a landmark in Russian musical history. The receipts financed the initial activities of the Philharmonia. The performances took place in Engelhardt House which established that place as the main site of Philharmonia concerts up to the 1840s. The orchestra of Petersburg’s Bolshoi Stone Theater included some outsiders. Spohr’s participation in the first violin section had no further resonance (he claimed, by the way, that the orchestra had seventy violins, thirty contrabasses, and doubled winds). But it helped make fourteen-year-old Mikhail Vielgorsky, who played second violin, into a supreme musical patron and amateur impresario of the early nineteenth century. The chorus in these performances was the Court Chapel Choir or Capella. The impact of its magnificent voices and the genius of Haydn’s music on Russian musicians and music lovers was tremendous. Creation became an annual event of the Philharmonia along with other choral works. In terms of listening experience, it may well be—as in Paris—that audiences new to large-scale works of this sort were enticed at least partly by the programmatic elements in Haydn’s work: the orchestral mimicry of primeval chaos and the successive creation by the deity of day and night, the earth, the seas, and living creatures. By 1807, the society had hardened into a real institution, with an imperial prefix, state patronage, a charter, and about a hundred members.¹¹

The pale blue mansion on the corner of the Nevsky Prospect and Griboedov Canal, Engelhardt House, has from 1949 borne the name Maly Zal or Small Hall of the Philharmonia (fig. 17). Visitors to Russia are hardly aware of it, as indeed are most Petersburgers who know the building only as a subway entrance. Yet for over half a century (1789-1846) the second floor of this house was the capital’s main concert venue. For about a decade after 1789 its hall was rented out for concerts and balls and was dubbed the Sale Lyon after the Frenchman who leased it. It passed first to a merchant and real estate magnate in 1799, and then in 1828 to his son-in-law Prince Vasily Engelhardt who gave it a new decor and a long-lasting name. The gorgeous columned foyer with ornamented mirrors lent optical depth to the interior space. In the spirit of cultural versatility, the place served as a favorite scene of testimonial dinners and of masques in the 1830s for Petersburg high society. It is best remembered by literary scholars as the setting for Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade.¹²

By the 1840s, the Engelhardt House was suffering from poor upkeep. The visiting Clara Schumann noted its cold, dark squalor. The last concert there in the nineteenth century was held in 1846. Merchants bought the building and turned it into a shop. The Philharmonic Society and other concert organizers had to move around to the homes of rich patrons, though these had difficulty accommodating the growing audiences. Enter the St. Petersburg Gentry Club. The architect Carlo Rossi and his colleagues finished the Hōtel Péterbourg (later named l’Europe) in 1834 across the square from the Mikhailovsky Palace; and by 1839 they had built the new Gentry Club in matching style across the street. In 1846, its Great Hall became the new, though irregular, home of the Philharmonia. Troubles arose on both sides: some in the society considered the hall acoustically unsuitable due to the thick stone columns; and club administrators sometimes showed reluctance to host concerts except when foreign celebrities were on the program.¹³

In the early decades, the Philharmonia offered the towering choral and symphonic works of the German and Italian masters, excepting of course Bach who was only revived by Mendelssohn and others in the 1820s. From 1802 to 1860 it gave 127 concerts, usually in January and March, and sometimes in November or December—averaging a bit more than two a year. The repertoire of the 1800s—Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), Giuseppe Sarti—was extended in the following decade to Luigi Cherubini, Tepper, Beethoven, and Pergolesi. On March 26, 1824, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis had its world premiere in St. Petersburg, the only time it was performed in the composer’s lifetime; the next full versions came in Cologne, Leipzig, and Bonn in 1844. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony got its first Russian performance in 1836. But the rather purist classical profile was somewhat modified by the inclusion of Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture played by two hundred musicians from a Guards regiment, and of Beethoven’s Wellington Symphony (The Battle of Victoria, 1813), a military potboiler which made Beethoven admirers such as Mikhail Vielgorsky hold their noses. Under Nicholas I, the offerings became more secular and contemporary, but still largely European, with a glittering array of foreign composers and virtuosos. By the end of the era, Italian opera selections held center stage at the Philharmonia concerts, a fact loudly lamented by certain critics.¹⁴

Who came? In the eighteenth century, according to one account, the aristocracy paid what they wanted at concerts, a practice that reflected its enmity to the cash nexus in general, and as applied to pleasure in particular. Here we have the same social mentality—anchored in a domestic universe with its tight circles of friends—that induced noble hosts to “tip” musicians (as did the tsars) rather than paying them a fixed fee; an outlook that led the Moscow hosts of Franz Liszt ticketless onto the concert stage to hear “their friend” perform. When concert tickets emerged, they were pricey enough to keep away the poor. Sketchy data suggest that they ran to about fifteen paper rubles under Alexander I and from about one to ten under Nicholas I. Early in this period, concerts started at 9:00 P.M., which would tend to inhibit the lower classes from attendance, and would fit perfectly into the leisure-driven clock of high society where late night balls and suppers were commonplace. Faddei Bulgarin afforded a fleeting glimpse of nonnoble concert attendees in the 1830s. Speaking of the public who came to Engelhardt House for music, he cautiously applauded the mingling of classes. This certified villain of Russian literature and journalism preached a little sermon to high society about its duty to mingle with the merchants and tradesmen who were constantly at their service in shops and businesses. Bulgarin was not speaking of the urban masses. During this era, one still had to pass through two gates in order to attend elite concerts: one of money, one of class. Yury Arnold observed that it took a long time for the Russian public to become attuned to serious symphonic music. Aside from the rarified art, other forces retarded its growth in Russia in the first half of the century. Neither Alexander I nor Nicholas I attended concerts on a regular basis. Fashionable circles tended to follow monarchs to their entertainments. The rage for foreign divas and virtuosos dictated a repertoire of short pieces and crowd-pleasers rather than the longer, more complicated works.¹⁵

The “German” coloration of the Philharmonia remained in place throughout the period. People with names like Grimm, Fuchs, Haberzettel, and Mein-hard still ran it a quarter-century after its founding; and in 1852 a letter to Mikhail Vielgorsky from its board contained ten signatories, only one of which was recognizably Russian, the rest being mostly German. With a letterhead in gothicized Cyrillic, the document is a real artifact of interethnic culture in Imperial Russia—a Germanic body writing in French to an ethnic Pole high in Russian service. After the death of Guillaume-Alexis Paris (1756-1840), a Belgian who had came in 1799 to St. Petersburg to conduct opera and who regularly conducted the Philharmonia concerts, Russian Germans—Ludwig Maurer, Karl Albrecht, Carl Schuberth (1811-63), and others—took the podium. Arnold noted that the players, drawn mostly from the theater orchestras, were 90 percent foreign and mostly German.¹⁶ The Teutonic dictatorship in Russian concert music was only a bit more thoroughgoing than that in Britain. Indeed, most European countries of the time were “occupied” by foreign musical forces: Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen. Invaders, though rarely in coalition, descended upon their objectives to conquer musical markets, audiences, and jobs. In the first decades of the century, they were joined by the detritus of war and revolution—refugees seeking shelter and a living. What sociologists call coping strategies led them to teach or perform in whatever skills they possessed. German hegemony in Russia was more socially complex because part of it was based on the large presence of German-Russians, native or permanent residents or people of Baltic origin. As Tsar Alexander I had put it in 1806 in justifying, though lamenting, the use of “well-known foreigners of proven talent”: “can we postpone events until our nationals become masters of every function that they have to perform?”¹⁷ From a musical point of view, the German hegemony proved advantageous in the early years of the Philharmonia due to its members’ familiarity with the newest and best German and Austrian music.

Like symphonic societies elsewhere, the Philharmonia had been formed under the inspiration of a particular composer or composers. In England and America, it was Haydn and Handel; on the continent of Europe, Beethoven. The symphonic genre and the large-scale choral work created the need for space: for the orchestra, the audience, and acoustical reproduction. Such spaces transcended the “narrow sociability of noble society for the broad performance space of the modern concert hall.” Within a very short time, however, those spaces in Europe proliferated and the performances in them multiplied far beyond the experience of Imperial Russia (Vienna put on 111 concerts during the 1826-27 season; London at about the same time mounted 125). Concert life in the Russia of serfdom thus became another of the many markers of how fast a public sphere could grow.¹⁸

The word "Capella" denotes both the Imperial Court Chapel Choir (Imperatorskaya Pridvornaya Pevcheskaya Kapella) and the exquisite hall housing it, presently known as the State Academic Capella of St. Petersburg. This architectural gem spans a courtyard off the Moika River, with an interior of modest dimensions and magnificent acoustics. Like the Engelhardt House, it is less-known to the world of visitors than the famous Philharmonia Hall. The oldest professional choir in Russia was founded in 1479 in Moscow as an adult male ensemble for the Uspensky Cathedral and court functions. Under Peter the Great, it moved to St. Petersburg, traveled with him in Europe, and was designated the Imperial Capella with eventually over a hundred men and boys. With the incursion of the music of Corelli and Telemann in the 1720s followed by wave after wave of Italian masters and teachers and composers, the Capella alternated between sacred music and service on the opera stage. As a result, the choir achieved a European level of vocal brilliance, technique, and suppleness. The price was the Italianization of style. A churchman complained in 1799 that when the doctored “melodies were sung the church was more like an Italian opera house that a house for reverent prayer to the Almighty.” Various efforts to Russianize the music were launched in the early nineteenth century.¹⁹

Unlike some of the Italian states which employed castrati up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Capella used boy sopranos. From the 1730s onward, grandees from the south began bringing talented youths with them to the capitals. For real or imagined reasons, Ukraine henceforth became a recruitment region for young voices well into the nineteenth century. The Capella maintained from 1738 to sometime before 1773 a permanent base at the inaptly named town of Glukhov (meaning “of the deaf”) in Ukraine where the far from tone-deaf boys, aged six to fourteen, got preliminary training. Among Ukrainian recruits who achieved renown through the Capella were the composers Bortnyansky, Varlamov, and Stepan Davydov, the painter Anton Losenko, and any number of lovers of empresses Elizabeth and Catherine. Though the Capella, all male until the Revolution, has been called “the only professional academy of music in Russia” until 1862, it offered instrumental training only sporadically. When their voices changed, boys with the best voices were kept on as adult singers, given rank XIV on the Table of Ranks, and freed if they were serfs. Thus the Capella, like the Theater School and the Academy of Arts, was another little-noticed agency of recruitment into freedom. Those not selected, also ranked, went to monastic choirs or theoretically got jobs as clerks in government service.²⁰

Of the Russian directors who came after the Italians, Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751-1825) achieved the greatest distinction, and his music still looms large in the Russian choral repertoire. A Ukrainian son of a military man, he was born in Glukhov, which probably accounts for his early recruitment into the Court Capella, at age six or seven. Scholars say little about his parents or how they gave him up. In Petersburg, he studied with Baldassare Galuppi and traveled to Italy. After minor posts, Bortnyansky served as Capella director from 1796 to 1825. By 1817, the choir had twenty-four boys and men. Bortnyansky partly succeeded in “de-Italianizing” the choir. His successor from 1825 to his death in 1836, Fëdor Lvov, was a dilettante known for the concerts at his home in the 1810s.²¹

The European reputation that the Capella acquired in the early nineteenth century is largely attributable to its director from 1837 to 1861, General Alexei Lvov, who succeeded his father. Until 1859 the Capella’s participation in the annual Philharmonia concerts made it integral to the musical life of the city. Hector Berlioz, in an oft-quoted remark about the choir which had sung his own music, wrote: “to compare the singing of the Sistine Chapel choir in Rome with these glorious singers is like comparing a miserable little bunch of scratchers from a third-rate Italian theater with the orchestra of the Paris conservatory.” The ensemble that Berlioz actually heard was the Capella amplified for his needs by voices from the Imperial Theaters. But the judgment still stands. Robert Schumann likened its octave basses to the low tones of an organ and its tenors to female voices. Lvov tried to enhance the musicianship of his singers in instrumental classes, in order to prepare them for jobs in orchestras, then held mostly by Germans. The theater musicians opposed this and the Imperial Theaters director lobbied to gut the program, even though some of it was financed out of Lvov’s pocket. Lvov also waged a musical struggle that went beyond the bounds of his own ensemble. From 1816 onward, the director of the Capella had been ex officio arbiter of church music throughout the empire. By the time of Nicholas I, many liturgical choirs had succumbed to “bad habits” which Lvov campaigned against. An ambitious man, he won the authority to approve all liturgical music performed in Russia, and he promoted his own compositions freely, along with those of Bortnyansky and a few others. Lvov even forced all choir teachers to take training at the Capella in order to keep their jobs.²²

Despite his impressive accomplishments and dedication to choral music, Lvov suffered at the hands of later historians, especially in the Soviet period, because of his contentious relationship with the cultural hero Mikhail Glinka. After the success of his opera A Life for the Tsar, Glinka served at the Capella under Lvov in 1837-39 as kapellmeister, which came to mean teacher, composer, arranger, and rehearsal conductor. In addition to these duties, Glinka went on recruiting singers in Ukraine, an experience he enjoyed. According to a Soviet editor of Glinka’s memoirs, the appointment was suggested by “the musical reactionary and personal foe of Glinka, A. F. Lvov,” as a way to tame a man who had too much popularity in society. This story is confirmed by other accounts. Lvov clearly envied Glinka and used his power to deflect glory away from him. It is generally believed also that Lvov relied heavily on the talented ex-serf Gavriil Lomakin who had moved from the Sheremetev choir to the Capella in 1848 as assistant director for rehearsals and training, but took the baton himself for public concerts. All this must be balanced by Lvov’s major contribution to music-making at a high level, at home, in the Capella, and in the concert hall.²³

Evenings with the Orchestra

The year 1812 called into being many institutions, long- and short-lived, to help those widowed and orphaned by the war. One of them became a useful partner of the Philharmonia: the Society of Patriotic Ladies (later St. Petersburg Women’s Patriotic Society). Founded by Empress Elizabeth and a group of aristocratic women in November 1812, it created among other things a girls’ school that became the Patriotic Institute in 1822. The society, a perfect blend of the patriotic and the patrician, viewed music as the natural coinage of charity and began in 1815 hosting fund-raising concerts. As an august sponsor of charity, the society could enable people to perform who were otherwise restricted from public appearance due to rank, such as the foreign celebrity Henriette Sontag and the Vielgorskys. At an 1837 concert, Matvei Vielgorsky performed a cello concerto and his brother played in the orchestra while titled male and female amateurs with illustrious names sang in the chorus. Throughout the period, charity served as an ideal link between private effort, upper-class performance, and public service. The garrulous prophet of sentimentalism Pëtr Shalikov commented transparently on the intimate tie between philanthropy and philharmonics. “Talent,” he wrote in The Ladies’ Journal, “is all the dearer when it is used to succor our neighbors,” and music served two impulses: friendship among equals and benevolence to the poor.²⁴

Although classical music performance still partly depended on the imperial purse or a princely Maecenas, it continued to flourish in the capital. The Imperial Theaters Directorate ran its own concert series during the Lenten season in order to keep the revenue flowing when plays, operas, and ballets were banned. The Directorate got around the ban on “theater” partially by luring audiences to concerts accompanied by tableaux vivants composed of ballet dancers and actors. Of the forty concerts given in the Lenten season of 1839, the theater orchestras gave seventeen. Of the rest, twenty-one were private or amateur affairs; only two were given by the Philharmonia.²⁵

The concert scene got a boost in 1842 with the launching of the Musical Exercises of St. Petersburg University Students (the term was adapted from the Paris Conservatoire concerts), commonly known as the Musical Mornings, presented on Sundays in the three-hundred-seat university Ceremonial Hall where generations of Russian and foreign students right up to the present have received their diplomas. The amateur violist A. I. Fitzthum von Eckstedt (Fitstum fon Ekshted), a retired army colonel and a popular inspector of students, inaugurated student music evenings and formed an orchestra. This assortment of, at its peak, about fifty-sixty amateur students and nonstudents performed without benefit of rehearsal and got help from some distinguished participants. Carl Schuberth of the Philharmonia regularly conducted; Mily Balakirev made his St. Petersburg debut there as a pianist; and Anton Rubinstein, though no friend of amateurism, debuted as a replacement conductor there in the 1850s and generously praised the orchestra in his memoirs. The composer Alexander Serov gave one of Russia’s first lecture courses on music history at the university in 1858. The Sunday morning performance time allowed a varied audience which reflected a growing interest in concert music among those not admitted to the high altitudes of salons and the more exclusive concerts—students, high school pupils, minor officials, members of the non-gentry intelligentsia.²⁶

Soviet historians have with some justice seen the university concerts as the “first swallow” of democratic concert life in terms of the mixed audience. The journalist and children’s writer of the 1930s M. Ilin (Marshak) went further and found democracy even in the musical programs. He cited the attendance of the young Alexander Borodin at the university concerts, which he contrasted with the “elitist” programs of sweet arias by visiting Italian divas and the acrobatics of virtuoso instrumentalists.²⁷ But in fact visiting soloists such as the singer Pauline Viardot also appeared at the Morning Concerts from time to time; and it is doubtful that its audiences, including Borodin, would have shunned other virtuosos. The largely symphonic offerings of the Morning Concerts were in fact elitist by both European and Russian standards of the time. If nationwide university enrollment figures are a guide, the frequency of these concerts and their growth in orchestra size and quality coincided with a rise in gentry enrollments from 1843 to 1848.²⁸ The influx of home-trained student players suggests their gentry origins. Thus the Mornings presented young people from the gentry and other social groups who possessed amateur music skills performing in a professional setting. The musicians (though unpaid) faced a large socially heterogeneous paying audience in a public space and were led by and accompanied well-known professional musicians in serious symphonic music. The university expanded the offerings of classical music in a city where these were still limited. From 1849 onward, the number of annual concerts jumped to ten a year. The university concerts ended in March 1861 after student disorders, just as new Russian musical establishments were being founded and at the moment when disturbances were ushering in an age of rebellion. Concert life within the university walls virtually ceased until 1883. But by then an entire concert network had been well established.

The Vielgorsky brothers and Alexei Lvov, major figures in the creation of musical life in the Russia of Nicholas I, floated their own concert organizations. The Vielgorskys and M. V. Rezvoi formed the Symphonic Society of St. Petersburg (1839-50) which played about fifteen times a year on Saturdays during the winter at the university or the Capella. Its amateur players performed Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and some now forgotten composers. It apparently ended for financial reasons. Mikhail Vielgorsky had spent much of his adult life advancing the cause of serious music in Russia, particularly through the Philharmonia which celebrated its fiftieth jubilee in 1852 by playing his Second Symphony. Matvei (1794-1866), a cellist, had both a domestic musical upbringing and exposure to the best in European classical music (fig. 18). During the last campaigns against Napoleon, he traversed Europe in a Ukrainian cossack regiment and commanded a cuirassier division. Like many poets, dramatists, and painters of the age, Vielgorsky combined the warrior with the art lover; and he acquired friendships with master composers, including Luigi Cherubini. After retiring as a colonel in the mid-1820s, he pursued his avocation as a cellist and composer, and played with visiting musicians such as Liszt and Vieuxtemps.²⁹

Opinions vary on Matvei Vielgorsky’s musicianship. His friend, the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, rhapsodized about his playing of Beethoven by quoting from the Russian Primary Chronicle: “We didn’t know whether we were on earth or in heaven.” Anton Rubinstein, also a good friend of Vielgorsky but a stickler for professionalism, privately had a low opinion of his virtuosity. Soviet musicology, while always exalting Glinka above his contemporaries, rendered a different judgment. Vielgorsky’s surviving scores show a high technical level. At Potsdam, he played Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata, Op. 56, with the composer himself at the piano and won his praise. Since Mendelssohn’s cello works demand great virtuosity to retain the lyrical spirit in rapid passages, the respected scholar Boris Shteinpress, writing in the 1940s, gave Vielgorsky high marks as a musician. Another distinguished musicologist, L. S. Ginzburg, hailed the cellist’s technique and composition, basing his judgment on Vielgorsky’s fingering and bowing instructions. The music itself is derivative and slightly Schubertian. Judging from the performance of a surviving theme and variations for cello and piano, Vielgorsky had a light and charming touch, anticipating Tchaikovsky’s famous Rococo Variations.³⁰

The Concert Society (1859-80s) owed its birth to Alexei Lvov. Gifted with a musical ear, he had taken up the violin on the family estate, played in domestic orchestras, and studied with several German tutors. At age nine, Lvov debuted with a concerto by Viotti, still a reigning favorite. Like other high-born amateurs, Lvov alternated his lifelong passion for music with more prosaic concerns. As a graduate of the Institute of Transportation, he worked for General Arakcheev in the Military Colonies and eventually rose to become an adjutant to Tsar Nicholas I. While abroad, he became friendly with Mendelssohn, Schumann, Spontini, and Meyerbeer, the last of whom gave him the theme for his duet for violin and cello. Lvov performed his own violin concerto with Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and with Liszt in Dresden. In European musical circles, the Russian was judged an accomplished dilettante violinist. In time Lvov received honors from academies in Rome, Bologna, and Berlin. In Russia, though not permitted to perform for the general public, he could do so without fee to select audiences and at charity events. If the recital was reviewed in print, Lvov could not be named.³¹

Lvov's violin concerto of 1840, subtitled “Three Movements in the Form of a Dramatic Scene,” lasts about twenty minutes. Haydnesque in places, it also echoes Beethoven’s Egmont music in the first movement, though as a whole it is clearly in the Italian school where Lvov had begun. Ever the admirer of Mendelssohn, Lvov seems to have indulged in what Charles Rosen has called “religious kitsch” in a movement marked andante religioso. The result is pure and sweet but without any notable generalized piety. Lvov first played it in Russia at the Vielgorskys in honor of Liszt’s visit in 1842. Although an eminently pleasing concert piece, this concerto was apparently never again performed afterwards until 1987. Given the relationship of Lvov with the musicians who dominated concert life in the late nineteenth century—especially Anton Rubinstein whose conservatory plans Lvov opposed—this is perhaps not so surprising. The Soviet neglect is even less so.³²

Lvov's surviving reputation in Russian music, despite all he did for it, is almost solely as the composer of the tsarist national anthem in 1833. Prior to 1816, neither nation nor dynasty possessed an official hymn. In that year, Grand Duke Konstantin, Alexander I’s brother, ordered the music to “God Save the King” (the British anthem) to be played for the tsar’s arrival in Warsaw—a custom continued on and off until 1833. When Tsar Nicholas voiced a desire for a Russian hymn, Glinka, Vielgorsky, and others tried their hands. Lvov, after many attempts, came home one night and within minutes wrote it out. He asked Zhukovsky to set the tune, at first entitled “Prayer of the Russian People.” Zhukovsky wrote an apostrophe to God seeking his protection for the tsar—the latter a synecdoche for the nation: “God Save the Tsar! / Mighty, autocratic / Hold sway to glory, / To our glory. / Strike fear in our foes, / Orthodox tsar. / God Save the Tsar!” Lvov tried, in the melody, to combine the spirit of Church, people, and army. In November 1833 the Capella first sang the new hymn with two military bands, Lvov’s father conducting. Tsar Nicholas demanded three more playings after which he shook the composer’s hand, kissed him and said: “Thank you, thank you, marvelous—you have understood me completely!” Later the composer had the words “God Save the Tsar” inserted into his coat of arms.³³

The first large-scale public performance of the new anthem took place at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater on December 11, 1833, in the rather irreverent company of one-act vaudevilles and ethnic dances. By one account, the four-hundred singers, including a dramatic troupe, students, and several orchestras and bands were greeted by an audience that rose to its feet. In the capital, the public first heard the hymn in 1834 at the Alexandrinsky Theater. Henceforth, the imperial anthem became routinely heard at the conclusion of concerts, sometimes with amplified musical forces to enhance its emotional power. A biographer quotes Lvov saying that “in a flash it was known in every regiment, all over Russia, and all over Europe as well.” Already in December 1833, the notes were circulated throughout the army and then spread to provincial towns. After the rise of a network of provincial orchestras in the late nineteenth century, the national hymn was heard everywhere—and, in the Russian manner, repeated several times after all kinds of performances. Ironically the British, who had supplied the predecessor to Lvov’s work, now adapted and sung his melody in churches. Lvov’s anthem was adapted to the concert stage as a concert piece for cello in the 1870s.³⁴ With its use in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Marche Slave the world has long been familiar.

Lvov's Concert Society, the last important musical body formed before the advent of the Russian Musical Society, was created with the help of Rezvoi, the Vielgorskys, and Odoevsky, and was prompted by a schism. As Capella director, Lvov had regularly offered its sumptuous hall and its singers for Philharmonia concerts. When that body began featuring Italian opera excerpts, Lvov ended the collaboration and launched his own organization of three annual Lenten concerts. Primarily designed to further European symphonic music, especially that of Beethoven, they occasionally enlisted the artistry of singers Rubini, Tamburini, Mario, and Viardot—though this contradicted Lvov’s alleged reasons for the break with the Philharmonia. Lvov programmed his own Stabat Mater, a work very much in the tradition of Haydn, Pergolesi, and Rossini, and made a few solo performances. The society catered to a select audience, including the royal family. Ticket prices, ten rubles for men and six for women for the three annual concerts, would not alone account for the attendance at these “aristocratic concerts.”³⁵ Invitation lists or other forms of clearance used in Europe were doubtlessly employed. But the real proof of the privateness of these events was the fact that high-ranking amateurs could face an audience of social equals such as they would meet in each other’s homes. Lvov may have had multiple motives in creating the Concert Society, but the result was the reprivatization of musical space at a moment when it was expanding elsewhere. General Lvov’s position, both as “victim,” unable to perform to a broad public, and as agent of audience restriction, illuminates perfectly the artistically impoverishing power of the prevailing socio-cultural system embedded in an ascriptive society.

Unlike the amateur university concerts, neither the Symphonic Society nor the Concert Society paid much heed to Russian composers, except for occasional works by Lvov and the Vielgorskys. Under Alexander I and his predecessors, Russian instrumental music rarely made it into the concert hall—as opposed to the opera. A compilation of mentions of composers in the journals, 1800-1860, gives a sense of the dominance of European over Russian music in the news—even more so if one subtracts the mentions of operas by Glinka and others. A few neglected composers should be noted. Jozef Kozlowski (Osip Kozlovsky, 1757-1831), a Polish nobleman, had been working in Russia since 1786, first as a cavalry major and then as musician for Prince Potëmkin. He produced a wide variety of solo voice, choral, and instrumental works—particularly versions of the polonaise of his native land. A recording of two of these performed by a chamber ensemble gives a sense of his elegant style—polished and stately, without the furor later associated with that form in Chopin. In the late eighteenth century, dance pieces (allemande, ecossaise, mazurka) adhered to rhythmic control for the sake of coordinated dancers.³⁶ Alexei Zhilin (17661848 or later), a composer and pianist from a Kursk gentry family, blind from childhood, in 1808-18 taught and conducted at the St. Petersburg Institute for the Blind and made at least one appearance, in 1811, at the Philharmonia. Surviving in recordings are romances, piano pieces, and a waltz for viola and piano written in a carnival spirit like barrel organ music—the mark of many early waltzes. His elegiac Variations on “Doves Sitting on an Oak” for piano contains passages reminiscent of Beethoven.³⁷ The music of Kozlowski and Zhilin, thoroughly European in construction, sometimes contained Russian themes. Kozlowski went to popular sites to listen to folk and urban songs. These composing and performing noblemen, perhaps because of background or handicap, stand as special cases, as do the few serf composers who also appeared in public.

In the 1850s, Vladimir Odoevsky, who also adored European symphonic classics, set out to correct the rarity of Russian pieces in concert programs. “A Russian concert,” he wrote in 1850, “consisting exclusively of the work of Russian musicians, until now seemed an impossible cause.” The reason, he argued with some venom, was the interminable performance of Italian opera music, which he called “macaroni.” Odoevsky had been lamenting Rossini worship since 1824 when he entered a fleeting debate over the virtues of that composer versus Mozart. Though not an operaphobe, Odoevsky nursed a major grudge against the tyranny of Italian opera and the grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Consumers of symphonic music everywhere constantly decried the “popular” or “vulgar” taste for opera. This charge might sound strange to our ears, because opera got canonized alongside symphonic music all over the Western world in the latter part of the nineteenth century, except for Italy where it was long “popular” as well as “serious.” As concert organizer of the Society for Visiting the Poor, Odoevsky mounted in 1850 the first (apparently) all-Russian concert, with works, mostly instrumental, by Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Vielgorsky, Rubinstein, Alyabev, Lvov, and two minor figures. The society’s lavish sponsorship allowed for a large orchestra and five weeks of rehearsal. This concert, and the impulse behind it, can be seen as an early instance of musical nationalism, but a nationalism lacking the aggressive ideology of the spokesmen for the Mighty Five that would soon emerge. No chauvinist, Odoevsky, in his report on the next Russian concert of the same year, identified Rubinstein, Henselt, Maurer, and John Field as essentially Russian by birth, upbringing, habit, or simply ''love for Russia."³⁸

In comparison to Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, or Paris—the Petersburg concert offerings seem thin. Monika Lichtenfeld counted about twenty-five classical music concerts in the Austrian capital each season (excluding chamber music) in the years 1850-56. Yet Petersburgers had access to many venues where good music was played: New Hall on the English Embankment, the Passage (a shopping complex on the Nevsky), the Yusupov and Stroganov palaces, the Imperial Theaters, and suburban resorts. When in 1856 Johann Strauss took the baton at the Vauxhall in Pavlovsk, previously a venue for restaurant and ballroom music, he offered symphonic works. Particularly active were the German Lutheran churches, with their singing academies and instrumental groups. In the 1850s, Balakirev performed on piano in symphonic concerts at the Commercial Hall on Kronstadt and at Myatlev Hall, a hostel for foreign guests. And the growing public interest in music is attested by a study of the available press which showed the number of items dealing with music tripling from the time of Alexander I.³⁹ While many so-called amateur gentry musicians got serious training from accomplished teachers, what Russia lacked was a permanent public society with full resources and an orchestra fed by a truly professional training center—to whit, a conservatory.

Listening Around the Empire

The word “concert,” first separated (in English) from its other musical meaning (concerto) in the early eighteenth century, still possessed fluid properties. Almost everywhere in Europe it could mean an evening or afternoon of music of almost any kind and in any blend of solo recital, arias, chamber music, or large-scale choral and orchestral works. In that sense, Russian concert life was far more vibrant than what was suggested by the limited schedule and repertoire of the concert societies. Virtually everything musical in St. Petersburg was repeated in Moscow—salons, clubs, German singing societies, ad hoc concerts sponsored by private families, charity groups, the university. Odoevsky, the Vielgorskys, John Field, and others moved back and forth, bringing their musical interests with them.

Moscow University, Russia’s oldest, became that city’s epicenter of nontheater music during the reign of Alexander I. Its energy source, the ex-serf Daniil Kashin, began while still in bondage to organize Moscow’s first open concerts, sometimes with an orchestra of two hundred. On gaining freedom in 1799 or 1800, Kashin anchored the musical life of the university for three decades as pianist, conductor, composer, teacher, and folk song collector. The story is told that when the French entered Moscow in 1812 and asked Kashin to produce some music for them. he declined, uttering the words of Tasso: “I now feel humiliated in my heart.” Amid the riot of musical patriotism that erupted after the Russian victory, Kashin produced stirring war-related works such as The Don, The Vanguard, and The Defenders of St. Petersburg, which achieved instant popularity at folk fairs, shows, and concerts. The regular orchestra of thirty to thirty-five players reached out to the Moscow public; at an 1823 performance, a professor counted eighty carriages and 150 sleighs arriving at the hall.⁴⁰

The shift of the epicenter of concert life from university to the Moscow Imperial Theater organization during the reign of Nicholas I owed much to the shrewd management style of its musical director, Alexei Verstovsky (1799-1862), a popular Russian composer and a powerful bureaucrat. Before his appointment in 1826, a few theater concerts had been organized by the Silesian Friedrich Scholtz (Fëdor Sholts, 1787-1830), who had come to Russia in 1811. Once Verstovsky took over, his self-promotion in concert life revolved around large-scale productions, or “monster concerts.” He scored for four harps and large orchestra his own choral hymn set to N. M. Yazykov’s “Great Sovereign,” which is full of gushing gratitude to Tsar Nicholas. In 1831, Verstovsky conducted it in the Moscow Gentry Club at a Lenten benefit concert for victims of the recent cholera epidemic. The imperial family attended the concert which featured a hundred voices, a 150-piece orchestra, and eighty horns. Verstovsky masterfully combined amateur gentry participation, philanthropy, and patriotism in his musical events. Patrician ladies of the Sheremetev and Bartenev families, in singing to a limited public at the Gentry Club, were merely extending the domestic setting to a wider assembly of their peers. On one of the programs was inscribed the now familiar motto: ''Art has always been the friend of charity."⁴¹

As musical arbiter of orchestral forces, voices, concert space, and fees, Verstovsky received a steady stream of letters from Russian musicians and visiting performers such as Catalani, Pasta, Berlioz, Viardot, and Clara Schumann. The polite epistolary discourse evinced a natural desire to please a powerful administrator; and the tone occasionally descended to unctuousness. Most letters came from Petersburg musicians seeking paid engagements in Moscow. In 1834 Ludwig Maurer wrote such appeals on behalf of himself and his sons. Verstovsky's opera Askold"s Grave became a totem of flattery for those dependent upon his good will. In the early 1850s, the Polish violinist Apolonary Katski (Kontskii, 1825-79) thanked Verstovsky, “My general and illustrious maestro!” for his assistance, praised Askold"s Grave which he had seen excerpted in Simbirsk, and requested concert engagements in Moscow. Letters from more exalted figures—the Vielgorskys, Odoevsky, and the political policeman Leonty Dubelt—reflected their power. The files are full of their recommendations and letters of introduction for friends, clients, and foreign guests. Their coded language of persuasion was embellished with ornate rhetoric and subtle hints. The grand patrons of St. Petersburg, as the hosts and semi-impresarios of musical life, saw Verstovsky’s satrapy as the Moscow branch of their hospitality.⁴²

Vasily Bezekirsky (1835-1917), a violinist, minor composer, and son of a piano maker, cast some garish light on the musical operations of the Moscow Theater Directorate, which, he claimed, once cheated his father in a business deal. Bezekirsky himself, after studying violin in Moscow and abroad, debuted in 1850 and eventually entered the patronage network of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Through competition, Bezekirsky gained first chair in the Imperial Moscow Theater orchestra. But his boss Verstovsky held the violinist’s salary down for a long time. Germans in the orchestra were eligible for a pension after ten years as opposed to Russians who had to wait twenty. Other minor grievances marked the clash between the two men.⁴³ Bezekirsky’s lament points up to the recurring problem of unequal wages and the privileges enjoyed by foreign-born or "foreign"-named musicians, one that became an issue for reform minded figures as different as Alexei Lvov and Anton Rubinstein.

Music-making in Moscow remained very much in the social sphere: a clubby setting of semiprivate space for members only. Aristocrats invited each other to their homes or to hired places such as the Gentry Club. When the internationally renowned diva Giuditta Pasta (1797-1867), for whom Bellini had written the title role in Norma, came to Moscow in 1840-41, she asked her friend and host Mikhail Buturlin to sing with her at a public paying concert. But Buturlin’s superior, Moscow governor D. V. Golitsyn, told him that it was not acceptable for “members of high society to participate in a public concert of professional artists.” The position of a well-born person performing in front of an audience suggested “serving”; and this put the function of critical judgment through applause in the wrong hands. Though Buturlin believed rightly that the attitude had attenuated by the 1870s, in some quarters it persisted right up to the Revolution.⁴⁴ But since high-ranking figures constantly performed for some publics, the notion of “public” was fast becoming fuzzy and the walls around private space sprang holes. It was one thing for the master of an estate to join a serf ensemble for a few hours in front of friends. It was quite another for him to appear in the guise of a professional. The notion of honor had always resided exclusively in the noble spectator, not in the performer. This notion got diluted as performing music grew more popular among the high-born.

In the two capitals of the Russian empire some subtle shifts had occurred in thinking about and organizing the realm of public space and social participation in the arts. Charity remained a key that opened the door to wider public performance for the upper classes. As long as noble performers received no fee, other commercial arrangements became acceptable: ticket sales, paid musicians, profit. In a sense, the philanthropic ticket buyers, in addition to supporting a favorite charity, were subsidizing the musical backup to gentry performers in a legitimized setting. The piano bench, long an artifact of courtship, was occupied by pianists from the gentry, such as Balakirev, in public display. During the rage for opera in the 1840s, owners of lustrous voices (real or imagined) wanted to show off beyond the closed circles of club and home. Charity concerts offered ladies and gentlemen of noble origins the chance to perform in a wider but still respectable milieu and for a worthy cause. Noble dilettantes were unknowingly narrowing the distance, dictated by the tribal mores of the aristocracy, between private and public space.

By the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Russians had created a wide network of provincial concert halls—institutionalized sites of nontheatrical musical performance, usually backed by a local symphonic society and a permanent orchestra. All this had been made possible by the Great Reforms of the 1860s, the rapid spread of railroads, and a host of cultural and social changes set loose by these. In the early nineteenth century, the regions that lay beyond the capital were by no means empty of cultural enterprise. But the bulk of non-folk musical performance in the provinces remained on the private estates or in the town theaters where audiences flocked to opera, ballet, and vaudeville. Concert life as such remained fragmentary and episodic, hardly surprising in light of the vastness of the land, the underdeveloped means of communication and transportation, and the sheer novelty of the concert format.

Classical music was brought to provincial towns for the most part by artists on tour. The combined itineraries of only four of the many soloists who toured the empire’s towns in the 1840s and 1850s—Henri Vieuxtemps, Apolonary Katski, Henryk Wieniawski, and Franz Liszt—included Revel, Riga, Dünaburg, Vilna, Novgorod, Tver, Vladimir, Tula, Orël, Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Saratov, Kiev, Kharkov, Poltava, Kursk, Ekaterinoslav, Taganrog, Novocherkassk, Kremenchug, Elizavetgrad, and Odessa. Verstovsky helped set up some of these engagements. In the 1840s, the Russian violinist Afanasev made seventy-eight appearances in four years, cutting a huge swath in every direction from Moscow, including the Jewish Pale. He claimed to have been the first Russian virtuoso to make an extensive tour of the empire. His account offers insight into how tours were arranged for artists such as himself who did not possess the luster of the foreigner or the sponsorship (apparently) of a Verstovsky. Afanasev and his cellist brother always needed recommendations in advance to local notables who would usually book them into the Gentry Club and try to whip up a modest audience of two to three hundred. The governor sometimes bought up fifty to a hundred tickets and distributed them to friends. The rest were passed downwards from officials to the police chief to constables who would place them in merchant stalls.⁴⁵

These itineraries make it clear that concertizing took place in far-flung corners of the empire, though the offering was diverse and the term “concert hall” (kontsertnyi zal) had yet to gain usage. Gentry Club, private mansion, or theater provided stages, and artists would often play after or between theatrical presentations. In the 1820s, a Tula merchant’s house doubled as a concert venue for musicians from the capital. The concerts of professional virtuosos, noble amateurs, and serf orchestras hosted by the Kursk Gentry Club from the 1840s onward were regularly chronicled in the provincial gazette. Although provincial capitals were the main centers, one finds solo recitals even in tiny district towns, such as the historically famous Uglich in Moscow Province and in the Voronezh provincial townlets of Zadonsk in 1856 and Pavlovsk in 1861. In that province, charity began to harness the concert medium in the 1850s with the arrival of such stars as Wieniawski and the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein (Anton's brother), Yury Golitsyn’s serf choir, and Elizaveta Khristiani [Christiani] (1827-53), the cellist who allegedly inspired Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. These Voronezh occasions were interspersed with local amateurs and occasional performances by the theater orchestra. A Soviet chronicler found that the two to four annual concerts were poorly attended due to high performance fees and expensive tickets. He also claimed that only the rich went to concerts, but in the same breath said that they were indifferent to real art.⁴⁶

In Saratov, an 1853 concert of Weber, Rossini, and Haydn’s Creation organized by nongentry folk evoked malicious accusations by aristocrats at not having been consulted, and the dispute was aired in the provincial gazette. In an attempt to tie music to politics in a direct way, a Soviet student of the city’s musical life dutifully recorded that the soon-to-be revolutionary N. G. Chernyshevsky was moved by listening to Rossini’s William Tell overture. Such nuggets in the literature served ideological correctness and also to fill in the rather thin story. Yet Saratov is interesting for other reasons. A few clues demonstrate that audiences were treated to a broad range of experience. The appearance of the internationally renowned Wieniawski in 1853 represented the reach of mobile impresarios. But the concert stage was fed from interior resources as well, including serf orchestras. The marshal of the nobility, N. I. Bakhmetov, an amateur violinist, played with his own serf orchestra at public concerts in the years 1848-51.⁴⁷

In the spotty record elsewhere, the “spots” offer a few insights on town life. Civic pride displayed itself in 1833 when the Ladies' Journal printed a report from Ekaterinburg that attempted to deflate the myth of “wild Siberia” by describing a charity concert there in the brightly lit hall of government house, where the women in the audience wore the latest Paris fashions. An orchestra of twenty played Weber’s Der Freischütz overture and music of Hummel, Mozart, and Herz. Deeper in Siberia, Governor General Yakoby brought a forty-piece orchestra to Irkutsk in the 1780s. Tobolsk offered an example of how musical life in distant places depended on the presence of a particular person, in this case Alexander Alyabev, the most famous popular song composer of the era and a convicted murderer living under sentence of exile. The governor in Tobolsk had been a comrade-in-arms during the Napoleonic wars, and in 1831 he provided the composer with an orchestra. Alyabev left an autograph program of a piano recital by the visiting Zintl sisters from St. Petersburg. The pattern repeated itself in Orenburg on the edge of Central Asia, a bleak military frontier town with a population of only fifty thousand. In 1827, Vasily Verstovsky, brother of the composer and an amateur musician, arranged concerts with other local amateurs. When Alyabev was transferred there in 1833, he found congenial company: Verstovsky; Governor General Vasily Perovsky, an 1812 veteran of enlightened views; and his secretary, Vladimir Dahl, guitarist, lexicographer, and poet. Together they organized the musical life of the town.⁴⁸

Kiev had a small city orchestra of sixteen players until 1852, and a Symphonic Society formed in 1848 gave concerts at the university. Kukolnik in the 1850s described a symphony orchestra in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. Wieniawski, while concertizing with his pianist brother Jozef, told Verstovsky that the take was excellent in diminutive Kremenchug, even though the audiences at the district Gentry Club had to bring their own seats and lanterns; and that in Kharkov, his five concerts won him a lavish reception, bouquets, and further concert invitations. Though the violinist was ingratiating and self-centered, there is little cause to doubt his success there or anywhere else.⁴⁹

The two most interesting musical cities outside the capitals—Nizhny Novgorod and Odessa—showed contrasting tastes. Alexander Ulybyshev’s musical salon expanded into concerts with a repertoire of classical German sym phonic offerings and works of Liszt and Chopin. Ulybyshev’s Thursday and Saturday evening concerts in 1841-1855 drew art figures, writers, and intellectuals, as well as the young Mily Balakirev, future luminary of the Mighty Five. Polish exiles and foreign visitors were on hand. For Mozart’s Requiem, the Beethoven symphonies, and choral works of Bortnyansky, the host marshaled the town’s musical resources: amateurs, theater musicians and singers, wind players from military bands, and singers from the archdiocesan choir. To a greater extent than in the capitals, provincial towns like Nizhny had to gather a variety of social types and roles together for large-scale works such as a symphony or cantata. A reporter in the Neue Berliner Musik Zeitung in 1850 expressed amazement that this music was being performed in the middle of the immense spaces of the tsar’s empire, halfway to Asia. At the great Nizhny Novgorod Fair, classical music could be heard at the Main Building. In the 1850s, Rubinstein, Balakirev, and many others appeared there. Programs were not only eclectic but set in a holiday atmosphere that was socially and psychologically distant from the solemnity of the capital concerts.⁵⁰

Odessa, among the most musical cities in the empire, had a long love affair with operatic music, even in concert. A surviving program at the Odessa theater directed by an Italian in July 1836 featured orchestral pieces by Sarti; Rossini; Mercadanti; a local violinist-composer, Leonid Gold; and Alyabev’s Grand Symphony “Farewell to the North.” When the trained dilettante P. D. Seletsky arrived in Odessa to teach in the 1840s, he discovered that opera so consumed musical taste there that his own passion for German instrumental music “produced a marked effect, like a news item” in that city. He joined a quartet and from his cello seat launched a brief unhappy affair with the musical host’s wife. In addition to the foreign virtuosos noted below, Odessa hosted dozens of lesser known artists from the Russian empire such as Yuliya Grünberg (Grünberg) of Kharkov and Guillaume of Estland. Two local Jewish soloists offered recitals and chamber works: the pianist Yakov Weinberg, physician and brother-in-law of Anton Rubinstein; and Leonid Gold, who had studied in Vienna, concertized in Europe and Russia, and founded the city’s first violin school. This was one of the early markers of a city that would produce some of the finest violinists in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the American Nathan Milstein and the Soviet David Oistrakh among them.⁵¹

The Vanquishing Virtuoso

Ire and indignation among European art music critics—never in short supply—grew particularly harsh in the second third of the nineteenth century, when two great currents of music competed and colluded: serious “classical” music and what the Germans call Trivialmusik, the lighter genres, particularly as rendered by divas and virtuoso soloists. The death of Beethoven in 1827 spread a veil of pious solemnity over the classical forms, especially the symphony. At the same time, the intrusion of the nonaristocratic classes into the concert hall audiences of Europe, reinforced by advanced modes of commerce, print culture, travel, and communications, pulled the glittering arts of the virtuoso onto the stage. Eclectic, crowd-pleasing concert programs were tailored to the deftness of professional performing artists: variations, fantasies, bravura solo works, romances, arias. William Weber, in his discussion of the struggle between the two currents, notes correctly that taste publics often overlapped. He quotes a French diarist speaking of those who “swoon in the morning with Beethoven and in the evening with Rossini.” Although mixed genres in concert rooms or halls had also been common earlier, critics poured venom on the swelling of variety and the blend of light and heavy, or of light masquerading as heavy.⁵²

Adventure, romance, fortune, and fame—keywords in the modern cult of celebrity—hovered around the professional soloist who emerged in the early nineteenth century. The European supervirtuoso, beginning with Paganini and Liszt, rode the commercial highways to wealth. Performers and their agents carefully cultivated an aura of supra-artistic prowess—demonic and orgiastic. For the star, planned international appearances replaced the passive drift from court to court, from salon to salon, or to badly managed concert venues. Fame had certainly heralded the arrival all over Europe of pianists such as Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, and Hummel; but the repute of Niccolo Paganini and especially Franz Liszt translated into status and social power. In a great leap of uneven development, a virtuoso pianist could consort with monarchs in a Europe where court soloists were just a few notches above the lackey. Though extramusical flourishes were part of the game, musical technique was at the heart of virtuoso appeal. In the words of Richard Sennett, sociologist and practicing musician, the performers employed “passes, retards, rubato” and “the immediate attack, the sensuous tone, the stunning chord”—all building blocks in the personal charisma that created a celebrity-attuned audience. Virtuosos followed the erotic trails blazed by the mythical and mythicized Don Juans and Casanovas. Women fainted over Paganini, clusters of females arrayed themselves on stage when Liszt performed, and males fashioned whole cults around opera divas. The virtuoso was equally hounded everywhere in Europe by the critics, purists, and lovers of the symphonic classics.⁵³

In Russia, where “uneven development” ran strong, the virtuoso experience took on a variety of meanings in terms of the artists’ status, popularity, aura, and earning power. “Foreignness,” a mark of distinction for most of them, could apply to the visitor from abroad; a performer from the Baltic or Poland; or a Russian who had won recognition in Europe. In a concert hall where virtuosos played, two hierarchies prevailed: one applied to the artist on stage who towered above his worshiping public; the other to the listeners divided by seating. The two loftiest status points stood opposite each other: center stage and the imperial box. Early in the century, a hailstorm of concert tickets rained from the sky in St. Petersburg for seats to see ubiquitous singers, pianists, guitarists, violinists, and clarinetists—including foreign artists of high quality and show-off virtuosos of little talent. Engaging artists in a concert circuit did not become regularized in this period due to an absence of professional impresarios. But the well-placed Vielgorsky brothers, Lvov, and Verstovsky assured a steady stream of performers. Mikhail Vielgorsky, sometime elder of the Gentry Club, board member of the Imperial Theaters and the Visitation to the Poor Society, had a particularly long reach and could lure visiting virtuosos into his home in addition to putting them on public stages.⁵⁴

Russian audiences saw Irishman John Field, a permanent guest who never learned Russian, as a French-speaking nonnoble foreigner—something between a visiting virtuoso and a native performer (fig. 19). His regular shuttling between home recital and concert appearance tells us something about the persisting distinction between private and public musical space. In the homes of grandees, Field had to contend with the boorishness of noble patrons who “tipped” him like a servant. A proud and sometimes mischievous man, the pianist would hand over the none too generous fee to a lackey and then leave.⁵⁵ Once Field established himself as a celebrity, he took to the concert hall and became a regular at the Philharmonia. In Moscow, where he settled for a decade in the 1820s, Field’s drinking habit caught up with him: several times the governor had to send the police to find the drunken pianist and bring him to the hall. At the peak of his career, Field was earning five thousand rubles for a soirée, and usually ten thousand for a public concert. Fildanstvo, the cult of Field, reigned in piano music. Following his return from a European tour, Field gave his last concert and died in 1837. He had taken Russian society not so much by storm as by tears. Liszt, the emperor of frenzy, disdained Field’s style as “inert” or “flaccid,” but it won the hearts of Odoevsky, Verstovsky, Apollon Grigorev, and dozens of budding concertizers who printed the device “pupil of Field” on their posters. Glinka, who loved to “weep sweet tears of emotion,” wrote of John Field that ''his fingers fell on the keys like drops of water."⁵⁶

Field's music gave rise to a belief in a stylistic continuity between him and Chopin.⁵⁷ The musicologist Patrick Piggott has demolished the myth by demonstrating the differences between the two pianists. Some of Field’s phrasing and ornament will remind listeners of Chopin in spite of the deeper differences. The myth was fueled by the role of the nocturne in both composers. Field applied the term to some of his piano pieces. In contrast to earlier forms, notturno and Nachtmusik, Field’s resembled romance, serenade, pastorale, all of which names he used—a wordless love song, first named nocturne by him in 1814. The romantic and atmospheric music suited both the intimate salon and the large recital. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Field did not win audiences with muscular passages and bravura. Though most of the nocturnes are written in the major, they have an elegiac quality perfectly suited to the Russian sentimental ear. A century later, theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold thought Field’s music was the perfect reflection of the hollow decrepitude of Russian society of the time, and he used the Nocturne No. 5 in a 1928 production of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit to illustrate the point.⁵⁸

Maria Szymanowska’s salon successes led to bookings in larger public sites such as the Philharmonia where she played solo and with Field. She was appointed the ''first pianist of Their Majesties Elizabeth Alexandrovna and the Empress Maria Fëdorovna." An 1823 tour took her to Kiev during its annual Contract Fair and then deep into the Ukrainian provinces—to Tulchin, Zhitomir, Dubno, Kremenets, Lvov, Vinnitsa. These names resonate with the memory of the old Jewish Pale but the sources are mute on the relative make-up of the audience as between Polish gentry, Russian garrison forces, Ukrainian, and Jewish residents. After a European tour, Szymanowska was back in St. Petersburg in 1827, more popular than ever. A reviewer emphasized her European success—still the major marker of prestige among performing artists. Yet Szymanowska could not escape the stereotype of female (thus inferior) version of Field. Her gender was underlined when she participated in an “all-female” concert in the Engelhardt House in 1830, performing side by side with relatively unknown women pianists.⁵⁹ Clara Schumann attracted the public attention usually reserved for the male player or the female vocalist. Although women pianists probably outnumbered men all over the world (just as cooks outnumbered chefs), the gendering of the piano did not extend to virtuosity. Female pianists in this era avoided the flamboyance affected and perfected by male artists. Nevertheless, Clara Schumann easily impressed the music lovers of the Russian capital in 1844 by her sheer force and intellectual quality in the rendering of the works of the German masters, including her husband. Robert Schumann had come along but limited himself to conducting his First Symphony at the Vielgorsky home.⁶⁰

The male European violin virtuoso as a cultural type asserted both his virility and his virtuosity by dazzling pyrotechnics on the instrument. Among the first to cause a sensation in Russia, since Paganini only got as far as Warsaw, was the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull (1810-80) who played there in 1838 and 1841. After a St. Petersburg concert, the conductor at the Italian opera, Heinrich Romberg, wrote that “Bull is simply a charlatan, a bad imitation of Paganini,” an opinion echoed in the next century by the scholar Boris Schwarz who called Bull a “calculating showman.” Romberg’s comment did not harm Bull’s success in Petersburg. In Moscow, the governor arranged a concert at the Gentry Club and the artist endeared himself in the customary way by playing his newly composed Homage á Moscou based on Russian folk material. Ole Bull impressed audiences by his august stature and his unusual techniques adapted from Norwegian folk playing of the Hardanger fiddle whose low bridge and long bow allowed quadruple-stop chords. Those critics who admired him employed the cloying habit of interpreting music as a reflection of the topography of the composer’s homeland. Yet although the mountains and fjords of Norway which he evoked may not have been depicted in the music itself, native musicians from those hills were certainly the source of Ole Bull’s style. And it was this exotic element rather than the quality of his compositions that accounted for warm reception in Europe, America, and Russia.⁶¹

Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-81) as a child prodigy conquered the salons of Europe. During a tour of 1837-38, Matvei Vielgorsky invited Vieuxtemps to Russia and for two years he garnered success on the heels of Ole Bull. Vieuxtemps returned to Russia in 1846 as Court Soloist and teacher at the Imperial Theaters. Between duties at the theater, he managed to tour a dozen cities including regular trips to Moscow. His letters to Verstovsky contain ritual thanks for engagements and requests for advertisement in the press and posters of his upcoming appearances. Employing a tried and true device of musical celebrities, flattery, Vieuxtemps played violin adaptations of Russian popular songs such as Alyabev’s “Nightingale,” and of themes from Verstovsky’s Askold's Grave. Vieuxtemps left Russia in 1852 (to return only once in 1860). A Russian biographer hints at a breach of contract which he blames on tsarist despotism. The more likely cause lay in Vieuxtemps’ heavy burden of playing incidental music for the theater, concertizing, and teaching. A European biographer cites a letter in which Vieuxtemps in later years recalled having “vegetated” in Russia, “this land of fraud and elegant society—refined and captivating.” Another source claims that Vieuxtemps thought Russia a fine place because audiences were generous, hospitable, and deferential to artists. As an artist and state employee who navigated a career in theater, concert halls, and gentry homes, the Belgian violinist may have been accurate on all counts.⁶²

Another child prodigy, Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880), would one day succeed Vieuxtemps as professor of violin at the Brussels Conservatory (fig. 20). Boris Schwarz called Wieniawski—a Polish subject of the tsar and the son of a Jewish physician in Lublin—“the romantic virtuoso par excellence.” He won first prize at the Paris Conservatoire at age eleven and became widely known as “the Chopin of the violin.” For his 1848 Petersburg debut, thirteen-year-old Wieniawski enchanted audiences at the Mikhailovsky Theater and the Gentry Club by playing a Viotti concerto and his own “fantasies” on Lucia di Lammermoor and Lvov’s national anthem. During a later sojourn in Russia, Wieniawski composed Souvenir de Moscou (1853), a bewitching rendition of two Varlamov romances for violin and piano which combines the flavor of the originals with the brilliant Wieniawski pyrotechnics; and his best-known piece, Légende (1860). A vigorous concertizer, Wieniawski made 194 appearances in the capitals and provinces.⁶³

Around 1852, a curious and revealing incident occurred at the Moscow Gentry Club when Wieniawski appeared together with the thirteen-year-old Czech violin virtuosa, Wilma Neruda (Vilemina Nerudová, 1839-1911). Vieuxtemps, who was present, gave Neruda a bouquet and the audience broke out in a great ovation. Perhaps a Pan-Slav sentiment surfaced at the sight of a Czech and a Pole—symbolizing friendly and hostile Slavs respectively. More likely it was simple courtesy. But the seventeen-year-old Polish performer, angered by Neruda’s triumph, tactlessly offered to prove his superiority. Outraged, audience members mounted the stage to remonstrate. Wieniawski prodded a Russian general with his bow and asked him to be silent. Insulting a general in the reign of Nicholas I was no light thing, but next day, the all-powerful Governor-General Zakrevsky—long famous as an overbearing administrator—merely ordered Wieniawski out of Moscow within twenty-four hours.⁶⁴ Yet the reaction was moderate and the little scandal did no harm to Wieniawski’s career. In spite of occasional spurts of temperament—by then almost obligatory in a virtuoso’s professional profile—he became a regular at the musical evenings of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Grand Duke Konstantin. Wieniawski’s prestige as an international virtuoso protected him from the usual rules. In the 1860s he gained appointment as Court Violinist and professor at the St. Petersburg conservatory before taking up the Brussels post. Though preceded by generations of Polish Jewish fiddlers, Wieniawski became the first model for a career that was to be taken up by scores of young compatriots for the next hundred years and more.

Among the big guns of European performance in the 1840s, Hector Berlioz employed as his instrument the mammoth orchestra which he tinted with lavish colors. As one of the earliest of the virtuoso conductors, Berlioz magnetized audiences with his tall frame, gaunt face, and flaming red hair which added visual spectacle to the auditory show. When news of his music in Russian journals excited interest, in 1841, years before Berlioz arrived, Heinrich Romberg mounted a performance of the composer’s Requiem at Engelhardt House, employing instrumental and vocal forces from the theaters, the Capella, and two Guards regiments. Unfortunately both the hall and the musical forces were insufficient to do the work justice—150 singers and 100 musicians in a room with a 300-seat capacity. Berlioz wanted more, and when he arrived in Russia after a harrowing trans-European journey in 1847, he got them. Within hours, Lvov and the Vielgorskys mobilized the Capella, the Imperial Guards regimental band, and an amplified orchestra of the Imperial Theaters for a total of 160 players, 180 singers, and 50 military musicians. For the two concerts at the Gentry Club—a much larger venue than the Engelhardt—Berlioz conducted the Roman Carnival overture, an incomplete version of The Damnation of Faust, and excerpts from the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. Though reviews were mixed, public acclaim was loud.⁶⁵

Berlioz repeated his triumph in Moscow though with a few glitches. When the marshal of the Moscow nobility was asked for the use of the Gentry Club, he became confused because he thought the word “concert” meant concerto (the words are the same in Russian) and that Berlioz was the performer. The idea of a symphonic concert was apparently new to him and he looked upon Berlioz as merely another virtuoso. He invoked the rule that in return for the use of the hall for a public performance, the artist would mount a free one exclusively for the membership—yet another effort to keep separate the public paying environment from that of the private. But in this case, the marshal required that Berlioz play on an instrument in his home. The great composer was proficient only on the kettledrum and the guitar. After some pleading, he was excused from the personal appearance and allowed to mount his concert. Berlioz returned to St. Petersburg several more times at the Capella and at court and left Russia in May 1847. The reception of his concerts had been phenomenal. Though Russian audiences were noted for their responsiveness, they were not attuned to modern music. It seems likely that some of the enthusiasm was generated by the composer himself, the sheer scale of his works, and their brilliant orchestral palette.⁶⁶

What Berlioz could do with a huge orchestra, Franz Liszt tried to match with a grand piano. Some have claimed that the Czech Jan Dussek (17601812) was first to sit sideways to the public when performing on the piano, but it was the Liszt profile that turned a pianist into a star performer. Both Paganini and Liszt came late to the practice of commercial promotion and both created a sensation. Heinrich Heine coined the word “Lisztomania” to describe the furor that swept Europe. Liszt, with the help of a modern professional manager, Gaetano Belloni, invented the modern piano virtuoso. While in Rome in 1842 at the peak of his fame, the Hungarian pianist was invited by D. V. Golitsyn, governor general of Moscow, to perform in Russia; Mikhail Vielgorsky organized the visit. Liszt’s debut there on April 8 at the St. Petersburg Gentry Club drew an unprecedented audience of about three thousand people. On an island stage in the middle of the hall, surrounded by the public on all sides, stood two pianos on which Liszt alternated so as to give full force to his visual presentation. The pianist strolled arm-in-arm with Mikhail Vielgorsky around the balcony before descending for his patented entrance: as he walked through the crowds towards the piano, he stripped off his white gloves, threw them beneath the piano and sat down to pound out the complex adaptations for which he was renowned. The censor Nikitenko observed that “the instrument vanishes beneath his hands.” In the audience, the budding composer Alexander Serov reached a state of “inexplicable ecstasy, of blissful rapture.” He and the influential critic Vladimir Stasov—in a musical version of the exalted revolutionary pledge made a dozen years earlier by Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarëv on Sparrow Hills—''took a vow that thenceforth and forever, that day, 8th April, 1842, would be sacred to us."⁶⁷

In Moscow, Liszt, unable to book the Gentry Club, turned to Verstovsky who offered him a deal: for three concerts at the theater, the house would take all the receipts for one concert or half the total of the three. At a benefit concert, Liszt improvised a fantasy on the Russian Gypsy songs he had heard that same evening at a Moscow tavern. He was persuaded to give still more concerts which were labeled Final Appearance, Another Final Appearance, and the Absolute Final Appearance. By participating in charity and benefit affairs, Liszt endeared himself to the musical public of Moscow, even when he was naughty. On one occasion, the pianist was out feasting with friends, failed to appear on schedule, and had to be searched for. Arriving unfazed, he mounted the stage, and cast his gloves into the audience—a more elegant anticipation of the modern rock star tossing a sweaty garment to the female fans. It was at Liszt’s first concert in Moscow that his friends from Rome and Moscow, Alexei Golitsyn, Prince Dolgorukov, and others tried to sit on the stage. The enraged Verstovsky, after some hot words, finally managed to get them off. The reporter of this episode claimed that the arrogant blue bloods wished to avoid buying tickets and also to display their closeness to the celebrity. In fact the intruders, far from being stingy, had lavished money on dinners, suppers, and picnics for the visitor. But they resented having to pay to hear their friend perform in company with everybody else at a public affair.⁶⁸

Liszt's last appearance in Russia also marked his swan song as a public concertizing pianist. In 1847, he arrived by sleigh from the Moldavian capital of Jassy at Kiev for appearances at the Contract Hall and at St. Vladimir University where he improvised on themes sung out to him by the audience. After concerts in Odessa at the Bourse, the largest hall in the city, Franz Liszt literally ended his paid concert career in the small southern town of Elizavetgrad. At the early age of thirty-five he announced his retirement from the concert stage.⁶⁹ Numerous anecdotes—some dubious—surfaced about the tsar and the pianist: Liszt allegedly stopped playing when Nicholas arrived late and began talking (in fact Liszt once silenced Queen Victoria this way); the emperor did not care for Liszt’s hairstyle and inadvertently insulted him by mentioning that he had a Russian regiment currently stationed in Hungary.⁷⁰ The brightness of socially nondescript stars in the firmament where majestic dynasts and dazzling aristocrats had shone was a potentially disturbing marker of instability. Liszt, a gargantuan upstart, rejected as a member by the Paris Conservatoire and the Magyar nobility, had a persona that combined, in one scholar’s phrase, spectacles of the mind and the body.⁷¹

The great littérateurs had yet to be wrapped in veneration, and they were rarely seen by the public at large. Performance celebrity was self-made, and its agency was enhanced by heretofore unfamiliar hordes of fans and fanfare, media coverage, and seductive propaganda. Its extramusical content—personal lives, love affairs, scandals—resonated as much as the talent displayed on the stage. Star quality and role expectation, normally associated with the age of mechanical reproduction, functioned smoothly through most of the nineteenth century. Audiences became inquiring and curious about social advancement, geographical mobility, artistic fees, and other qualities of the European entertainment market, all of which challenged the culture of ascription. The result was a burbling mix of condescension, envy, admiration, ambition to emulate—all lapping against the traditions of upper-class hospitality and expectations of deference.

The foreign virtuosos cut and healed, wounded and caused joy—in different ways for different people. Some of the readers of Dostoevsky’s “Netochka Nezvanova” (1849) must have felt the thrill of recognition in his evocation of a demonic spirit inside an aspiring Russian violinist crazed by the success of a foreign virtuoso rival. Herzen and other intellectuals despised the public’s "slavishness" to Liszt.⁷² But a positive image also came into focus. The sheer range in national background of the virtuosos helped create a kind of “Euro-mania” which diluted the exclusivity of the Francophilia already attenuated by the 1812 war. Even for rock-ribbed Gallomanes, all the "monsieurs"—whether French, Polish, German, Hungarian, or even Jewish—spoke French and could be elevated to the status of gentlemen or lady guests. For the Euromanes, such visitors may have created temporary social, emotional, and esthetic alliances and even acted as a reassuring force in an age when Russian foreign policy hummed with tension over the Eastern Question, British Russo-phobia, the tsar’s high-nosed treatment of the July Monarchy, and the recurring repressions of Polish freedom. The constant presence of foreign artists from potentially hostile nations may have acted—as it did during the late rivalry of the United States and the USSR in the three decades after Stalin’s death—as a signifier of hopeful mutual accommodation. If so, this would partly account for the great astonishment of educated Russian society upon the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853.⁷³

Less speculative is the effect Liszt and Berlioz’s personal appearances had on Russian musical life. The onslaught of foreign virtuosos exposed Russians to a wide range of music. Of all the manifold reactions by musicians and music lovers—lifelong cults, temporary infatuations, ambivalent resentments, or just plain rejections—the most poignant was that of Vladimir Stasov, the great prophet of Russian national music and the foremost designer of the myth of the Mighty Five. In his exuberant first-hand observations of 1843, Stasov told of Liszt’s arrogance and conceit, but then bristled (silently) when he overheard a few unflattering remarks from Glinka about Liszt’s playing. “I was absolutely scandalized!” wrote Stasov later. “What! How dare some 'mediocre' Russian musician, who had not yet done anything in particular himself, talk like this about Liszt, the great genius over whom all Europe had gone mad!” Stasov’s love of Liszt grew into hyberbolic worship, and he became a friend and admirer down through the decades of that monumental pianist. In a pious exegesis written after Liszt’s death, Stasov laboriously canvassed all the quotations he could find in print or in letters to prove how much Franz Liszt—and Berlioz as well—had championed the Russian national school of composers.⁷⁴

It can be argued, of course, that Liszt, for example, banefully influenced audiences with his meretricious repertoire—the infamous flashy improvisations and transcriptions with which he won fame and fortune. But once again, we must consider the pedagogical function of such performances which are often gateways to more “serious” music and to the performance site itself. Just as symphonic pops and promenade concerts and children’s programs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries initiated untold numbers of young people into the pleasures of great music, so Liszt and his fellow virtuosos generated or sustained interest in that kind of music by popularizing the more exalted forms. The adventurous cultural historian Richard Leppert has offered some broader suggestions on the “meanings” of Liszt in his time, some of which apply to the Russian reception. Among other things the pianist represented extravagant individualism, blatant sexuality, the market, the subject, agency, the body, physicality, the reversal of the performance gaze of desire, spontaneous expression as freedom, and “enthusiasm”—a virtual taboo among the highest ranks of society but a trait that the middling classes were beginning to see and emulate in public places. Though the few scorned showiness as vulgar, the many found it irresistible and perhaps contagious. As Robert Schumann wrote at the time, “the sight of any virtuosity elevates and strengthens.” Finally, it is clear that the growth of Russian public musical venues and performances in the capitals and around the empire, and their loose linking by touring virtuosos, helped bring about the release of art music from what T. C. W. Blanning has called, for eighteenth-century Europe, “the thralldom of representation”—that is the adornment and artistic projection of courtly power.⁷⁵

Out of the Pale: Rubinstein

In the Paris of 1790, getting to a recital by the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti required its aristocratic audience to climb five flights of stairs in a private home. James H. Johnson has suggested that this very concrete episode may have been a turning point in the emergence of the musical professional.⁷⁶ Surely other, especially foreign, artists were able to do things like this in pre-revolutionary France; and certainly the musician as servant lingered long after 1790—under whatever regime. But the point is well taken. In western Europe, the full-blown independent professional conductor and performer visibly emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Around 1839, Anton Rubinstein (fig. 22) became the first keyboard titan—excluding Chopin—to come out of the Russian empire which would eventually generate a flow of distinguished performers such as Serge Rachmaninov, Ignac Paderewski, Arthur Rubinstein, Alexander Brailowsky, and Vladimir Horowitz, to name only the best-known.

The career of Anton Rubinstein can best be understood in the context of the foreign domination of orchestras and the virtuoso invasion. His Jewish origins had no significant effect upon his early successes. Jewish performers, actors, and singers—converted or otherwise—had become a familiar sight in the slow dawning of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in post-Napoleonic Europe. Moscheles, Herz, Ferdinand David, Giuditta Pasta, Rachel, and many other Jewish names glittered in the public arena. Two composers of Jewish origin reigned supreme in musical capitals: Meyerbeer in Paris and Mendelssohn in Leipzig and Berlin. Wieniawski, a subject of the tsar, a Pole, and a Jew, apparently suffered no grief about his ethnic background. Rubinstein, a Muscovite since age six, fit easily into the familiar tapestry. He offered no comment on his Jewish background in his autobiography, but he never hid it and was offended by Wagner’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Jewishness in Music. As a child prodigy, Rubinstein rode the wake of such fashionable wunderkinder as the five Katski children of Cracow whose music-loving father took them on tour to Russia in 1829-30 and then on the European circuit. The violinist Apolonary Katski went on to a successful Russian career. The thirteen-year-old Rubinstein was among the last of the child prodigies to dazzle St. Petersburg audiences in this era. In addition to his performing genius and enormous technical skills, youth, royal attention, and European celebrity assisted Rubinstein’s rapid climb in Russian musical life. A true virtuoso, he deployed both his own style of frowning when playing and of laughing when taking applause, as well as a version of the Lisztian manner of flying hair and plunging hands.⁷⁷

Examining the take-off point of Russian musical life at midcentury places two sets of brothers—the Vielgorskys and the Rubinsteins—in illuminating opposition: active dilettantes versus the professionals who founded Russia’s first two conservatories. The contrast between Anton Rubinstein and Mikhail Glinka is clarifying as well. The Vielgorskys, however much they contributed to the musical life of their country, were marginal figures. Glinka and Rubinstein were—in their different ways—giants in the mainstream. The striking polarity of their social and geographic backgrounds set against the musical contexts of their lives reveals much about the cultural topography of music in this era: Glinka, the pampered child of a noble landowner, raised deep in the forests of backwater Smolensk Province; Rubinstein, the pampered child of Jewish converts from the edge of empire. Both were richly endowed with talent, had musical mothers, became roving cosmopolitans, and achieved fame in their lifetimes. Glinka’s world reputation, slower in coming but far more lasting, rests on his compositions. Rubinstein’s music even at its best pales by comparison. Radios and recital halls all over the world up through the 1940s, long after his death, continued to ring with his Melody in F and the song “Desire” ("Zhelanie"), both written in the 1850s; but by then he was being constantly confused with the Polish-born pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Though nowadays Anton Rubinstein is rarely heard, his importance to the musical culture of his time is unassailable. Wherever the musical canon may put him, the historian must place him at its very center alongside Glinka.⁷⁸

Anton Rubinstein’s grandfather hailed from Berdichev, a shtetl set amid the swirling currents of pious Judaism, Yiddish culture, and the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. He rose through energy and hard work to be a rich merchant who won and lost fortunes, sat in jail for a time, and fought legal battles with the magnate Radziwill family over land titles. Two sons later went to university; Anton’s father Grigory settled in the village of Vykhravatinsky on the Dniester, in the Balta District of Podolia Province on the border of Bessarabia—a classic site of Hasidic Jews and the scene of ghastly pogroms before and after the nineteenth century. There Anton was born in 1829. Before he was five, the family had made two crucial steps: conversion to Orthodox Christianity and removal to Moscow. The mass baptism on a single day of sixty Rubinsteins in Berdichev in 1831 was not unique to this family. Converts acquired exemption from the 1827 laws on double taxation of Jews and the recruitment of their children. By purchasing substitutes for the army, Jewish converts could avoid the scourge of the brutal cantonal system. Since they could also move from the Jewish Pale and take up residence in Russia proper, Rubinstein père took his family to Moscow in 1834.⁷⁹

Grigory Rubinstein set up a pin and pencil factory in Zamoskvorechie district, at the heart of the Moscow merchantry. By all accounts a jovial and generous person and a good family provider, he welcomed a socially diverse company to his home: Russian merchants, petty nobles, workers, and a circle of intelligentsia—teachers, officials, and his brothers’ university student friends. Groups of them would travel in a bone-rattling cart up the Ordynka Road and across the river to the Bolshoi Theater. When music dawned in the household, the circle widened to include J. J. Johannis, conductor at the opera, among others. Home music was provided by Anton’s mother and then by the budding pianist-composer himself who in later years said “apparently I was never young,” in reference to the rigor and regimen of piano lessons that began at age five. His mother Kaleria, née Clara Löwenstein, came from Prussian Silesia and had met Grigory in Odessa. With her musicality she combined energy, practicality, and ambition for her children, and a domineering will that reached—according to a son-in-law—the point of despotism. A stern teacher, she subjected the sleepy child to finger exercises in the dark and cold of early mornings.⁸⁰

In 1837 after seeing a performance of the ten-year-old Kharkov piano prodigy Yuliya Grünberg, Anton’s mother engaged her teacher, the noted pianist Alexandre Villoing, the son of a French cook in refuge from the Revolution. Within a few years, he turned the talented boy into a child prodigy who debuted publicly in 1839 at Moscow’s Petrovsky Park. The pretty little boy with the long curls whom a journalist affectionately dubbed a monstre musical performed at the university and evoked rave reviews from the nationalist literature professor Stepan Shevyrëv. After a brief stint in Paris with his teacher, where he concertized and met Chopin and Liszt, he returned to Russia on the death of his father. In Petersburg Rubinstein’s fame brought him an engagement with the Philharmonia at the Engelhardt House. Tsar Nicholas, hearing of the boy’s European repute, had him perform at the Winter Palace. Rubinstein recalled in his memoirs how he brought the tsar to laughter by imitating Franz Liszt’s signature hair-tossing body language. The next venture to Europe, this time with his mother, included study in Berlin with Glinka’s old teacher Siegfried Dehn, and more than two hundred appearances. In spite of his earnings, the young Rubinstein felt pangs of hunger and was even brushed ever so slightly by radicalism in 1848. On his return to Russia, he was searched thoroughly at the frontier and nearly arrested. Like Dostoevsky, he attended briefly the utopian socialist circle of Mikhail Petrashevsky in 1849 but certainly had no interest in a revolution. A few years later, he collaborated on an operetta with one of the Russian radicals of the 1860s, M. L. Mikhailov, but this had no political overtones. Yet Rubinstein was on the verge of playing some very important personal and professional politics that would change the shape of Russian musical life in his time.⁸¹

Rubinstein's name began appearing at the Philharmonia and university concerts and he toured Russia in 1849. In 1852, an early opera caught the attention of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Born Princess Charlotte Marie of Württemburg, she had married Mikhail Pavlovich, youngest brother of Nicholas I. She came to St. Petersburg in 1823, became Russianized, and retained a German accent as well as a vague admiration for “la liberte”—a certain freedom and scope for the individual within a conservative enlightened monarchy. In the 1840s, Elena Pavlovna’s salon evolved into soirées morganatiques, her term for socially diverse musical evenings on Thursdays. Barenboim, bowing to Soviet historiographical constraints, wrote that she was thereby co-opting unranked guests for the goals of autocracy. In fact the grand duchess was keenly interested in the arts and in artists. Like some of the earlier salons, and at a loftier level, the evenings of mixed company were—like morganatic marriages—not quite acceptable in the highest circles but necessarily tolerated. The site of Elena Pavlovna’s gatherings, the Mikhailovsky Palace, lent enormous social prestige to the assembled company.⁸²

In 1852, the twenty-three-year-old Rubinstein, strikingly handsome, immensely talented, well traveled, and fluent in several languages, won appointment by Elena Pavlovna as Court Pianist or Accompanist, a post that had been occupied by distinguished European artists. Essentially a high-toned servant, Rubinstein referred to himself sardonically as the imperial family’s “musical furnace attendant,” playing at dynastic residences in and around Petersburg. Rubinstein was the ultimate stiffener at the musical evenings as he accompanied the tsar’s son, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, a talented amateur. Rubinstein dedicated several of his pieces from this period, including the Melody in F, to Elena Pavlovna. Some held Rubinstein’s elevated connections against him. In 1918, one writer claimed that Rubinstein had loved the luxurious court surroundings. Barenboim rightly refutes this. Rubinstein found Elena Pavlovna capricious and autocratic, blowing hot and cold on Rubinstein’s push for more serious music. Although Rubinstein’s Jewish origin apparently played no role, he was after all the son of a Moscow businessman. The young and self-confident musician knew how to play the courtier, but his discomfort occasionally shows through in the autobiography. Playing at court was a job that he could eventually use to advance his professional ambitions and his larger vision about musical life in Russia. In this regard, the young pianist differed sharply from the transient colleagues at the Mikhailovsky—Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski. Rubinstein’s wunderkind reputation faded into partial oblivion, and the emoluments from the palace hardly sufficed for him to live on. He taught and concertized, but detested the still common practice of making the rounds in society to sell tickets for his appearances. High officials in the cultural world continued to call him, now a grown man, by the familiar form of “you” (ty). Anton Rubinstein felt more or less at a dead end.⁸³

Rubinstein's escape from the dead end, a new European tour from 1854 to 1858, almost sunk him. He had proposed opening a conservatory of music in St. Petersburg as early as 1852, and when this failed, he continued to build up his prestige abroad. But while in Vienna in 1855, he wrote what became a notorious article on “Russian Composers” for Blätter für Musik, Theater, und Kunst, a sharply negative survey of the Russian musical scene. He conceded that the Russian people were musical, but claimed that their “melancholy and monotonous” folk tunes did not suit adaptation in opera. While praising Glinka’s genius as an instrumental composer, Rubinstein disparaged the operas. Actually Rubinstein had very little knowledge of folk material. He grew up amid the German classical idiom and as a boy heard urban romances, dance music, and some Moldavian Jewish tunes. In his Moscow neighborhood, he had occasionally seen round dances of peasants turned workers, but had never lived in or near a village or been exposed to peasant music. Much of his own music is diluted Mendelssohn and Schumann, weak in harmonic and melodic innovation. His essays in “national” opera uniformly bombed. The tactless polemic evoked a storm of hostility in Russia and Rubinstein regretted it to end of his days. Glinka, who had always been polite but cold to Rubinstein, informed a friend that “the Jew [zhid] Rubinstein has undertaken to acquaint Germany with our music and has written an article in which he flings mud at us all, touching rather arrogantly my old lady, A Life for the Tsar.” Glinka then referred to Rubinstein as “an impudent Jew [z hid].” Barenboim, quoting the letter, omitted with ellipses references to the term zhid.⁸⁴ Though the word zhid was still a neutral ethnic term for Jew, Glinka’s usage was clearly an anti-Semitic slur. Anton Rubinstein, unlike his father, was never particularly at ease with people and vented his intolerance of views and practices associated with “amateurism”—at least among his peers—which he wrongly conflated with a misplaced “national spirit” in music. Rubinstein was by no means alone in his assault on the dilettantism that continued to dominate the Russian musical world. And his dismissal of the folk idiom in Russian music eventually led to the harmful and much overinterpreted schism between two allegedly opposite schools of music in the latter part of the century (see chapter 9 of the present work).

But a kind of salvation arrived during Rubinstein’s sojourn in Europe. Elena Pavlovna, wintering in Nice in 1856-57, invited Rubinstein to come and play the musical furnace man again in the lavish villas of the elite where Matvei Vielgorsky was also on hand. The three of them spoke at length about Russia’s musical future and the need for better professional training. Though the topic was not new, it was apparently here that the seed for a conservatory was planted in the right soil. It is highly doubtful that the courtier-dilettante Vielgorsky, for all his love of music, could or would have carried the idea to fruition. Rubinstein, a man bristling with ambition and possessed of great self-discipline and organizational energy as well as talent, reputation, and connections, was poised to convert the still amateurish musical scene in Russia into one of professional dedication.⁸⁵ Returning to St. Petersburg in 1858, he began the process that would establish the musician as “free artist” on the cultural landscape just as the mass of the enserfed population was being turned into free subjects of the tsar.