E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten
Walsh Musorgsky and His Circle
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ISBN: 978-0-571-31114-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Russian Musical Adventure
E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-31114-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Stephen Walsh is a leading English writer and broadcaster on classical music, the author of several books on Igor Stravinsky including a major two-volume biography, a large-scale study of the Russian nationalist group of composers known as the kuchka or Mighty Handful, and most recently a highly praised biography of Claude Debussy. He was for many years deputy music critic of the Observer newspaper, and also a regular critic for The Times, Financial Times and, more recently, The Independent. He now reviews for a leading arts website, theartsdesk.com. From 1976 to 2013 he was a lecturer, then professor on the music faculty at Cardiff University, and is now an Emeritus Professor of that university. He lives in Herefordshire with his wife, two dogs, two horses, seven sheep and too many squirrels.
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Until the first production of , in November 1836, Glinka’s work had been strictly that of a dilettante. To call it amateurish would be to miss the point; among his early compositions are works of real brilliance and expertise. But—with the possible exception of a few songs—they are historically indolent, say nothing new or particularly personal, and merely confirm the essentially salonesque character of the culture for which they were conceived. In Italy he had rubbed shoulders with the famous composers of the day, including Donizetti and Bellini, had heard and to some extent imitated their music, but had at last begun to feel artistically homesick, fed up with his own aesthetic neutrality and with the facile lingua franca of the music that was all around him in one Italian opera house after another. “All the pieces I had composed to please the inhabitants of Milan,” he wrote near the end of his life, “had only convinced me that I was not following my own way and that I truthfully could not become an Italian. Longing for home led me, step by step, to think of composing like a Russian.”1 What that might mean, of course, remained to be seen. It was something for which no theory existed, but which, like all solutions to great problems, awaited the consideration of a unique practitioner of genius.
Glinka’s immediate answer, when he arrived back in Russia, was to plan an opera with a specifically Russian plot, but not the kind of comic or picaresque-folksy subject that had dominated the vaudeville repertoire. Instead the composer’s choice fell on the historical tragedy of the peasant Ivan Susanin, a serf of the future first Romanov tsar, Mikhail Fyodorovich, who at the time of Mikhail’s election as tsar in 1613 was supposed to have saved his master from a murderous band of Polish and Cossack marauders by losing them in a deep forest, sacrificing his own life in the process.
Glinka himself was by no means a political animal. The subject seems to have been pressed on him by the writer Vasily Zhukovsky as an alternative to his own romantic short story “Mar’ina Roshcha,” for which Glinka had already started composing music. If so, Zhukovsky was probably being opportunistic on Glinka’s account. For the past eight years he had been tutor to the young tsarevich (the future Tsar Alexander II), and he was certainly well briefed on the concept of ’—Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality—which had been promulgated a year or two earlier by the minister of education, Sergey Uvarov, as an approved ideological basis for what Uvarov called “the education of the people.” The doctrine of Official Nationality, as it came to be known, was essentially a clever device for harnessing the dangerous energy of progressive national consciousness that had grown out of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, had infected especially the aristocratic and intellectual classes of Russian society, and had culminated in the Decembrist putsch against the new tsar, Nicholas I, in December 1825. In the Glinka libretto, largely written by the tsarevich’s secretary, Baron Georgy Rosen, Susanin at first greets the Polish soldiers (Roman Catholics, of course) by inviting them to his daughter’s wedding; but when they rudely brush this aside and insist on his showing them the way to Moscow, he changes his tune (literally) and, to a melody plainly colored by Russian Orthodox chant, loftily proclaims that “our native land is great and holy! … The road to Moscow is not for foreigners.” “I have no fear of death,” he adds, adopting the folk tune that had begun the opera as an apostrophe to the Russian motherland: “I will lay down my life for Holy Russia!”
It would be hard to imagine a situation or characterization that more thoroughly reflected the three terms of Official Nationality. What might have been a good deal less obvious was what kind of music would suit it in the same way. One might idly suppose that some combination of folk song and Orthodox chant would meet the case. But even if such an outlandish concept had occurred to Glinka, it’s hard to see how he could have implemented it on the scale required. Genuine folk tunes, such as had been collected, arranged, and published by Nikolay Lvov and Ivan Prach in 1790, were essentially compact, limited musical objects, ideal for adapting to the needs of comic vaudevilles (rather in the manner of in London a century earlier), but hardly adequate to the broad canvas and heightened tone of a grand historical drama. As for the music of the Orthodox liturgy, its beauties and limitations may seem familiar to anyone who has stood through any part of a Russian service; but in fact this form of setting was not widely known in the 1830s, which were still dominated liturgically by the Bortnyansky style of unaccompanied classical harmony.
From the start Glinka seems to have planned (as it was originally called) as a musical drama without dialogue, something that, as a matter of fact, no Russian composer had attempted before, even though the operatic repertoire in St. Petersburg in the twenties and thirties offered plenty of foreign models: Glinka records seeing Cherubini’s rescue opera and Méhul’s biblical , among other French works. Later, in Germany, he saw Beethoven’s , Weber’s , Spohr’s , and Cherubini’s (which, however, he could neither understand nor remember). In Italy, he had become intimate with the local version of the unbroken-music formula: aria, ensemble, recitative. In Milan he had attended the premieres of Donizetti’s and Bellini’s , theatrically powerful works that at times vary and extend the formula in the direction of seamless musical narrative. He may have wearied of the Italian and French styles, but when it came to operatic modelling on a tragic scale they were what he knew. On the other hand, he had no particular reason to feel restricted by them. His studies with Dehn in Berlin on the way home read now like the dreaded curriculum of a first-year university music student. He spent the five months harmonizing Bach chorales and writing fugues, essentially Teutonic disciplines not much cultivated in the opera houses of Italy, but a valuable resource to a Russian composer seeking to assemble the elements of his musical experience into a new and individual style of his own.
A composer naturally composes out of his own head, without necessarily weighing up the ingredients that have gone to form his particular mode of expression. He writes what he feels with the largely unconscious help of what he knows. But Glinka’s situation was peculiar. Not only was he attempting a work on a vastly bigger scale than anything he himself had written before, but he was composing something that was completely outside the framework of what his audience would expect. Foreign touring operatic companies were a familiar part of the St. Petersburg landscape, and since their repertoire was in general contemporary, Petersburg audiences were reasonably au courant with the styles of opera being turned out in Paris, Italy, and Germany. Glinka could hardly evade such models, which were equally part of his own mental furniture. Yet at the same time he had to Russify them, both for the benefit of his subject matter and for the good of his soul. The Susanin story, after all, is about the rejection of foreign intrusion. Its operatic treatment had at least to seem to reject it too.
Glinka’s solution to this problem was to have profound consequences for the entire course of Russian music in the nineteenth century. To some extent this was because of the specifically Russian elements that he worked into his score. They gave it, of course, an identity that set it apart from any previous grand opera, known or unknown to Russian audiences. Specifically, they marked it out from a work like Verstovsky’s (), a romantic opera with dialogue which had enjoyed a spectacularly successful premiere a year or so before, but which now seems lightweight and derivative and largely devoid of noticeable Russianisms.2 Crucially, Glinka’s opera did this without drastically disrupting the genre itself. So is not some weird ethnic concoction derived from the tribal rituals of northern Muscovy, but a tragic opera recognizably in the traditions that Glinka had absorbed from France, Italy, and Germany, based on the formulae of recitative, arioso, aria, ensemble, and chorus, though without directly resembling any one particular composer or work.
The overture starts, after a couple of peremptory gestures, with a slow introduction based on an oboe tune in Taruskin’s “urban ,” in which, in this case, “the Russian folk melos [has] been put through an Italianate refinery.”3 It then quickly reverts to type with a sparkling allegro in sonata form, complete with fugal development, such as might suit an opera by Weber or Spohr. The curtain goes up on a scene of peasant life, as it does, for example, in Weber’s and Rossini’s . And like those composers, Glinka takes the opportunity provided by country people enjoying themselves to localize his story, while also, unlike them,...
