Abraham On Russian Music

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30728-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 290 Seiten

First published in 1939, On Russian Music was conceived by Gerald Abraham as a sequel to his earlier Studies in Russian Music (1935, also in Faber Finds), and complements the previous work in many useful respects. Glinka moves to the forefront via close study of both of his operas. A historical account of the composition of Borodin's Prince Igor enriches the critical study made in the first book. And chapters on Mlada and Tsar Saltan round out Abraham's appreciations of the major operas of Rimsky-Korsakov. There are also critical and historical essays on works by Mussorgsky, Dargomïzhsky, Tchaikovsky and other composers, and analyses that, in their time, threw new light on the programmatic meaning of such well-known compositions as Scheherazade and the Pathétique symphony. The book is superbly illustrated with music examples throughout.

Gerald Abraham (1904-1988) was a distinguished musicologist, holding honorary doctorates from the unversities of Durham, Liverpool, Southampton and California. Among the official posts he held were Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool, Assistant Controller of Music at the BBC, and President of the Royal Musical Association. He wrote or edited many books on music including several volumes in The New Oxford History of Music, of which he was the General Editor. Other books include Essays on Russian and East European Music, Slavonic and Romantic Music , Studies in Russian Music and The Tradition of Western Music.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Abraham, Gerald

Leseproben

I.—“A LIFE FOR THE TSAR.”

Everyone who knows anything at all about Russian music “knows” that Glinka’s “Life for the Tsar” was “the first Russian opera.” Like a good many other well-known facts of musical history, it happens to be not quite correct. “A Life for the Tsar” was neither the first opera composed on a Russian subject or to a Russian text, the first opera by a Russian composer, nor (in the opinion of the present writer) the opera that really laid the foundation-stone of modern Russian music. True, it happens to be the first of the only two operas written by the first Russian composer of any importance; but, even so, it is not—historically considered—a beginning of anything. Rather it is an end, a summing-up, the best and almost the last blossom produced by a rather sickly plant. The true foundation stone of Russian opera, as the world knows it, was the work that followed “A Life for the Tsar”—“Ruslan and Lyudmila.” Still, “A Life for the Tsar” contains too much living music and enjoys too great a history-book reputation to be curtly dismissed as a mere relic of an earlier age. Without knowing it, one cannot properly recognise the enormous importance, the daring of “Ruslan.” And, in turn, one cannot truly appreciate “A Life for the Tsar” without at least a rough idea of its predecessors.

The first opera written to a Russian text was “Cephalos and Procris,” by Francesco Araja, the Empress Elizabeth’s maestro di cappella. It was performed on February 27-March 11, 1755, at the Court Theatre, Petersburg, by an all-Russian cast—also an innovation. The next year we hear of another work that has been claimed as “the first opera by a Russian composer.” This was the operetta “Tanyusha,” of which the music is said to have been “arranged” by Fyodor Volkov. But Volkov was not a composer but an actor, the “first Court actor” of the Imperial Russian Theatre which was established the same year (1756). As for “Tanyusha,” even the libretto has disappeared; we know nothing at all about it. The first opera definitely composed by a Russian was Fomin’s “Anyuta” (first performance: August 26-September 7, 1772), but even of this only the libretto survives. And the next operas by Russian musicians of which we hear were settings of Italian texts, written and produced in Italy: Maxim Berezovsky’s “Demofonte” (Leghorn, 1773), and Bortnyansky’s “Creonte” (Venice, 1776).

That is symptomatic. Of the five native composers who were writing Russian operas in the seventies and eighties of the eighteenth century—Fomin (1741–1800), Matinsky (died 1820), Berezovsky (1745–77), Bortnyansky (1751–1825), and Pashkevich (? - ?)—the first four all studied in Italy. Another symptom: Fomin and Matinsky* were both liberated serfs and both were at first purely self-taught musicians. It seems probable, though we do not know for certain, that they too, like Berezovsky and Bortnyansky, began their careers as operatic composers in Italy. As for the court composer, Pashkevich, if he never studied in Italy, he produced several works in collaboration with the foreign composers in favour at the Court of Catherine the Great (who was herself their librettist)—with Sarti, Carlo Canobbio, and Vincente Martin y Soler.

These composers, even the foreigners, appreciated the flavour of the national folk-music more than might have been expected. Fomin used folk-tunes, or good imitations of them, in several of his operas. Findeisen† considers this passage from the overture to his best work, “The Miller” (1781), which kept the stage for more than seventy years, “more or less Russian in character”:—

The chief theme of the overture to Matinsky’s “Bazaar at St. Petersburg” (1779):—

is much more definitely Russian; it is even a faint anticipation of Olga’s theme in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Pskovityanka.” And Canobbio in the Prelude to Act III of “The Early Reign of Oleg” (1790; in collaboration with Pashkevich and Sarti) introduces the famous “Kamarinskaya,” the indecent tsigane dance appearing under a mask of propriety in the disguise of a thoroughly respectable minuet:—

But these were only oases in the desert of Italian or quasi-Italian music produced at the Imperial Court. Some of the foreign Court composers—e.g., Paesiello, never even attempted to set Russian texts; others, such as the Neapolitan, Catterino Cavos (1776–1840), definitely Russianised themselves, wrote operas based on Russian legends and episodes from Russian history, and tried to catch the inflections of popular melody. Cavos actually anticipated the subject of “A Life for the Tsar” in his “Ivan Susanin” (1815). And the native amateur strain lived on in figures like Verstovsky (1799–1862), Alyabiev (1787–1851), and the brothers Titov (Alexey, 1769–1827, and Sergey, born 1770). Thus Russian opera for more than half-a-century was composed by through-and-through Italians, by superficially Russianised Italians, by Italian trained Russians, and by Russian amateurs who took this Italo-Russian music as their model. Of these the Italians were at least competent technicians, but the Russians—even those who had studied abroad—seem to have been as weak in technique as in inspiration. Apart from its historical interest, their collective output (as far as one can judge from the specimens obtainable) is an insipid pot-pourri of the musical platitudes of the day, faintly flavoured with native condiments.

Nevertheless, it is to this genre that “A Life for the Tsar” belongs. Its composer, too, was a wealthy dilettante who had studied only desultorily, who had just spent a three years’ holiday in Italy, and who was full of admiration for the Italian opera of his day—writing rondos “on a theme from ‘Montecchi e Capuletti,’” serenades “on themes from ‘Anna Bolena,’” and similar artistic atrocities. And he wrote his first opera in this Russian-flavoured Italian idiom.‡ But with these differences: that the native flavouring was stronger and that he himself had a genuine creative gift denied to his predecessors.

Even before he left Italy in 1833, at the age of twenty-nine, Glinka had seen that “the Italian sentimento brilliante is the result of an organism happily developed under the beneficent influence of southern sunshine. We dwellers in the North feel differently: impressions either leave us altogether untouched or penetrate deeply into the soul—with us it is a matter of either frantic merriment or bitter tears. With us, love is always linked with sadness.” He had tried to make an Italian of himself, but had failed. “Homesickness gradually led me to the idea of writing in Russian.” And on his leisurely way home from Italy he composed, à propos of nothing in particular, several themes which he was afterwards able to use in his first opera: in Vienna the clarinet theme of the Krakoviak, in Berlin (where he studied with Siegfried Dehn for four or five months) the melody of Vanya’s song at the beginning of Act III (i.e., the second Allegro subject of the Overture), and the theme of the finale of the same act (i.e., the first subject of the Allegro of the Overture).

From Berlin he wrote in January, 1834: “I have a scheme in my head, an idea …. Perhaps this isn’t the moment to make a complete confession; perhaps if I told you everything I should be afraid of detecting signs of incredulity in your face. And yet I ought to warn you that you will find me somewhat changed; I’m sure you’ll be astonished to find much more in me than you could have believed at the time when I was living in Petersburg. Must I tell you? Well, I fancy that I, even I, have the ability to give our stage a work on a large scale. It won’t be a masterpiece, as I am the first to admit, but all the same it won’t be so bad! What do you say to this? The main thing is to choose the subject well. It will be absolutely national in every respect. And not only the subject but the music; I want my fellow-countrymen to feel absolutely at home in it, and I don’t want to be considered abroad as a vainglorious jay decked out in borrowed plumage.” Six months later he had still not found a suitable libretto. “But the idea of ‘Marina Grove’§ kept revolving in my head, and I played on the piano several fragments of scenes which afterwards partly served me for ‘A Life for the Tsar.’”

Curiously enough, it was the author of “Marina Grove” himself, poet, critic and former tutor to the Tsarevich, who set him on the right track. I give the story as Glinka himself tells it in his Memoirs:

“When I avowed my wish to write a Russian opera, Zhukovsky [who was anxious to create an artistic nimbus about the throne] sincerely approved my intention, and suggested to me the subject of ‘Ivan Susanin.’¶ The scene in the forest [with the Poles in Act IV] deeply impressed itself on my imagination. I found in it much that was original and typically Russian. Zhukovsky wanted to write the words himself, and as a specimen wrote some lines used for the trio with chorus in...