Download Chapter (PDF)

OTHERS: A MYTHOLOGY AND A DEMURRER (BY WAY OF PREFACE) THE SECULAR fine art of music came late to Russia. To all intents and pur- poses, its history there begins in 1735, when the Empress Anne (Anna loan- no vna, reigned 1730-40) decided to import a resident troupe of Italian opera singers to adorn her court with exotic and irrational entertainments. The first such performance took place at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg on the empress's birthday, 29 January (Old Style) 1736. It was Laforza dell'amove e dell'odio, an opera seria by Francesco Araja, the leader of the troupe. That was the beginning of secular music in Russia as a continuous, professional, and literate artistic tradition.1 That tradition, although it thrived at court under a series of distinguished maestri di cappella (Manfredini, Galuppi, Traetta, Paisiello, Sarti, Cimarosa), was of no particular importance to Russia at large, and Russia, beyond pro- viding a few favored foreigners with brief plum appointments, was of no importance to it. The practice of European art music had little or no role to play in the formation of Russian national consciousness, which did not even begin to be a factor in Russian culture until the reign of Catherine the Great was well under way.2 It was only the spread of Europeanized mores and attitudes beyond the precincts of the court, and the increased Russian presence in Europe following the Napoleonic Wars, that really rooted European high culture in Russian urban centers and led beyond receptivity to actual Russian productivity in the European arts. The institutional means for maintaining that productivity in music were established in the 1860s, chiefly by dint of Anton Rubinstein's heroic labors. By the last decade of the nineteenth century Russian composers of European art music—particularly Rubinstein himself and Chaikovsky, the outstanding early graduate of Rubinstein's conservatory—had achieved "world" prominence and prestige. As fine a professional education in music could be had in Russia as anywhere else on the continent, and Russia's emi- nence as a habitat and training ground for first-rate talent (chiefly violinistic and pianistic talent) would actually begin to eclipse that of other nations. 1 An earlier operatic performance on Russian soil—Calandro, a commedia per musica by Giovanni Alberto Ristori, performed at the Kremlin palace in Moscow by a troupe of Italian comedians from the court of Dresden on 30 November 1731—was an isolated event, not to be duplicated in the old capital until 1742. 2 The basic historical treatment of this watershed in Russian cultural history remains Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1959). xii OTHERS: A MYTHOLOGY AND A DEMURRER And yet the profession that Rubinstein, Chaikovsky, and all those violinists and pianists followed had only just achieved legitimacy in Russia. Only since the 1860s had Russian law recognized the existence of any such animal as a "Russian composer." And only since the 1770s at the earliest had there even been such a thing as a Russian who worked professionally at music as a European fine art. If Vasiliy Pashkevich (1742-97)—Vincenzo Manfredini's apprentice, who wrote singspiels to texts by Catherine the Great's court poets and eventually by the Empress herself—turns out to have been of Russian birth rather than an immigrant Pole as his name (Paszkiewicz) suggests, then he was the oldest person to whom that description could be applied. If not, then the distinction belongs to Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky (1745-77), the son of a serf, who trained at court with Galuppi (first as a sopranist and then, very exceptionally, as a composer) and was sent to Bolo- gna at the Empress Catherine's expense in 1766 to study with Padre Martini. In the event he received instruction not from Martini himself but from the latter's assistant, Stanislao Mattei; but he was awarded the diploma of the Accademia Filarmonica in 1771, one year after Mozart, and saw his journey- man opera, to Metastasio's old Demofoonte libretto, successfully produced in Livorno during the 1773 Carnival. (He was then summoned home to take over the Imperial Court Chapel Choir; his suicide at the age of thirty-one made him a legendary figure and, beginning in the 1840s, the subject of novels, plays, and eventually movies.) Berezovsky was thus the earliest Russian-born composer of opera; but since his opera went unheard in Russia, it cannot be said to have contributed to the development of any indigenous practice of European art music there. The same goes for the opere serie of Dmitriy Bortnyansky (1751-1825), another precocious son of a serf from the same Ukrainian village as Bere- zovsky, who followed him to Italy and eventually succeeded him as Imperial Court Chapel choirmaster. The historical significance of both Berezovsky and Bortnyansky lay in another area; with their choral concertos they played a leading role in Westernizing the much older tradition of Russian Orthodox sacred singing (peniye, long distinguished in the Russian vocabulary from the secular art of muzika). Yevstigney Fomin (1761-1800), who is treated at some length in the first part of this book, was a junior member of this first generation of native-born Russian practitioners of the European fine art of music, all men of low birth who pursued their careers in conditions of inden- tured, quasi-military service. Accordingly, the practice, as opposed to the consumption, of art music in Russia continued to carry a social stigma well into the nineteenth century, even though Bortnyansky lived to a venerable age and acquired great fame. Rubinstein's efforts to secure an institutional base and official social recognition—the bureaucratic rank of svobodriiy khudozhnik, "free artist," equivalent to a midlevel civil service grade—for the art he practiced were OTHERS: A MYTHOLOGY AND A DEMURRER xiii motivated in part by the self-interest of a man working under multiple social and ethnic handicaps. Another factor that improved the social standing of art music in Russia was the rise of a generation of noble dilettante composers and performers. Among the earlier members of this cohort were the brothers Wielhorski (Viyel'gorskiy), Counts Mikhail (1788-1856) and Matvey (1794-1866), familiar to readers of Berlioz's memoirs. The elder brother composed an opera, two symphonies, and a raft of chamber music. The younger brother was a cellist of international repute. (Mendelssohn's familiar D-major sonata is ded- icated to him.) He lived long enough to become Rubinstein's ally in the professional organization of St. Petersburg musical life, heading the first board of directors of Rubinstein's Russian Musical Society, which sponsored the first full-time resident orchestra in the Russian capital (from 1859), as well as the conservatory (from 1862). A slightly younger member of this noble cohort was Alexey Fyodorovich Lvov (1798-1870), another long-serving director of the Imperial Court Cha- pel Choir and a cousin of the Lvov who is cast in a starring role in the first part of this book. As a composer, although he wrote operas and concertos, Alexey Lvov is remembered only for Bozhe, tsarya khrani (God Save the Tsar), the dynastic anthem (1833). His greater fame during his lifetime was as a violinist who appeared (gratis, of course) as soloist with orchestras throughout Europe and who played regularly in a trio with Matvey Wielhorski and Franz Liszt. (This last was a professional ensemble in that the pianist was paid—but he was paid by his noble partners, who thus qualified as patrons, not profes- sionals; and the group appeared only at aristocratic salons.) Later generations of the aristocratic class of Russian art-musicians included Glinka and Dargomizhsky. The last of the line was Musorgsky, whose land- owning family was impoverished by the 1861 emancipation and who there- fore had to earn a living (not, it goes without saying, as a musician). Chaikovsky—native-born, conservatory-trained, full-time—was in a word Russia's first composing professional, and the very first native musician to achieve a position of esteem in Russian society without the advantage of blue blood or a prestigious sinecure, and without being a performing virtuoso. His professional and social status, not the spurious issue of nationalism, was what estranged him from the "kuchkists," and them from him. They all needed their day jobs and lacked his entree to the court musical establishment. So of course they created a mythos of authenticity that excluded him, as it excluded his ethnically suspect mentor, Rubinstein—a mystique that received massive publicity thanks to the prodigious journalistic activity of Vladimir Stasov, their promoter, and Cesar Cui, their brother-in-arms. That myth— which authenticated "true" Russian music by a preternatural ethnic aura unre- lated, indeed inimical, to the temporal institutions of the actual Russian state—reached its full formulation only in the 1880s, by which time xiv OTHERS: A MYTHOLOGY AND A DEMURRER Chaikovsky's domination of the local musical scene was complete, when folklorism, even among the kuchkists, was actually becoming passe, and when entrepreneurial patronage was at last allowed by law to compete with the crown in the fields of theater management and music publishing. It was just then, of course, that Russian music began making a massive bid for recognition on the world stage, and foreign champions for it began to appear. The early foreign champions—for example, Camille Bellaigue (1858-1930) in France and Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940) in England—were indoctrinated directly by Stasov and Cui; their successors—for example, Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi (1877-1944) in France (later England) and Mon- tagu Montagu-Nathan (1877-1958) in England—were beholden to Bellaigue and Newmarch; Gerald Abraham (1904-88) was Calvocoressi's disciple, even as many younger British champions (by now academic scholars) like Edward Garden (b.

Load more