Chapter 24: Slavic Harmony and Disharmony

I. Smetana A. Introduction 1. The ideas proposed by the New German School influenced composers in other areas as well, notably Smetana (considered the first important nationalist composer from the Czech lands). 2. He was educated in Germany. 3. He was also a piano prodigy. As a young composer, he contacted Liszt, who assisted in the publication of some early works. 4. In the late 1840s Smetana hoped that Franz Joseph I would work for Czech autonomy, but the opposite happened, stifling Czech creativity.

B. A Czech Abroad 1. While the use of the Czech increased in the last half of the nineteenth century, Smetana’s music was not appreciated. 2. He left Prague in 1856, moving to Sweden. 3. He visited Liszt in Weimar in 1857 and joined the New German School. a. This resulted in a series of symphonic poems. b. During this period, Smetana was one of the most progressive composers in Europe, but music history has been written differently. 4. Smetana returned to Prague to write a Czech opera (for a competition) for a new national theater. a. He eventually became its conductor and artistic director. 5. Smetana wrote seven operas in different genres. a. He did not use folk songs but did follow the rhythms of Czech speech patterns. b. Despite this, today Smetana is considered a nationalist composer. c. It might be because the Czechness (českost) does not come directly from style but from musical symbols which carry associations.

C. Má Vlast 1. In the 1870s (when he went deaf), Smetana composed music that represents českost, including the cycle of symphonic poems entitled Má vlast. a. Three are depictions of places or nature. b. The others deal with belief systems, pre-Christian (one) and fifteenth-century religious wars (two). c. The symphonic poems are connected through the use of familiar melodies. 2. The most popular of these is Vltava, most commonly known by its German name “Die Moldau.” a. Smetana painted musical pictures that represent possible events and aspects of the river itself. b. He makes use of a fifteenth-century hymn that was familiar to audiences in the region. c. Although he never quotes an actual folk song, the popular character of the music is appealing.

D. The Fate of a Tune: From Folk Song to Anthem 1. The main theme representing the river became the most popular theme Smetana ever composed. It has come to represent českost. a. It is a Swedish tune Smetana heard while living there. b. He may not have remembered its origins when he included it in Vltava. c. Others have used the melody to represent other places; it was the official Zionist anthem at the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

E. Competing Reputations at Home and Abroad 1. Smetana’s comic operas presented harmonious existence between the upper classes and the peasantry. 2. The best known of this is Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride), an opera with overtones of Figaro. 3. The opera is known for its folk life and characters demonstrated through national dance rhythms. 4. It was well received at home and abroad. 5. At home, Smetana’s more progressive compositions were favored; abroad, the more folksy ones. 6. A pan-Balkan movement arose in mid-century, but Smetana was not interested in it. a. When Balakirev came to Prague for a performance of one of his works, he blamed Smetana for all that went wrong. b. Balakirev got him back when The Bartered Bride was performed in St. Petersburg, in the form of a horrible review by Balakirev’s friend Cui.

II. Balakirev A. Slavic Disharmony 1. During the mid-century, Russia saw turmoil in several areas, including the Crimean War and peasant rebellions. The result was censorship. 2. Dissension also existed among Russian composers, who tended to fall into the camps forming in Germany. 3. Balakirev aligned with the more progressive ideas. 4. Rubenstein held to a more conservative line. a. A piano virtuoso, Rubenstein sought to raise Russian music training to a more professional level by importing master teachers (paid for by aristocratic patrons). b. He offended native Russian composers with his preference for German musicians, even though his aims were nationalist. 5. Balakirev, in response, formed the New Russian School. a. He gathered a group around him to defend Russian music against the Germans. This group, kuchka (bunch), is known as the “Mighty Five” or “Mighty Handful.” b. They were Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Musorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. c. Only Balakirev lived as a composer; the others all had day jobs. d. Without foreign teachers, most Russian composers learned from studying scores. e. Balakirev’s group met regularly to do so.

6. Even though they claimed status as Russian composers, Glinka was the only Russian composer they claimed. Thus, they claimed legitimacy as a group because of their ethnicity. a. They created a myth of Russian authenticity that excluded conservatory study. b. Cui took this to Paris, and it has become the way historians have discussed Russian music ever since.

B. Kuchka Music 1. The kuchka built a school of Russian music on a foundation of folklore based on Glinka, who didn’t exactly use folk music. 2. Balakirev studied folksongs to use as the basis for his works. a. He collected and arranged folksongs from the Russian heartland. b. His harmonizations were unique and sounded nothing like peasant music. c. Nonetheless, this style became known as Russian, based in part on its use by later composers. 3. Ironically, Balakirev’s music structurally followed German models (sonata form).

C. Mussorgsky’s Realism 1. Opera was the best genre in which to make Russian nationalist statements. 2. Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov proved to be the heir to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. 3. He was one of the most progressive composers of the century and rejected all that Glinka had absorbed (the beauty of Italy and brains of Germany). 4. Realism was the driving force for Mussorgsky, along with a contempt for fine manners and convention, and the falseness of the other musics. 5. Rather than use poetic verse for the libretto, Mussorgsky chose to imitate conversational speech. a. Because he was self-taught, he did not feel so tied to tradition. 6. He also used “unvocal” intervals in melodic lines, further denouncing lyricism.

D. Art and Autocracy 1. Historical themes were popular stories for operas in the nineteenth century. 2. In the late nineteenth century, Russia was the only autocratic state in Europe. 3. The tsar controlled everything, and censorship was stringent. a. As such, any dissident ideas had to be disguised. 4. Russian art moved away from Romanticism toward realism, regarding beauty with skepticism. 5. These ideals fit with how Mussorgsky saw art and himself. 6. He used the past to comment on the present. a. Pushkin wrote Boris Godunov in deliberate imitation of Shakespeare’s history plays. b. The play is a commentary on kingship and legitimacy. c. The play was banned and not performed until 1866. 7. Mussorgsky took out all scenes that did not include Boris, leaving Pushkin’s text intact but succinct and direct.

E. The Coronation Scene 1. The Prologue (Coronation Scene) is the most famous scene in Boris Godunov.

2. Mussorgsky widens the intervals in the melody to emphasize Boris’ discomfort. 3. Musical realism extends from the declamation of text to instrumentation and harmony. a. The harmony is static; there is not functional cadence. b. In this guise, the harmony is subversive.

F. Revising Boris Godunov 1. Mussorgsky could not get Boris Godunov performed at first because there was no role for a prima donna. a. He added the role, which had existed to a degree in Pushkin already. 2. He made other revisions, and not necessarily against his will (as has been told). a. Upon hearing the opera, a group of friends did not receive it the way Mussorgsky had intended. He was dissatisfied at not having communicated effectively. 3. Much of Mussorgsky’s music has been edited by other composers, most notably Pictures at an Exhibition. a. Originally composed for piano, Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. b. Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestrated Boris Godunov and other works.

III. Tchaikovsky A. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1. Tchaikovsky was a pupil of Rubinstein. 2. He was Russia’s first great international musical celebrity. 3. Like his favorite composer, Mozart, he composed both instrumental music and opera, and he excelled at writing ballets. 4. His Eugene Onegin (also on text by Pushkin) is a tribute to Russian realism. a. Originally intended for performance by an opera workshop, it does not demand too much from the singers. b. Its emotional strength lies in its use of symbols as they relate to genres of popular art. 5. Tchaikovsky had a gift for imbuing life and emotion with power through conventional form. a. He was especially interested in presenting people in social contexts, showing how we view experiences through our own lenses as dictated by social and cultural classes. 6. In Onegin, Tchaikovsky uses music associated with particular classes and their ideas of romance, making it revealingly intimate.

B. Russian Symphonies 1. The two music camps each produced an outstanding symphonist in the 1870s. a. For the kuchka, it was Borodin. b. For the conservatory composers, it was Tchaikovsky. 2. Even with the connection to traditional European music, Tchaikovsky still felt like an outsider. He complained to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck about Liszt while writing his Fourth Symphony. 3. The Fourth Symphony marked a break with symphonic tradition in that it does not unfold based upon a Beethovenian model, nor does it adopt the tight motivic structure seen in the symphonies of Brahms.

a. Instead of motives, Tchaikovsky used expansive melodies, as well as reference to songs and dances. b. His symphonic music demonstrates an affinity for French symphonists. c. Because most music textbooks have been written from a German-dominated view of history, Tchaikovsky’s music has been overlooked. d. He purposely rejected Brahms and his use of motive (“little fragments ... glued together”). 4. But what to express? In the first movement, Tchaikovsky presents a strident and violent waltz, with dramatic flair. a. The development has the most disruptive brass interruption. b. It is dramaturgy. 5. Mme. von Meck asked Tchaikovsky what the first movement meant, and he replied in a famous letter. a. He likened it to the sword of Damocles. b. He later remarked that having to describe the symphony in words was very difficult and unsatisfactory. c. The dramatic brass interruptions led Mme. von Meck to suspect an underlying program to the symphony.

C. Autobiography in Music? 1. In spite of his homosexuality, Tchaikovsky accepted a proposal of marriage from Antonia Milyukova in 1877. 2. The resulting fiasco, in which Tchaikovsky fled the marriage, has been associated with the Fourth Symphony for years. a. The correspondence with Mme. von Meck supports an autobiographical reading of the Fourth Symphony. 1) The implication points to the marriage debacle. 2) This reminds us of other nineteenth-century autobiographical statements (the Heiligenstadt Testament, Schubert’s letter to Kupelweiser, Berlioz and Harriet Smithson). 3) If we go this route, we are dealing with music and representational codes. 4) In this case, noticing how Tchaikovsky deviated from the norm results in a reading of the symphony that may—or may not—tell us something about his life. 3. Tchaikovsky used dance genres as a code in the Fourth Symphony. a. He told Mme. von Meck that the brass fanfares represented fate. b. He pairs aspects of the waltz with the polonaise (associated with military parades). The manner in which Tchaikovsky uses the two tells us that the polonaise always trumps the waltz. 1) This might designate power (impersonal) overruling individual concerns, just as in Onegin society’s rules trumped Onegin’s pursuit of love. 4. Nonetheless, one must be careful not to read too specifically into such works, as the example of the Sixth Symphony. shows. a. The symphony is subtitled Pathétique and was associated with Tchaikovsky’s death/depression/homosexuality by various writers because of its emotional content, particularly the slow final movement.

1) Tchaikovsky died nine days after the premiere, at which time the various associations began to appear with it. 2) Yet he wrote that he was happy with and proud of this work in a letter: thus reading too much into it can yield false results.