CHAPTER IV
THE RUSSIAN NATIONALISTS

I

The most significant phase in the history of Russian music is that which represents the activity of the Balakireff group and the founders of the St. Petersburg Free School of Music. This belongs to the middle of the past century, when the seed sown by Glinka, Dargomijsky and partly by Bortniansky began to bear its first fruits. Up to that time the question of Russian national music had not been aroused. The country was dominated either by German or the Italian musical ideals. Art, particularly music, was in every direction aristocratic, academic, and pedantically ecclesiastic. The ruling class was foreign to the core and followed literally the timely æsthetic fads of other countries. The idea that there could be any art in the life of a moujik was ridiculed and flatly denied. O, Bóje sohraní! a patron of music would exclaim at any attempts at a national music.

To the middle class and the common people the admission to high-class musical performances and the opera was legally denied. The concerts of the Imperial Musical Society and the performances of the Imperial Opera were meant only for the élite, and the direction of those institutions was in the hands of bureaucratic foreigners. It was at a critical moment that Balakireff, who had come as a young lawyer from Nijny Novgorod to St. Petersburg, laid the foundation of the Free School of Music. This institution was meant to train young Russians, to arouse in them an enthusiasm for the possibilities latent in their native music, and at the same time to arrange free concerts for the people and perform the works of those native composers who were turned away by the existing organizations. Founded by Balakireff, the composer, Lomakin, the talented choirmaster, and Stassoff, the celebrated critic, the free school became the institution of Borodine, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. Balakireff, Borodine and Moussorgsky can be considered as the real founders of the Russian 'realistic' school of music, if not the pioneers of a new musical art movement altogether. Upon their principles and examples rest the original vigor and the subjective glamour of all subsequent Russian music. The vague initiative given by Glinka and Dargomijsky underwent a thorough process of reconstruction at the hands of these three reformers; the stamp set by them upon the Russian music is as unique and as lasting as the semi-oriental spirit that permeates Russian life and character with its exotic magic.

The ideal of building up an art out of national material seemed to hang in the air, for this was the time of a great national awakening in Russia. Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and Turgenieff in poetry and fiction, Griboiedoff and Ostrovsky in the drama, Stassoff, Hertzen, and Mihailovsky in critical literature, and the revolutionary movement of the so-called narodno-volts in politics were all symptoms of a vigorous reform period. It should be noted that in this great and far-reaching movement the Russian church, with all its seeming supremacy, exercised but little influence over matters of art and literature. While the church in Western Europe was aristocratic in its institutions, in Russia it remained throughout the centuries democratic. A Russian clergyman has remained nothing but a more or less refined moujik, a man who lives the life of the common people and associates with the people. As such he has never been antagonistic to the spirit of the common people, as far as their æsthetic tendencies and traditions are concerned. He has never tried to make art an issue of the church. Music, less than any other of the arts, has never been influenced in any way by ecclesiastical interests. No instrumental music of any kind has ever been performed in Russian churches. Hence, unlike those of Western Europe, Russian composers never came under the sway of the church. The western church was, as we have seen, originally opposed to the influence of folk music. In Russia, on the other hand, it favored any assertion of the people's individuality. It was, therefore, unlike the aristocratic classes, sympathetic to such a work as that which the Free School of Music made the object of its existence.

Before treating the works of the three great Russian reformers individually we may remark that none of them made music his sole profession. Balakireff was sufficiently well off to devote himself to his art without thought of material gain. Borodine earned his living as a scholar and pedagogue, and so maintained his independence as a composer. Moussorgsky alone felt the pinch of poverty; his official duties were strenuous and left him little leisure for composition. Yet, like his colleagues, he never compromised with public taste.

The real initiator of this new movement, Mily Alekseyevitch Balakireff, was born at Nijny Novgorod in 1837. He studied law at the University of Kazan, though music was his hobby from early childhood on. His musical ideals were Mozart, Beethoven, and Berlioz. During one of his summer vacations Balakireff met in the country near Nijny Novogorod a certain Mr. Oulibitcheff, a retired diplomat and friend of Glinka, an accomplished musician himself and thoroughly familiar with the classic composers of every country. It was he who converted Balakireff to the idea that Russia should have its own music, and that the lines to be followed should be those indicated by Glinka. With an introduction to that apostle of nationalism Balakireff journeyed to St. Petersburg in 1855. He found the city under the spell of German and Italian music, and the masses limited to the musical enjoyment to be derived from military bands and boulevard artists. With all the youthful energy at his command Balakireff set himself to combat the foreign influence and advance nationalistic ideas of music.

Balakireff was an artist such as perhaps only Russia can produce. Without really systematic study he was an accomplished musician theoretically and practically. No existing method could measure up to his ideas of musical study. He had mastered the classics and made their technique his own; his contemporaries he approached in a critical spirit, appropriating what was good and rejecting what he considered wrong. His watchword was individual liberty. 'I believe in the subjective, not in the objective power of music,' he said to his pupils. 'Objective music may strike us with its brilliancy, but its achievement remains the handiwork of a mediocre talent. Mediocre or merely talented musicians are eager to produce effects, but the ideal of a genius is to reproduce his very self, in unison with the object of his art. There is no doubt that art requires technique, but it must be absolutely unconscious and individual.... Often the greatest pieces of art are rather rude technically, but they grip the soul and command attention for intrinsic values. This is apparent in the works of Michelangelo, of Shakespeare, of Turgenieff, and of Mozart. The beauty that fascinates us most is that which is most individual. I regard technique as a necessary but subservient element. It may, however, become dangerous and kill individuality as it has done with those favorites of our public, whose virtuosity I despise more than mere crudities.'

The man who launched such a theory at a time when the rest of the world was merged in admiration of Wagner and his technique was an interesting combination of a scholar, poet, revolutionist, and agitator. Wagner, Rubinstein, and Tschaikowsky were technicians in his eyes, whose creative power moved merely in the old-fashioned channels of classicism. Of the rest of his contemporaries Liszt was the only genius worthy of attention. Between Balakireff, Rubinstein, and Tschaikowsky there was continual strife.[12] Rubinstein headed the newly founded Imperial Conservatory, Balakireff his Free School of Music. On Rubinstein's side were the members of high society, the music critics and the bureaucratic power. Balakireff and his group of young composers were outcasts. Music critics and public opinion stamped him a conceited dilettante, only a handful of intellectuals subscribed to his creed.

Balakireff's first composition was a fantasia on Russian themes for piano and orchestra, which he afterward rearranged for an orchestral overture. In 1861 he composed the music to 'King Lear,' which is his only work of a dramatic character. An opera, 'The Golden Bird,' which he commenced some years later, was never completed. One of the most significant of Balakireff's early works is the symphonic poem 'Russia,' commemorating the thousandth anniversary of the inauguration of the Russian empire by Rurik. That his own works are rather limited in number is explained by the fact that he spent most of his best years in organizing his campaign and in criticising the compositions of his followers. The symphonic poem 'Tamara,' some twenty songs and ballades, 'Islamey,' an oriental fantasy for piano, which was one of the most cherished numbers in Liszt's repertoire, and his symphonic poem 'Bohemia' represent the best fruits of his genius. His First and Second Symphonies are very beautiful, original and Russian in feeling, but they have somehow remained behind his above-mentioned works. Very fiery and popular are his two concertos, the Spanish Overture and a number of dances. 'Tamara' is a real gem of oriental wickedness and fascination.

In 1869 Balakireff was appointed conductor of the Imperial Musical Society and later of the court choir. In 1874 he retired from the directorship of the Free School of Music and the post was taken over by Rimsky-Korsakoff. From this time until his death Balakireff lived in seclusion in his comfortable home in St. Petersburg and avoided society. He died in 1910, having outlived all his contemporaries and many of his pupils. The last period of his life was overshadowed by a strange mystic obsession which caused him to destroy many of his compositions.

An artist of wholly different cast was Alexander Porphyrievitch Borodine. While Balakireff was the positive type of an active man, a born organizer and agitator, Borodine was a dreamer and tender-souled poet, the true Bohemian of his time. He was a most remarkable combination of very unusual abilities: Borodine the surgeon and doctor enjoyed a nation-wide reputation; Borodine the chemist made many valuable discoveries and wrote treatises which were recognized universally as remarkable contributions to science; Borodine the philanthropist and educator was tireless from early morning till night; Borodine the flutist, violinist, and pianist rivalled the best virtuosi of his time; and Borodine the composer was, according to Liszt, one of the most gifted orchestral masters of the nineteenth century.

Here is what Borodine writes of his visit to the hero of Weimar in 1877: 'Scarcely had I sent my card in when there arose before me, as though out of the ground, a long black frock-coat, and long white hair. "You have written a fine symphony," he began in a resonant voice. "I am delighted to see you. Only two days ago I played your symphony to the grand duke, who was wholly charmed with it. The first movement is perfect. Your andante is a masterpiece. The scherzo is enchanting, and then, this passage is wonderful—great!"' This was his Second Symphony, which Felix Weingartner has called one of the most beautiful orchestral works ever written.

Under what circumstances he produced his enchanting beauties is best evidenced from one of his letters to his wife in 1873: 'Thursday I gave two lectures for women [on surgery], received clothes sent from the institution, had a letter from Butleroff to take dinner with him and then to attend the meeting of the chemists. I brought there all my material and gave an account of my experiments. Then, Mendeleyev [the famous chemist] took me to his house. I worked this morning as usual, took dinner with Miety at Sorokina. Then Raida and Kleopatra called on me to request space for a sick man in the hospital.'

Who would believe that a man of such a versatile nature was at the same time one of the finest composers and musicians of his generation? In another letter to his wife he writes how he rushes madly from his laboratory to his musical study, sits furiously at the piano and starts to pour out the musical ideas that have haunted him day and night. His friends thought he would never be able to continue such a triple life for any length of time and urged him to devote himself merely to music. But to him this change of thought and work seemed a recreation and he lived in this very turmoil until he died.

Borodine was born in St. Petersburg in 1834. His father was Prince Gedeanoff, a descendant of the hereditary rulers of the kingdom of Imeretia in the Caucasus, and his mother, Mme. Kleineke, the widow of an army doctor in Narva. Borodine's oriental tendency can be traced back through his family. His nationalism was truly spontaneous and genuine, in spite of the fact that, unlike his colleagues, Balakireff and Moussorgsky, he never had an opportunity to come in contact with the peasantry. Borodine's nationalism is a product of heredity and owes nothing to environment.

Having studied medicine in the famous Military Surgery School in St. Petersburg, Borodine became a professor in the same institution after a short practice as a surgeon in various hospitals of the capital. He was, even as a student in college, an accomplished virtuoso in music. At the age of eighteen he had composed a concerto for violin and piano. But his real musical creative activity started when he met Balakireff and the members of his circle, to whom he was introduced by Moussorgsky, then a young officer of the guard in the military hospital. Though filled with Balakireff's ideals, Borodine was not close to his teacher. Balakireff's ideas were grand in outline, but rather rough in detail; Borodine's preferences were toward refinement in detail and melodic form. Though the opera 'Prince Igor' may be considered Borodine's masterpiece, he has enriched Russian musical literature by exquisite examples of orchestral composition—of which his Second Symphony and the symphonic poem 'In Steppes of Central Asia' are the best—chamber music, songs and dances. Borodine's orchestral compositions excel in richness of coloring and in the dramatic vigor of his melodies. Withal he has an almost mathematical mastery of form and style.

From all his works emanates a distinctly lyric Slavic-Oriental glow of sound—brilliant, passionate, gay, and painful in turns. In the words of a modern Russian composer, 'it is individually descriptive and extremely modern—so modern that the audiences of to-day will not be able to grasp all its intrinsic beauties.'

In 'Prince Igor' Borodine has produced a work that has nothing in common with either Italian or German operas. He employs a libretto of legendary character, such as Wagner used for his operas, but in construction and style he follows the very opposite direction of the German master. The dramatic plot is almost lacking in the conventional sense, but the interest of the audience is kept in suspense by means of a unique musical beauty, by stage effects and the dramatic truth that shows itself in every detail of the action.

As compared with Balakireff and Moussorgsky, Borodine was an aristocratic figure in thought and inclination. He was more chivalrous and lyric in his style and more imaginative in his form, therefore less dramatic and less elemental. Borodine's great significance for Russian music lies in his individual form of melodic thought and the relation of that thought to human life. His realism verged on the point of impressionistic symbolism, in which he surpassed both Balakireff and Moussorgsky. He gave to Russian music new forms of romantic realism, forms that have been used and perfected by the composers who have followed him. Unlike Balakireff and Moussorgsky, Borodine was married and lived a happy family life. He died suddenly at a costume-ball in St. Petersburg in 1887.

II

Of all artists one of the most fought and ridiculed, the least recognized and a figure almost ignored, yet doubtless the greatest personality in Russian musical history, was Modest Petrovitch Moussorgsky. It has remained for the present generation, especially for men like Rimsky-Korsakoff, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf, to appreciate this most original musical genius of the last century. Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky spoke of Moussorgsky as of a talented musical heretic, regarding his compositions as the result of accidental inspiration, crude in their workmanship and primitive in their form. Though his name was known through Russia to some extent, especially after Rimsky-Korsakoff had secured for him some professional success, he remained always a minor character. This lasted until the beginning of this century, when a celebrated foreign composer came out publicly and said: 'What Shakespeare did in dramatic poetry Moussorgsky accomplished in vocal music. The Shakespearian breadth and power of his compositions are so original that he is still too great to be appreciated, even in this generation. A century may pass before he will be fully understood by composers and music lovers generally. His misfortune was that he composed music two hundred years ahead of his time.' After this the whole atmosphere changed. A cult of Moussorgsky was started at home and abroad. The public began to dig out the tragic chapters of his life little by little and the neglected genius of Moussorgsky loomed up to an extraordinary height, as is usually the case when the sentiments of the public are stirred. However, this cult of Moussorgsky is merely a timely fad and adds nothing to his real greatness.

After the composer had met bitter opposition where he had expected enthusiastic appreciation he wrote to Balakireff: 'I do not consider music an abstract element of our æsthetic emotions, but a living art, which, going hand in hand with poetry and drama, shall express the very soul of human life and feeling. The academic composers and the people who have grown to love the musical classics take my works for eccentric and amateurish. This is all because I lack the high academic air and do not follow the conventional way. But why should I imitate others when there is so much within myself that is my own? My idea is that every tone should express a word. Music to me is speech without words.'

Moussorgsky's music reminds us so much of the poetry of Walt Whitman that we cannot but regard these two geniuses of two different worlds as intimately related to each other.

Like Whitman, Moussorgsky broke loose from the conventional rhythm and verse. Most of his compositions are set to his own words and librettos, in a kind of poetic prose. He said plainly that he never cared for verse for his compositions, but merely for a dramatic story to carry a certain thought. 'Thoughts and words fascinate me more than rhythm and poetic technique,' he used to say. Every piece of his work bears the stamp of his individuality; every chord of his music breathes power and inspiration. It was not a notion to be original that actuated him, but the irresistible necessity to pour out what came to life in his creative soul and temperament. In his autobiography Moussorgsky writes characteristically:

'By virtue of his views and music and of the nature of his compositions Moussorgsky stands apart from all existing types of musicians. The creed of his artistic faith is as follows: Art is a means of human intercourse and not in itself an end. The whole of his creative activity was dictated by this guiding principle. Convinced that human speech is strictly governed by musical laws, Moussorgsky considered that the musical reproductions, not of isolated manifestations of sensibility, but of articulate humanity as a whole, is the function of his art. He holds that in the domain of the musical art reformers such as Palestrina, Bach, Berlioz, Gluck, Beethoven, and Liszt have created certain artistic laws; but he does not consider these laws as immutable, holding them to be strictly subject to conditions of evolution and progress no less than the whole world of thought.'

Moussorgsky's life was no less unique than his thoughts and works. He was born in 1831 in the village of Kareva in the province of Pskoff, the son of a retired judicial functionary. He inherited the gift of music from his mother and from his father the gift of poetry. At the age of ten he was sent to a military school in St. Petersburg, where he remained until 1856, when he became an officer of the Preobrajensky Guard Regiment in St. Petersburg. A handsome young man of chivalrous manners, he became the romantic hero of the beau monde of St. Petersburg. His musical studies, begun in the college, were taken up more systematically and energetically after he became an officer. As a sentinel in the military hospital he met Borodine, the surgeon, and the two passionate lovers of music soon grew to be intimate friends. It was through Borodine that he heard of Balakireff, in whose Free School of Music he at once became a student. Already in 1858 he composed his first orchestral work, 'Scherzo,' which was performed two years later by Balakireff's orchestra.

In 1859 Moussorgsky resigned from the army with the idea of living for his music alone, but, lacking a systematic musical education, he found himself an outcast. He was treated as a dilettante by the professional musicians and the patrons of music, and this closed the way to earning a living by his art and getting his compositions published or produced. The situation made him desperate and he was glad to accept a clerkship, first in the Department of Finance, later in the office of the Imperial Comptroller. The salary was small and the work hard; he could only compose during the evenings and on festival days. This made him bitter about his future. It is rather strange that even Balakireff did not wholly understand Moussorgsky's genius when he joined the circle, for Rimsky-Korsakoff writes in his memoirs that Moussorgsky was always treated as the least talented of all. This was on account of the peculiarly passive frame of mind into which the composer had fallen after leaving the army. He even changed in his appearance and manners. The once handsome, chivalrous young social hero was suddenly transformed into a dreamy vagabond, who cared nothing for manners and appearances.

Moussorgsky's masterpieces are his three song cycles of about twenty numbers each, his few orchestral compositions and his two operas, Boris Godounoff and Khovanshchina. There is hardly a work by another composer which has upon the listener such a ghastly, hypnotic effect as some of these works of Moussorgsky. Every chord of them is like a gripping, invisible finger. His cycle of 'Death Dances,' of which Trepak is the most popular, are knocks at the very gates of death, written in the weird rhythms of old Russian peasant dances. In this work he makes the listener realize the indifference of nature to human fate. 'Snow fields in silence—so cold is the night! And the icy north wind is wailing, brokenly sobbing, as though a ghastly dirge. Over the graves it is chanting. Lo! O behold. Through the night a strange pair approaches; death holds an old peasant in his clutches.' Thus sings the composer in the epilogue. The starved peasant is frozen under the snow. But then the sun shines warmer; spring comes into the land. The icy fields change into flourishing meadows, the lark soars to the sky and nature continues its everlasting alternate play as if individual joys and sorrows never existed.

The descriptive power of Moussorgsky's vocal compositions is marvellously realistic, and of this his songs of the second and third active period of his life, such as 'Peasant Cradle Song,' 'Children Songs,' 'Serenade,' and Polkovodets, give the best illustration. In the first named composition not only does he visualize the rocking of the cradle, accompanied by a sweet melody, but he also draws, with a remarkable power, the interior of a peasant's hut, the mother bending with tenderness over her child; her sigh and dreaming of his future; the child's breathing and the ticking of a primitive old watch on the wall. One can almost see the details of an idyllic lonely Russian village. But Moussorgsky is not only powerful in his gloomy and melancholy tone pictures, in which he depicts the hopeless situation of the Russian people in their struggle for freedom; he is also great in his humorous, gay songs. Hopak, Pirushki, Po Griby, and the 'Children Songs' are full of exultant humor, naughtiness or joy. How well he could make music a satire is proved by 'Classic,' 'Raek,' and others, in which pedantic academicism is caricatured in ironic chords. Moussorgsky's musical activity may be divided into three periods: First, from 1858 until 1865, when, more or less under the influence of Dargomijsky, he composed 'Edip,' 'Saul,' Salâmmbo, 'Intermezzo,' 'Prelude,' and 'Menuette'; second, from 1865 until 1875, when he was independent and wrote the 'Death Dances,' 'Children Songs,' Boris Godounoff, Khovanshchina, etc.; and the third, during which he composed the 'Song of Mephisto.' The works of his second period are overwhelming in their elemental power and boldness of treatment. In them he surpasses all Russian composers up to his time.

Boris Godounoff, finished in 1870, was performed four years later in the Imperial Opera House. The libretto of this opera he took from the poetic drama of Pushkin, but he changed it, eliminating much and adding new scenes here and there, so that as a whole it is his own creation. In this work Moussorgsky went against the foreign classic opera in conception as well as in construction. It is a typically Russian musical drama, with all the richness of Slavic colors, true Byzantine atmosphere and characters of the medieval ages. Based on Russian history of about the middle of the seventeenth century, when an adventurous regent ascends the throne and when the court is full of intrigues, its theme stands apart from all other operas. The music is more or less, like many of Moussorgsky's songs, written in imitation of the old folk-songs, folk dances, ceremonial chants, and festival tunes. Foreign critics have considered the opera as a piece constructed of folk melodies. But this is not the case. There is not a single folk melody in Boris Godounoff, every phrase is the original creation of Moussorgsky.

Although there is nothing in the symphonic development of Boris Godounoff which approaches the complexities of Wagnerian music drama, the leading motives are quite definitely associated with the characters and emotions of the drama. Noteworthy features in the realm of musical suggestion are those of the music accompanying the hallucinations of Boris, where Moussorgsky forsakes the conventional custom of employing the heavy brass and reproduces the frenzy in musical terms by means of downward chromatic passage played tremolo by strings—an effect which succeeds because it has a far more direct appeal to the nerves of the listener than the more abstract commentary of the German operatic masters.

Moussorgsky's second opera, Khovanshchina, which was finished by Rimsky-Korsakoff after the death of the composer, is in its subject and broad style far superior to 'Boris,' especially because of its more powerful symbolism and exalted pathos. But the music, particularly in the last unfinished acts, lacks the originality and grip of his early opera. If he had been able to work out this opera under more favorable circumstances it would have caught more faithfully the psychology of a nation's life and history in a nutshell of music than anything written before or later for the stage. Moussorgsky also wrote a comic opera, 'The Fair at Sorotchinsk,' which was partly orchestrated and finished by Sahnovsky and Liadoff and performed for the first time in the Spring of 1914.

Moussorgsky's perpetual misery, overwork, and the thought that his compositions would be hardly understood and recognized during his lifetime made him so gloomy and desperate that he drifted away from Balakireff's circle. For some time he lived at the country place of his brother, and when he returned to St. Petersburg he tried to overcome the haunting thoughts, but in vain. He began to avoid all society and everything conventional. In the meanwhile his Boris Godounoff had been given with great success on the stage. Yet the academic circles would not recognize him in spite of this public success. The man's pride was touched and he felt unhappy about everything he had done. His only contentment he found in playing his works for himself and in associating with the common people in dram shops, which he visited with dire results. Shunning every intelligent circle and society, he grew melancholy, and his mental and physical health was seriously affected.