MIKHAIL GLINKA (1804-57), “the father of Russian music,” composed the first Russian opera, A Life for the Tsar, in 1836, and thus laid the foundation for a Russian national music whose voice would reach full resonance only during the latter part of the nineteenth century in the celebrated works of Tchaikovsky and the composers of the so-called Mighty Coterie (Moguchaia Kuchka).

This aphoristic characterization of nineteenth-century Russian music history has persisted among Western musicians and music historians because of a continuing ignorance of the fundamental research done by Russian-music specialists, both native-born and foreign, during the past half century. Our discussion here, founded on this fundamental research, proposes to trace the emergence of national consciousness in Russian music and to establish the historical context in which Glinka could appear as the founder of a self-consciously nationalist school of composers in Russia.¹

The dominant position of the Russian Orthodox church in prePetrine Russian cultural life promoted a skepticism toward secular art in any form that endured into the eighteenth century. Even folk music, though never suppressed, had suffered periodic ecclesiastic ire, while secular music of the art tradition had simply never struck root in the inhospitable soil of Russia’s pietistical culture. But conditions changed quickly in the wake of Peter the Great’s reforms at the start of the eighteenth century. Imperial ukase suddenly accelerated Russia’s long-standing practice of borrowing selectively from Western technology, and the influx of Western ways swept in as well the trappings of Western culture. Soon, newly clean-shaven and peruked courtiers were dancing to menuet, polonaise, and anglatse at the Western-style court balls in St. Petersburg. In 1711, Peter issued directives on the establishment of military “staff orchestras” along the German model, to consist of bands of nine “oboists” (the generic name for all military musicians) and sixteen drummers. Such bands soon participated fully in military life, accompanying the troops in battles and maneuvers, as well as playing for the quasi-military ceremonials at court. Ten years earlier, the venerable Chorus of the Sovereign’s Singing Clerics (Khor gosudarevykh pevchikh d’iakov)—composed, as custom dictated, of mature male voices—had been transformed at Peter’s behest into a court choir that included both men and boys in the European manner. Peter moved the choir from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1703 and included it in the royal entourage on his trip in 1717 to Poland, Germany, Holland, and France, where he impressed his European hosts with the prowess and beauty of Russian male voices. Then in 1721, Karl Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, claimant to the hand of Peter’s elder daughter, Anna, arrived in St. Petersburg with his court Kapelle—the first sizable group of highly trained German musicians to find residence at the Russian court. They performed at balls and official celebrations, gave chamber music concerts, and soon acquainted the Russian court with such contemporary European masters as Corelli, Telemann, and Keiser. A number of these musicians, including the Konzertmeister Johann Hübner (1696-c. 1750), eventually entered the service of the Russian court, remaining in St. Petersburg even after Peter’s death.

Opera, the genre that would dominate secular art music in Russia to the end of the eighteenth century, appeared only in the 1730s. On 26 February/9 March 1731, an Italian troupe previously engaged in Dresden at the court of the Saxon elector, Friedrich August (who was also King of Poland), inaugurated a series of musical and theatrical presentations at the court of Empress Anna. The troupe’s repertoire consisted mainly of short plays in the style of the commedia dell’arte with musical intermezzi performed between the acts. (The style of the latter closely resembled nascent opera buffa of the sort exemplified by Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona.) A second Italian theatrical company brought more intermezzi to the Russian court in 1733. But such light-hearted entertainment could scarcely satisfy the imperial pretensions of Russian court life. Opera seria was needed. In 1735 Empress Anna summoned Francesco Araja (1709-c. 1770) from Italy to direct a newly assembled Italian troupe capable of mounting opera seria; this troupe formed the nucleus of the first Imperial Court Opera. Araja soon satisfied his patroness with a grand production of his own La Forza dell’amore e dell’odio, on 29 January/9 February 1736, in a specially built opera house in St. Petersburg. Araja held his post only until 1738 but later accepted reappointment from Empress Elizabeth in 1744; he remained in Russia this time until 1759—long enough to see more and more talented Russians among the musicians at court. The spectacle of opera seria could be sustained only by augmenting the imported musical forces with native players and singers—the latter usually drawn from the court choir, which had started to participate regularly in opera performances during Araja’s first term as Kapellmeister (the German term was used at the Russian court). Indeed, the cadre of native performers had grown sufficiently large and competent by mid-century to mount an opera in Russian to an original Russian libretto—Araja’s Cephalus and Procris (Tsefal i Prokris) on a text by Alexander Sumarokov (1718-77), which premiered on 27 February/10 March 1755.

After Araja, foreigners (predominantly Italian) continued to occupy leading positions in Russian musical life to the end of the eighteenth century: Hermann Friedrich Raupach (1755-62, 1768-78), Vincenzo Manfredini (1758-69, 1798-99), Josef Starzer (1760-70), Baldassare Galuppi (1765-68), Tommaso Traetta (1768-75), Giovanni Paisiello (1776-84), Carlo Canobbio (1779-1800), Giuseppe Sarti (17841802), Gennaro Astaritta (1784-89, 1795-1803), Domenico Cimarosa (1787-91), and Vincente Martin y Soler (1788-1806). But native Russian composers were already taking their first tentative steps in the 1770s. On 26 August/6 September 1772, the first known Russian vernacular comic opera was performed at Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial summer residence. The work, Anyuta (Aniuta), is known today from its libretto by Mikhail Popov (1742-c. 1790). Neither musical score nor parts survive, and the composer remains unidentified, although Vasily Pashkevich (c. 1742-97) has often been advanced as a credible candidate. At one point in the text, the character Filat is instructed to leave the stage singing the folk song “Fair-face, chubby-face” (Belolitsa-kruglolitsa), which suggests the possibility that the musical score may have amounted to little more than a pastiche of contemporary folk and popular songs. French comic opera, which had secured a place at the Russian court by the mid-1760s, undoubtedly served as the model, since mature opera buffa returned to the court only on 3/14 February 1779, with a performance of Paisiello’s Filosofi immaginarj. By that late date, opera buffa had been enjoying great success in the public theaters of St. Petersburg and Moscow for a number of years, but the imperial court continued up until about 1780 to demand from Italian composers the ceremonial pomp and self-aggrandizing metaphor of opera seria.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, social support for music spread beyond the imperial court, first into the circles close to the court, then into the wider realm of aristocratic society. Wealthy nobles, emulating the court, set up domestic orchestras, choirs, and opera theaters staffed largely by serfs trained by foreign professionals. (The musical establishments of Prince Pyotr Volkonsky [1776-1852], Count Nikolai Sheremetev [1751-1809], and Count Alexander Vorontsov [1741-1805] achieved particular renown.) Amateur musicmaking became an expected component of genteel education. Entrepreneurs opened theaters and sponsored concerts for a paying public. Giovanni Battista Locatelli (1715-85) brought his private Italian opera-buffa and ballet troupe to St. Petersburg in 1757, and following great success there, he opened a theater in Moscow in 1759. A number of years later, public theaters offering a varied bill of drama, opera, and ballet were founded in Moscow (1776) by Michael Maddox, an Englishman, in collaboration with Prince P. V. Urusov, and in St. Petersburg (1779) by Karl Knipper, a German. Russia’s secular music culture had clearly struck root at last.

The first French comic operas on the Russian stage in the 1760s took many operagoers by surprise. After attending one, a contemporary reacted with dismay: “We have become accustomed to a grand and imposing spectacle with music in the Italian [i.e., opera-seria] style, while here, but for the simplest music and simplest settings, but for smithies, blacksmiths, and goings-on about blacksmiths, there was nothing.”² Indeed, with its reliance on popular folk and folklike tunes, spoken dialogue, and simple plots featuring peasants and scenes from village life, French comic opera could scarcely have been further removed from the conceits of court-sponsored opera seria. Here was the perfect model for a Russian vernacular comic opera. (Italian opera buffa provided less apt a model because of its greater musical sophistication— usually newly composed music and sung dialogue [i.e., recitativo], with plots often set in an upper-class milieu, even when they concerned lower-class characters.) Motivated by the attitudes of the French Enlightenment, the vanguard of Russian culture, led by Empress Catherine herself, found the habits, customs, and temperament of simple folk “enchanting.” Folk song perfectly embodied the peasant spirit, and aristocratic Russians started to delight without embarrassment in the indigenous beauty of their native music. Its potential for creating a vernacular comic opera of distinctly Russian flavor was quickly recognized by composers, both native-born and foreign.

The burgeoning interest in folk song among the higher strata of Russian society toward the end of the eighteenth century soon lent incentive to systematic collection, and the first printed transcriptions started to appear. Precedence belongs to Vasily Trutovsky (c. 1740-1810). In 1761, Empress Elizabeth appointed him Court Singer and Kammerguslist (i.e., a player of the Russian folk instrument the gusli, a kind of psaltery; the German name was used at court in preference to the Russian gusliar, which means “gusli player”), suggesting that the European interest in folk music was already sanctioned in the highest circles. Trutovsky published Part One of his pioneering four-part Collection of Russian Rustic Songs with Music in 1776 (Sobranie russkikh prostykh pesen s notami [St. Petersburg, 1776-95]).³ A more systematic approach was adopted by Nikolai Lvov (1751-1803) and Jan Bogumir Práč (?-1818) in their collaborative Collection of Russian Folk Songs with their Tunes; Music Arranged by Jan Práč (Sobranie narodnykh russkikh pesen s ikh golosami. Na muzyku polozhil Ivan Prach [St. Petersburg, 1790]). The abundance of traditional melodies in these collections made them a primary source for composers well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Lvov-Práč volume probably experienced the greatest social resonance of any music publication in eighteenth-century Russia (especially considering its numerous reprintings in the nineteenth century). A list of the composers, both in and out of Russia, who drew on it would include Beethoven, Rossini, Sarti, Martin y Soler, Pashkevich, and virtually all of the declared Russian nationalists, starting with Glinka.

Vernacular comic opera occupied first place in the output of the embryonic Russian School of the eighteenth century. The genuine prototype (Anyuta notwithstanding) premiered in Moscow on 20/31 January 1779: The Miller-Magician: Trickster and Matchmaker (Mel’nik-koldun, obmanshchik i svat’) by Mikhail Sokolovsky (c. 1756-?) to a libretto by Alexander Ablesimov (1742-83). The Miller-Magician owed much to Vasily Maikov’s (1728-78) Russian adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, which had been set to music by one Johann or Josef Kerzelli and presented as The Village Soothsayer (Derevenskoi vorozheia) in Moscow some two years before (the exact date is unknown; the overture and various songs and interludes arranged for “clavier or piano” were published in Moscow in 1778—the first operatic pieces to be printed in Russia). The Sokolovsky-Ablesimov treatment captivated the public’s fancy in an unprecedented fashion, remaining in the repertoire continuously until 1821 and becoming thereby a reference standard for the genre. The distinguished native Russian composers of the late eighteenth century—Pashkevich, Evstignei Fomin (1761-1800), Dmitry Bortniansky (1751-1825)—refined the musical content and polished the operatic forms, while expanding the range of subject matter, but the genre’s identifying features remained the same as in The Miller-Magician: spoken dialogue, songlike numbers (the majority based on genuine folk melodies), and stories set in the everyday milieu of common folk.

The utilization of genuine Russian folk melodies in vernacular comic opera represented no more than a convention to Russian composers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a convention that had little impact on their determination to command the language and forms of contemporary European art music. Likewise, when Russian folk tunes were first taken as themes for variation cycles, their presence amounted to little more than charming curiosity—a bit of local color that barely hinted at the way folk song would eventually free the imagination of native Russian composers from European modes of musical thought. Vasily Trutovsky once again gets credit for publishing the first known Variations sur les Chansons Russes pour le Clavecin ou Forte-piano (St. Petersburg, 1780), which contains two sets of variation cycles. The tunes came from his own folk-song collection—a lyric leisurely or melismatic song (protiazhnaia pesnia),⁴ “At the Fine Husky Fellow’s” (U dorodnogo dobrogo molodtsa) and a dance song (pliasovaia pesnia), “In the Woods Hatched a Host of Mosquitos” (Vo lesochke komarochkov mnogo urodilos’). Ivan Khandoshkin (1747-1804) followed the next year with Chansons russes variées pour violon et basse (Amsterdam, 1781), and then two years later with his first publication in Russia—Six Old Russian Songs with Variations for Solo Violin and Alto-Viola (Shest’ starinnykh ruskikh (sic) pesen’ s prilozhennymi k onym variatsiiami, dlia odnoi skripki i alto-violy). At the turn of the century, variations on Russian folk tunes constituted the most popular genre of purely instrumental music produced by both natives and foreigners resident in Russia (the latter included Johann Gottfried Wilhelm Palschau [1741-1815], Johann Wilhelm Haessler [1747-1822], and John Field [1782-1837]). In a few of these early sets, especially those by native composers, a distinctive quality of “Russianness” can be discerned. The process of variation itself corresponds more closely than any other formalized compositional procedure to one of the traditional ways of musical thinking found among Russian folk musicians and expressed in actual folk performance practice. This may account in some way for the preeminence of variation cycles in the instrumental output of native composers.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, gifted native composers had also tried their hands at instrumental and vocal genres in which the quality of Russianness emerged scarcely if at all. Bortniansky and Maxim Berezovsky (1745-77), both of whom spent many years in Italy, cultivated a European type of sacred choral concerto that nevertheless reveals some traces of the seventeenth-century tradition of Ukrainian-Russian so-called part singing (partesnoe penie). Józef Kozłowski (1757-1831), who was born in Poland but settled in Russia in 1773, established the polonaise in Russia as both a gala, ceremonial piece and a favored salon genre; the polonaise eventually accrued specific connotations within its Russian milieu, along with distinctively new stylistic elements, and during the nineteenth century came to be considered a characteristically and recognizably “Russian” musical genre. A type of vocal salon piece called the Rossiiskaia pesnia or “Russian song” (as distinct from songs or arias to French or Italian texts) seems to have made its earliest appearance in Grigory Teplov’s (1711-79) Idleness Midst Labor (Mezhdu delom bezdel’e), the first printed collection of “Russian songs” by a Russian composer to texts by Russian poets (St. Petersburg, n.d., but probably not before 1751; second and third printings occurred in 1759 and 1776). These songs, in three-part texture, reveal many traits in common with the fashionable European vocal salon music of the era, although some residue of style may survive in them from the three-part lyric kant found in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. More to the point, however, the “Russian song” spawned an offshoot that evolved in the songs of Kozłowski and Fyodor Dubiansky (1760-96) at the end of the eighteenth century—the “Russian romance,” a genre that, like the polonaise, came to be considered characteristically Russian in the course of the nineteenth century without (again, like the polonaise) relying on folk-song citation per se. Finally, a number of Russian composers at the turn of the century had produced European-style sonatas, fugues, chamber ensemble pieces, and the like, but however adept these might be—and in the case of Bortniansky and Khandoshkin, they were indeed adept—they possessed no perceptible quality of Russianness.

The first generation of Russian composers to feel inclined toward a national expression could imbue their works with a recognizable quality of Russianness only by reference to sound images associated with Russia’s two ancient and indigenous musical practices—folk music and music of the Russian Orthodox church. The lineage of both stretched back to historic traditions outside the borders of the Russian state, but centuries of geographical and cultural isolation had insured their evolution along distinctively Russian lines. Although these practices had evolved to quite different purposes and functions, some degree of mutual influence inevitably occurred—each left imprints on the other. Russian composers experiencing the first faint flush of national consciousness found folk music the richer stimulus to their musical imagination. As musical nationalism developed into a self-conscious, articulate, and aggressive movement during the course of the nineteenth century, folk music remained the nationalist composer’s primary touchstone. Proximity to this touchstone came finally to be considered the sine qua non of the nineteenth-century Russian nationalist school of composition.

The theater remained at the center of attention for the majority of Russian composers in the nineteenth century, but subject matter and musical language changed radically. Folk-epic stories and fairy-tale fantasies that stressed the supernatural began to attract them, betraying interests in common with the European romantics, while the political events that culminated in the War of 1812 inspired them to compose patriotic works on themes from Russian history. Vernacular comic opera lost much of its ethnic focus and penchant for social satire, tending instead toward farce and an often saccharine idealization of peasant life such as can be seen in Alexei Titov’s (1769-1827) Yam, or the Post Station (lam, ili Pochtovaia stantsiia) (1805), The Village Sociable (Posidelki) (1807), or The Bride’s Wedding Party, or Filatka’s Marriage (Devishnik, ili Filatkina svad’ba) (1808). Fantasy opera came to Russia in 1803 with a production of The Dnieper River Nymph (Dneprovskaia rusalka)—a Russian adaptation by Nikolai Krasnopolsky (dates unknown) of the Austrian composer Ferdinand Kauer’s (1751-1831) Das Donauweibchen, with added musical numbers by Stepan Davydov (1777-1825). The work had already enjoyed great success in Vienna and Berlin. Recast to reflect Slavic folklore, it proved a triumph in St. Petersburg. A year later, a sequel appeared with added musical numbers by Catterino Cavos (1775-1840; his forty years in Russia, 1799-1840, surely qualify him as a “naturalized Russian”). Continued success led to two later incarnations—Lesta, the Dnieper River Nymph (Lesta, dneprovskaia rusalka) (1805) and The Nymph (Rusalka) (1807). The latter two were composed entirely by Davydov, who relied extensively on folk song for characterizing the protagonists and their locale. Davydov imbued his scores with a heightened romantic expressivity, making the pictorial and descriptive episodes some of the earliest examples of romantic “tone painting” in Russian music (e.g., the overture to the 1805 Nymph depicts a thunderstorm). The rusalka tetralogy became the prototype of nineteenth-century Russian fairy-tale opera.

Not only did Cavos compose some of the earliest popular fairy-tale operas—The Invisible Prince (Kniaz’-nevidimka) (1805) and Ilya the Hero (Il’ia-bogatyr’) (1806)—but his Ivan Susanin (1815), to a libretto by Prince Alexander Shakhovskoy (1777-1846), written under the immediate impressions of the War of 1812, represents the finest early example of Russian historic opera. Its dramatic choral scenes with music in folk style are especially distinguished. Twenty-one years later, Cavos would conduct the premiere of another opera based on the same event in Russian history—Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za Tsaria) (1836). The assertion might be made without exaggeration that the paradigms of all later nineteenth-century Russian opera were established in works composed between 1800 and 1815.

Other musical theatrical genres also contributed to Russia’s incipient national school. The so-called divertissement (divertisment), a folk-vernacular entertainment, gained great popularity between 1810 and 1830 with its simple plots enlivened by songs and dances in folk style. Many were based on patriotic subjects connected with the War of 1812, such as Cavos’s The Home Guard, or Love for the Fatherland (Opolchenie, ili Liubov’ k otechestvu) (1812) or Davydov’s Triumph of Victory (Torzhestvo pobedy) (1814-15). The Russian vaudeville (vodevil’), a genre similar in character to the divertissement, also enjoyed much success with the public during the 1820s. A touring French troupe had introduced the vaudeville to Russia in 1800; as its popularity spread, Russianized versions of texts and plots appeared, but with the French tunes retained. Cavos composed the earliest known original Russian vaudeville to a libretto by Shakhovskoy, The Cossack Poet (Kazak-stikhotvorets) (1812), which typifies the genre—an anecdotal situation narrated in spoken dialogue with simple songs consisting of verse couplets set to strophic tunes (often well-known melodies) in folk style.

The vaudeville Grandma’s Parrots (Babushkiny popugai), presented at the Bolshoi Theater in St. Petersburg in 1819, launched the musical career of Alexei Verstovsky (1799-1862). Scion of an enlightened aristocratic family, Verstovsky grew up in musical surroundings. His father maintained a serf orchestra and owned a music library of considerable size for the period. Young Alexei and his brother Vasily participated from childhood in amateur music-making. At age ten, Alexei publicly performed piano works of John Field and Jan Dušek. After the War of 1812, the family settled in St. Petersburg, where Verstovsky studied at the institute attached to the Corps of Transport Engineers (Institut korpusa inzhenerov putei soobshcheniia) during 1816-17 and entered civil service on graduation. Nevertheless, music remained his first love, and at various times he studied piano with Daniel Steibelt and John Field, violin with Franz Böhm and Ludwig Maurer, and composition with Johann Gottfried Miller. He moved easily into St. Petersburg’s artistic society, becoming fast friends with the composer Aliab’ev (about whom more later) and such influential figures in the theater as Pimen Arapov (1796-1861), Nikita Vsevolozhsky (1799-1862), and the playwrights Prince Shakhovskoy and Nikolai Khmelnitsky (1791-1845). Verstovsky moved to Moscow in 1823, where he was appointed Inspector of Music for the Moscow branch of the Imperial Theaters Directorate (1825), then Inspector of Repertoire (1830), and finally Manager of the Moscow branch (1848-60). His position in the mainstream of Russian cultural life brought him into contact with such literary notables as Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and Alexander Griboedov (17951829). Access to the intellectual circle of Prince Vladimir Odoevsky (1803-69), Sergei Aksakov (1791-1859), Mikhail Zagoskin (17891852), and Stepan Shevyryov (1806-64) acquainted him with the current sociocultural debates over the controversial issue of Slavophilism.

As Verstovsky secured power and authority, both as composer and administrator, during the thirty-five years of what has been called the “Epoch of Verstovsky” in Moscow’s theatrical life, he gained a reputation as a tough-minded, despotic manager but also earned respect for his personal dedication to the job at hand and for his exceedingly high artistic standards. One of his contemporaries, the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-86), wrote of him:

We know very well the unbounded admiration felt by all artists for . . . persons of discriminating tastes. Verstovsky was just such a connoisseur in the art of the theater. All the performers craved his criticism—feared it, yet heeded it gratefully and with confidence. It never entered an artist’s head to resent Verstovsky for addressing him thou [ty], especially when Verstovsky then praised him. Artists who performed in his presence (and he was at the theater every day) paid little heed to the applause of the public, but waited to see what he would say when he came backstage at intermission.⁵

Verstovsky devoted his compositional energies to the theater above all, producing in most of the theatrical genres of the period (except ballet)—vaudeville, opera, melodrama, “dramatic cantata,” as well as various sorts of prologues, musical tableaux, and intermezzi. The enormous success of Grandma’s Parrots led to some thirty more vaudevilles (a number in collaboration with other composers, especially his friend Aliab’ev). Having gained confidence as a composer for the theater in his vaudevilles, he turned to opera with Pan Twardowski (1828), which one critic declared “a new, heartening phenomenon never before encountered on the Russian stage. It is ours, it is the first Russian opera!”⁶ Doubtless such enthusiasm was engendered partly by the fact that Verstovsky had produced a serious work imbued with romantic drama and musical substance quite unlike the vernacular comic operas or fairy-tale operas of earlier native Russian composers. But Pan Twardowski was derivative of Polish legend (refracted through the story by Zagoskin, who also wrote the libretto), and only in his second opera, Vadim, or the Awakening of Twelve Sleeping Maidens (Vadim ili Probuzhdenie dvenadtsati spiashchikh dev) (1832) did Verstovsky begin to suggest that quality of Russianness so crucial to evoking national consciousness. Based on the second part of Vasily Zhukovsky’s (1783-1852) Twelve Sleeping Maidens (Dvenadtsat’ spiashchikh dev) (a kind of “German legend” metamorphosed into a Russian folk tale), the libretto gave Verstovsky an opportunity to compose music for scenes portraying the by-gone world of the ancient Slavs, their rites of spring and choruses of peasant maidens, their folk dancing and epic feasts, all of which anticipated the content and style of nationalist works to come. Verstovsky composed four more operas, reaching the apex of his inspiration in Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova mogila), produced on 15/27 September 1835—almost exactly a year before Glinka’s epoch-making A Life for the Tsar. Askold’s Tomb clearly bears the imprint of contemporary European “romantic nationalism”—many of its musical and scenic characteristics seem strikingly reminiscent of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, while the tone and content of Zagoskin’s libretto (adapted from his novel Askold’s Tomb), with its evocation of Kievan Rus’ at the time of Vladimir the Blessed, betray the then-current romantic vogue for “reconstructed” history in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. Although Russian folk-song elements often condition the character of the opera’s music (especially that associated with the Russian minstrel (skomorokh) Torop), Verstovsky never quite managed to exploit the potential of folk song to buttress the score’s nationalist imagery. His musical idiom derived essentially from the nineteenth-century Russian vernacular song—the “Russian song” and the “Russian romance,” which may be quite appropriately described as “urban folk songs” and which frequently incorporate identifiable elements from the older rural folk-song tradition. But for all this, Verstovsky’s musical language retained its fundamentally European accent. His operas reflected a kind of mild Slavophilism no doubt acquired in his intellectual circle and adapted to his artistic purposes— not as an urgent testament but as an expedient proposition.

Verstovsky’s friend and frequent collaborator on vaudevilles, Alexander Aliab’ev (1787-1851), probably shared his colleague’s mild Slavophilism during the early years of their association, though later, as a collector and arranger of Russia’s non-European folk music, his feelings surely intensified. The anti-Western feeling provoked by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia resurged after the Polish uprising of 1830, encouraging a pro-Asian sentiment that Aliab’ev clearly shared. Born in Tobolsk, east of the Ural Mountains, where his father held the post of governor, Aliab’ev’s special interest in the folk music of Russia’s Asiatic peoples may have stemmed in part from youthful associations. Despite the provincial setting, musical life in the Aliab’ev home included appearances by local amateur musicians and concerts by a serf orchestra. Then in 1796 the family moved to St. Petersburg and thence to Moscow in 1804, where Alexander’s love for music turned more decisively toward a lifetime commitment. Two waltzes for piano, his first publication, appeared in 1810, published by Weissgreber in Moscow.⁷ Aliab’ev’s close friendship with Verstovsky, possibly dating from the time when both were studying with Johann Gottfried Miller (Miller’s dates are unknown), would prove a valuable professional asset during the 1820s because of Verstovsky’s connections with the Moscow branch of the Imperial Theaters Directorate.

The War of 1812 prompted Aliab’ev to enlist as an officer in a hussar regiment. He took part in a number of skirmishes and battles, was wounded in action and decorated for bravery, and finally shared the glory of marching into Paris with the victorious Russian troops. After the war, he settled for a time in St. Petersburg, where he resumed composing (mostly “Russian romances” on texts by contemporaries, including Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and Baron Anton Delvig [1798-1831]) and established ties with the vanguard artistic and intellectual leaders of the capital city. He and his friend Verstovsky often joined in the play readings at Prince Shakhovskoy’s, which brought together such literary notables and devotees of the theater as Pushkin, Baron Delvig, Griboedov, the novelist-poet-critic Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1797-1837), the writer of fables and sometime dramatist Ivan Krylov (1769-1844), and the writers and playwrights Nikolai Kmelnitsky, Pavel Katenin (1792-1853), Andrei Zhandr (1789-1873), and Nikita Vsevolozhsky (who would one day organize the Decembrist society “The Green Lamp” [Zelënaia lampa]). But Aliab’ev felt drawn to Moscow and returned in 1823, the same year Verstovsky settled in the old capital. He quickly found a place at the center of the city’s artistic life through his association with Verstovsky and other cultural leaders such as the arts patron Count Mikhail Vielgorsky (Wielhorsky) (17881856), who lived in Moscow from 1823 to 1826, the composer Osip Genishta (1795-1853), and Prince Odoevsky. Verstovsky’s influence as an enthusiast of the theater must have had some bearing on Aliab’ev’s turn to vaudevilles, a number of which he composed in collaboration with Verstovsky. Then a dramatic event in his private life changed everything: early in 1825, Aliab’ev was accused of murdering a man with whom he had argued over cards. Although medical evidence suggested that the man had died of a chronic disease and not from physical violence, Aliab’ev was arrested and imprisoned for nearly three years. Finally in 1828 he was sentenced to exile in Siberia with the loss of his title and all personal rights. Exiled at first to Tobolsk, the city of his birth, he obtained permission in 1832 to travel to the North Caucasus region for health reasons, where he spent more than a year in Stavropol, Piatigorsk, and Kislovodsk. Here Aliab’ev became acquainted with the music, dances, and instruments of the Caucasian peoples, undertaking to transcribe songs of the Circassian, Kabardinian, Georgian, Azerbaijanian, and Turkmenian tribes. A chance meeting with the noted Ukrainian folklorist Mikhail Maximovich (1804-73) led to a collaboration that produced the first printed collection of Ukrainian folk songs—a collection that played as significant a role in the development of Ukrainian music as the Trutovsky and Lvov-Práč volumes played in Russian music.⁸ His request to remain longer in the Caucasus denied, Aliab’ev was transferred in the fall of 1833 to Orenburg, at the foot of the South Ural Mountains. Now his new-found fascination led him to seek out the music of the indigenous Central Asian and Trans-Volga peoples; he transcribed Bashkir and Kirghiz songs and even composed a symphonic overture on Bashkir folk themes. This was followed in 1834 by a collection entitled The Caucasus Singer (Kavkazskii Pevets) (Aliab’ev himself seems to have published it, arranging for it to be lithographed by F. Bartoldi in Moscow and sold there by the Music Store of Gresser & Miller⁹). The songs here may be considered the prototype of a genre that would be assiduously cultivated by the coming generation of nationalists—the “Asiatic song.” These pieces depend not on folk-song quotation but on Aliab’ev’s free interpretation and transformation or paraphrase of the music he gathered among the peoples of the Caucasus. The pitch and rhythmic elements that distinguished the songs of Russia’s non-European peoples offered Aliab’ev and his nationalist successors a repository of musical structures utterly unlike any in the Western tradition. Small wonder that these Eastern elements figured so prominently in that vision of a “special destiny” for Russian music shared by Balakirev and his nationalist league—a vision that idealized Russia’s Asiatic heritage in music no less than the Slavophiles idealized it in moral philosophy.

Through the intercession in 1834 of the governor-general of Orenburg, Aliab’ev was granted permission by Tsar Nicholas I to live with his relatives, but he was denied access to either of the capital cities and had to register with the local police at his place of residence. He immediately moved to the Moscow Province, then slipped into the city, where he remained illegally for a time. But news of his presence there reached the tsar, who promptly had him consigned to Kolomna, a city some seventy miles southeast of Moscow. Finally, in 1843, he was allowed to settle in Moscow under police supervision, but without the right to appear in public.

Toward the end of his confinement in Kolomna, Aliab’ev began his last opera. He had completed two many years before and was at the moment already well along in yet another one (of six in all, two remained unfinished at the time of his death). But Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s tale of Ammalat-bek seized his imagination with its vivid account of cultures in confrontation amidst the romanticized images of the rugged Caucasian wilderness. Russia had claimed control over the northern foothills and slopes of the Caucasus Mountains with the annexation of Georgia in 1801, but efforts at pacification of the territory extended into the mid-nineteenth century and would end only with Shamil’s surrender in 1859. Thus Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s theme spoke with powerful immediacy to Aliab’ev, both because of its currency and because of his personal knowledge of the region and its proud, independent peoples. The musical substance of the score would be fashioned from the authentic songs he himself had transcribed. Aliab’ev finished the opera in 1847, but his dream of seeing it staged was thwarted. He even appealed to Alexander Dargomyzhsky (1813-69) for intercession with the Imperial Theaters Directorate, but the bureaucracy refused to budge. Verstovsky’s role in this affair remains obscure, although by now he was office manager of the Moscow branch of the directorate.

Despite Aliab’ev’s interest in folk music during the last two decades of his life and the significant impact that interest had on the works singled out for discussion here (especially their anticipation of the concerns that would motivate Aliab’ev’s declared nationalist successors), the embodiment of national consciousness in music remained an essentially incipient component of his creative expression. His oeuvre encompassed all the genres found in Russian music of the 1820S-40S: vaudevilles and operas, cantatas, choruses, more than thirty works for orchestra and wind band (symphonies, overtures, marches, dances of various sorts, including polonaise, mazurka, waltz, and quadrille), chamber music, piano pieces, and more than 150 “Russian songs” and “Russian romances.” Most of his output—certainly the symphonic and chamber works—reveals a fundamental dependence on European stylistic norms unqualified by features that might distinguish them from the Western mainstream. Only his “Russian songs” and “romances” occasionally seem to reflect the melodic contours and scale formations of his native Russian folk music, although at the same time the frequent juxtaposition of parallel major and minor, the unexpected enharmonic modulations and mediant relationships, the expressive use of altered chords and dramatic unisons all suggest the equally profound influence of Schubert’s Lieder. A few of his pieces—the “Russian song” “The Nightingale” (Solovei), the chorus “From a Distant Land” (Iz strany, strany dalëkoi), the “Russian romance” “The Beggar Woman” (Nishchaia) — gained such widespread popularity throughout Russia and became so thoroughly absorbed into the people’s consciousness at all levels of society that they attained the virtual status of “folk songs.” But authentic folk song, for all its importance to Aliab’ev at significant moments and in particular works, remained at the periphery of his creativity, whereas for his contemporaries Alexander Varlamov and Alexander Gurilyov, it occupied a position closer to the center.

Varlamov and Gurilyov introduced a new current in Russian vocal chamber music of the 1830S-40S. Both found the “Russian song” and “Russian romance” the most congenial genres for self-expression. Both sought inspiration in the Russian folk-song tradition, though most often indirectly—refracted through the tradition of the “urban folk song.” Both descended from a social milieu closer to the common folk than to the aristocracy, perhaps making folk music more of a reality to them than to composers from more privileged backgrounds.

Alexander Varlamov (1801-48), son of a retired noncommissioned military officer, enjoyed few musical advantages at home, though he taught himself to play violin by ear. Noting the lad’s enthusiasm for music, family friends persuaded the father to sign ten-year-old Alexander into the custody of the Imperial Chapel Choir in St. Petersburg, where he worked and studied from 1811 to 1819. Although singing was his first responsibility there, instrumental music continued to attract him: he carried on the violin, started guitar, and eventually studied both piano and cello as well. His lovely preadolescent voice secured assignment among the soloists in the choir, calling him to Bortniansky’s attention. The famed Kapellmeister took personal interest in the youngster’s future, encouraging and advising him, according to Varlamov, who years later credited Bortnianky with teaching him everything he knew about vocal artistry,

In 1819 Varlamov was assigned as regent (precentor) to the Russian Embassy Church at The Hague in the Netherlands. His stay in Holland and Belgium (1819-23) introduced him to the richness of European musical life and marked his first public appearances as a chamber concert singer and guitar soloist. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1823, he taught singing in a theatrical school but managed in 1829 to secure an appointment to the Imperial Chapel Choir. Still he found it difficult to support his family on his modest income from the post, and he continued to teach voice on the side in schools and private homes. In 1832 he accepted appointment as assistant to the Kapellmeister, then as staff composer at the Moscow Imperial Theaters. In the latter capacity, he wrote incidental music to various types of theatrical productions (most of the music has not survived, though individual songs and romances originally composed for some of the productions were sometimes published separately).

The new Moscow of the 1830S-40S, rising vigorously from the ashes of the old, threatened to eclipse St. Petersburg with its surge of cultural activity. Whether from genuine sympathy for official ideology— Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality—or newly aroused Slavophiliac sentiment, Moscow seemed permeated by a sense of national consciousness and pride in her Russian heritage—a heritage so distinct from that of St. Petersburg. Small wonder that the musical part of that heritage should receive special attention in the city’s cultural life. Not only was folk song performed and enjoyed at every level of society, but composers began more and more to cultivate a folk-song style in their “Russian songs” and “Russian romances,” freely interpolating authentic folk elements into these genres and thus distancing them still further from the contemporary European art or salon song.

Varlamov found Moscow’s cultural atmosphere highly congenial. The full range of its rich musical life interested him, from the fashionable art of the Imperial Theaters to the popular songs of gypsy singers heard at local cafés. He became fast friends with Alexander Gurilyov, a young composer of like mind and similar interests. Both found stimulus to their creativity in the poems of Nikolai Tsyganov (1797-1831). Tsyganov, a noted actor in Moscow’s Maly Theater, incorporated in his poems many of the structural and thematic features of folk verse; he also approximated the often ingenuous lyric imagery of his model, along with such familiar motifs as the harshness of fate for the common man—or woman, since many of his poems recount the almost ritualistic events of pain or sorrow in the life of peasant women. Of nine songs contained in Varlamov’s Music Album for 1833 (Muzykal’nyi al’bom na 1833), dedicated to Verstovsky (privately published, Moscow, 1833), four were on poems by Tsyganov, including “Mama, Don’t Sew Me a Red Sarafan” (Ne shei ty mm, matushka, krasnyi sarafan).¹⁰ “Red Sarafan” was to become one of Russia’s all-time hits, “sung by every social class—in the parlors of noblemen as well as in the shanties of peasants,”¹¹ in the words of Nikolai Titov (1800-75), Varlamov’s contemporary and a noted composer in his own right. Tsyganov’s poem deals with one of the most widespread themes in Russian folklore—the plight of the maiden whose carefree existence must inevitably come to an end with marriage. Although Varlamov’s music to the poem reveals less connection with authentic folk sources than Tsyganov’s text, the song actually appeared in some later nineteenth-century published collections of Russian folk music without Varlamov’s name, as if it really were a genuine folk song.¹²

Moscow also introduced to Varlamov the performance tradition of gypsy singers—a tradition that he helped to translate into the genre of the “Russian gypsy song.” He attempted in his gypsy songs to re-create the profuse emotionalism, the taut rhythmic flexibility, and the exuberant energy of the gypsy performers who enjoyed such great popularity among all classes of Russian society during the nineteenth century.

In 1843, after having served nearly twelve years in the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Varlamov was compelled to resign. Verstovsky may have played some part in this. Jealous of his position in the Moscow branch of the directorate and neurotically self-centered, he could not abide any threat to his preeminence as a composer or a musical power in Moscow. Moreover, his hostility toward Varlamov is documented in contemporary memoirs.¹³ During the Moscow years Varlamov had unquestionably established his name in Russian music: he had published over one hundred “Russian songs” and “Russian romances,” issued a music journal—The Aeolian Harp (Eolova arfa) (1834-35)—appeared successfully as an orchestral and choral conductor and as a concert singer renowned especially for performances of his own songs, and secured a reputation as a teacher of singing whose method had been codified in a widely circulated Complete School of Singing (Polnaia shkola peniia) (Moscow, 1840), dedicated to the memory of his teacher Bortniansky.

At the beginning of 1845, Varlamov moved back to St. Petersburg, hoping to gain reappointment at the Imperial Chapel Choir, but politics at court blocked his chances. He gave singing lessons and concerts to augment his modest pension from the Imperial Theaters, but his large family and his own impracticality combined to keep him in continual financial need. He sought distraction from personal hardship in St. Petersburg’s stimulating artistic-literary life, which brought him into contact with the poet-critic Apollon Grigoriev (1822-64), a devotee and connoisseur of Russian folklore, who may have given him the idea for his last major musical project—the publication of one hundred Russian folk songs harmonized by himself. For a musician whose individuality had evolved in direct proximity to the rural and urban traditions of Russian folk song, such an undertaking seemed especially appropriate: as a performer he had always included folk song in his repertoire; as a teacher he had sought to cultivate a Russian school of singing based on a thorough analysis of the Russian folk melos and its authentic performance traditions; as a composer he had developed a personal musical language whose stylistic precepts reflected the principles of creativity peculiar to Russia’s native music.

Varlamov’s best “Russian songs” in folk style (mostly to texts by Tsyganov, Alexei Kol’tsov [1809-42], and Alexei Timofeev [181283]) closely paralleled the authentic prototype, often suggesting variations on familiar modes. Two basic types could be identified—the leisurely spun-out lyric song (protiazhnaia pesnia) and the brisk, energetic dance song (pliasovaia pesnia). The protiazhnaia pesnia in particular revealed Varlamov’s indebtedness to the Russian folk-song model, with its growth process based on (1) the assemblage of an extended melody in stages from an initial growth figure or popevka, whose characteristic intervals were subject to varied repetition according to traditional formulaic patterns, (2) the nonlinear recurrence of the assembled melody, again by varied repetition of its constituent melodic figures, and (3) the elaboration of the melodic line by formulaic ornamental melismas at expressive moments in an otherwise prevailingly syllabic setting of the text. Such original songs as “Ah, Time, thou precious Time” (Akh ty, vremia, vremechko) and “Why, dear Grass, hast thou yellowed so early?” (Chto ty rano, travushka, pozheltela?) proved so effective in their evocation of the folk spirit and in their appeal to a wide public, that they came to be thought of during the later nineteenth century as the true property of the people and an authentic part of their folk-song heritage.

Only forty-three of the projected one hundred folk songs were actually published in a collection called The Russian Singer (Russkii pevets) (St. Petersburg, 1846). Varlamov died of laryngeal phthisis in 1848 before he could finish a second volume. In the preface to the published volume, he wrote: “Our native song has long remained forgotten on the lips of common folk, and were it permitted to appear midst the highest estates, then only in artificial guise capriciously prescribed by inconstant and fickle fancy. . . .” Going on, he insisted that for his collection he had presented “the song [in its] native simplicity, as the people created it.”¹⁴

Varlamov’s contemptuous reference to native song “in artificial guise” may well refer to the continuing popularity in Russia’s haut monde of variations on folk songs—a genre that entertained amateurs of the privileged class throughout the nineteenth century. Yet his friend and companion in dedication to the genres of the “Russian song” and “Russian romance”—a compatriot equally close to the traditions of both rural and urban Russian folk song—produced a few restrained and tasteful piano variations on native folk tunes, as well as some brilliant virtuoso sets on popular “Russian songs,” including some of Varlamov’s. Alexander Gurilyov (1803-58), son of the renowned serf musician Lev Gurilyov (1770-1844), grew up in the exceptionally rich musical environment of Count Vladimir Orlov’s (1743-1831) country estate Otrada (Delight) near Moscow. Alexander’s father, a student of Sard’s, served as composer and music instructor, as well as conductor of the serf orchestra, reputed to be one of the finest in Russia. Lev began training his son early, and the boy’s progress on violin and viola, started at age six, soon secured the youngster a chair in the orchestra. Later he would play viola in the quartet of Prince Nikolai Golitsyn (Galitzin) (1794-1866), a gifted amateur musician who was a correspondent and patron of Beethoven’s.¹⁵ The famous musicians of the era often performed at Otrada, among them John Field, who may have given piano lessons to the young Gurilyov. In any case, the piano more than any other instrument attracted him, and Field’s style of composition and manner of performance profoundly influenced the development of Gurilyov’s superior pianistic talent.

In 1831, after Count Orlov’s death, the Gurilyov family received its freedom, and Alexander was registered as a “burgher” in the category of “craftsman” (a lower-middle-class designation) with the Moscow Board of Trade. (As with all children of serfs who were trained as musicians, he had been trained in a craft as well as in music.) Gurilyov’s future friend Varlamov moved to Moscow the very next year, and the eventual friendship of the two young Alexanders would contribute mutually to their professional careers. Both sought inspiration in Russian folk music, admired good choral singing, and avidly absorbed the traditions of Moscow’s renowned gypsy singers. By the early 1840s, Gurilyov’s “Russian songs” and “Russian romances” had established his name as a composer, his concert appearances had earned him a reputation as one of Moscow’s best pianists, and his teaching had attracted a large class of private students. Even so, financial difficulties beset him throughout his life, forcing him at times to work long hours as a music proofreader in addition to everything else.

Gurilyov’s collection of Forty-Seven Russian Folk Songs (Sorok sem’ russkikh narodnykh pesen) for voice and piano (Moscow, 1849) provides important insight into his conception of folk music—insight that illuminates as well the manner in which the folk tradition manifests itself in Gurilyov’s original compositions. Although the title specifies “folk songs,” without further qualifications, the collection contains songs of comparatively recent urban origin alongside songs of the ancient rural folk tradition, both arranged in a contemporary style that features harmonizations and accompanimental patterns reminiscent of the fashionable romance. Gurilyov also introduces elements adapted from the performance style of the current popular gypsy singers, who frequently included traditional Russian folk songs in their repertoire, modifying the melodic figures or popevki with melismatic interpolations, dramatic accents, and vocal effects of various kinds intended to heighten expressiveness. Gurilyov attempts to achieve similar results in his arrangements. Considering the choice of songs, the scope and variety of types, and the “period style” of their arrangements, Gurilyov’s collection amounts virtually to an encyclopedia of what Russians were singing in the 1830-40S.¹⁶

Like his friend Varlamov, Gurilyov clearly considered “folk song” a rather broad and flexible designation for songs “popular among the folk,” whatever their origin. Since a demand existed for such songs, those that had achieved popularity—whether they were authentic folk songs, more recent urban songs, or newly composed songs—became the models for his own output. Just as the somewhat sentimental style of the popular “Russian romance” infiltrated his collection of Forty-Seven Russian Folk Songs, it infiltrated his own “Russian songs,” making them much more salonlike than those of Varlamov. Not that he excluded the rural folk-song influences of the sort Varlamov had so successfully been able to incorporate; rather, Gurilyov attempted to synthesize the two almost contradictory traditions. For example, he could accommodate his penchant for waltz rhythms (so pervasive in all contemporary salon genres) quite comfortably to the well-liked pseudofolk verse of Alexei Kol’tsov, whose texts he often set (as did Varlamov). One of the traditional meters of Russian rural folk poetry was based on a pentasyllablc foot with the stress on the third syllable:

This metrical scheme, illustrated here in an authentic bit of Russian folk verse, appears so frequently in Kol’tsov’s poetry that it has sometimes been called “Kol’tsovian meter.” Gurilyov would take one of Kol’tsov’s pseudo-folk verses, such as The Maiden’s Melancholy (Grust’ devushkt), set in motion a simple waltz accompaniment, then infuse the melodic line with structural conventions from Russian rural folk song, thus creating a hybrid genre as distinctively Russian sounding as songs more obviously reliant on folkloric sources.

Although less influential in their own time, as well as later, than his eighty-eight “Russian songs” and “Russian romances,” Gurilyov’s piano variations on Russian folk tunes added to the reservoir from which the avowed nationalists would draw elements to nurture their movement. Despite Varlamov’s slighting reference to native song “in artificial guise,” the techniques developed by composers of folk-song variations in the first half of the nineteenth century anticipated the procedures refined by their successors.

Unlike his concert variations on tunes from contemporary operatic successes (e.g., his set on themes from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia) or popular “Russian songs” and “Russian romances” of his era (e.g., those on Varlamov’s “Wakest Her Not at Dawn” [Na zare ty eë budi]), which so clearly reflected the John Field school of virtuoso pianism, Gurilyov’s folk-song variations suggested more the character of teaching pieces. He may well have composed them for his students and thus felt constrained to limit virtuosic elements. His variations on “This Is Not White Snow” (Ne bely to snegi), “All around the Village, Katinka” (Po vsei derevne Katin’ka), “Ah, on the sea”¹⁸ (Akh po moriu), “The Neighbor Had a Hut”¹⁹ (U soseda khata byla), and those which he contributed to his father’s set on “What Happened to the Maiden” (Chto devushke sdelalos’) reveal an imaginative exploitation of contrasting pianistic textures and sonorities, despite their modest technical demands.

Our discussion of the increasing importance of native rural folk music to Russian urban culture during the first half of the nineteenth century and the growing body of newly composed, protonationalist art music correlative to it would be incomplete without recognizing the activities of Daniil Kashin (1770-1841) and Ivan Rupin (1792-1850), both of whom gained great fame as concert performers and collectors of Russian traditional folk song. Kashin, born a serf, studied first with the Kapellmeister of Gavril Bibikov’s (?-1812) serf orchestra, then later with Sarti. One of the first Russian musicians to make a success of public performance, his career as pianist and conductor spanned from 1790 to 1830. He received his freedom in 1799, at which time he became associated with Moscow University, where he arranged concerts, conducted the orchestra, taught music, and composed choral and instrumental music for ceremonial occasions. His profound interest in folk song antedates the national surge of patriotism engendered by the War of 1812. In 1806 he wrote in the preface to his first publication containing folk songs collected and arranged by himself:

The love and affection of Russians for everything national [otecbestvennyi] induces Mr. Kashin to publish The Journal of National Music [Zhurnal otechestvennoi muzyki\. In it will be included, first of all, ancient music on old Russian [epic] tales. . . . The music of these tales consists of rarefies precious to every Russian. . . . Mr. Kashin, hoping that his journal might become in some sense a history of and a memento of gradual changes and successes for Russian song, earnestly beseeches the gentle person who loves music to honor us with his information about native tunes and texts for this journal.²⁰

Kashin published twelve issues of the journal between 1806 and 1809, making available the first printed examples of Russian epic songs, the byliny, along with numerous other arrangements and many folk-song variation sets. These quickly won the public’s favor, in part because of frequent concert performances (many by Kashin himself), which stimulated wide interest and prompted amateur performances. Kashin’s major contribution to the body of folk music accessible to the urban population appeared with publication of the two-volume Russian Folk Songs (Russkie narodnye pesni) (Moscow, 1833-34; 2d ed., 3 vols., Moscow, 1841). His arrangements, like those of Gurilyov, are tinctured by the contemporary romance, although he declared of his approach: “... [I] aimed, in particular, to preserve the melody of our splendid songs, to add nothing to foreign. . . .”²¹

Rupin, born a serf like Kashin, attracted attention as a child for his exceptionally beautiful voice. Sent to Moscow as a young man to study with the Italian Pietro Muschietti (dates unknown), he quickly earned a reputation as a master of bel canto, but his lack of the requisite physical attributes prevented him from making a career as an opera singer. After gaining his freedom, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied composition and expanded his activity as a concert singer, using the pseudonym “Rupini.” His performing repertoire included his own “Russian songs” and “Russian romances” (some fifty survive), as well as Russian folk songs in concert arrangements by himself, which featured elaborate vocal colorature in the conventional bel canto manner. He restrained this “concert” exuberance, however, in his published folk-song transcriptions, reproducing the traditional formulaic melodic figures with greater precision and more careful text underlay than did such earlier collectors as Trutovsky or Lvov-Práč.²² His first volume of folk songs—A Collection of Twelve Russian National Songs (Sobranie dvenadtsati natsional’nykh russkikh pesen), “arranged for fortepiano with voice and chorus, published by the teacher of singing I. A. Rupini” (St. Petersburg, Part 1, 1831; Part 2, 1833)—presented each song in two arrangements, one for soloist with a guitarlike piano accompaniment and another for three-part chorus (reminiscent of the Russian lyric kant style). The success of this collection led to another equally successful one, Seven Russian Folk Songs (Sem’ narodnykh russkikh pesen) for voice with piano accompaniment, which also included variations for piano alone (St. Petersburg, 1836). Although he continued to contribute individual folk-song arrangements to anthologies and music journals, he published no further collections of his own.

Neither Kashin nor Rupin carved out their niches in nineteenth-century Russian music by means of incisive creativity. Their importance derives rather from their roles as central participants in and contributors to the burgeoning folk-song movement that spread through Russian urban culture between 1810 and 1840 and nurtured a national consciousness whose consequences became increasingly manifest in the expanding repertoire of Russian art music both before and after midcentury.

Because folk song has been made the touchstone for testing emergent national consciousness within the mainstream of Russian music during the first half of the nineteenth century, perspective on the full range of original musical activity by Russian composers in that period has inevitably been restricted. Still, proximity to this primary source of “nationality” served as the crucial gauge (though, admittedly, not the sole one) by which the self-proclaimed generation of nationalist composers and critics would continue to measure the Russianness of a work. The central importance of this gauge can be validated by sampling critical reaction to Mikhail Glinka’s path-breaking A Life for the Tsar (1836).

Nikolai Melgunov (1804-67), member of the Society of the “Lovers of Wisdom” (Obshchestvo liubomudriia) and an influential music critic, writer, and composer, wrote of Glinka’s achievement: “He understood the meaning of the words ‘Russian music’ [and] ‘Russian opera’ differently from his predecessors. He did not limit himself to more or less imitating the folk melos, . . . he opened up an entire system of Russian melody and harmony drawn from folk music itself and not comparable to any one of the previous schools.”²³ The radical social critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48) observed that in A Life for the Tsar one can see “the striving to utilize in cultured (uchënaia) music elements of folk music,” and ratified the results by declaring, “that is fine and good, a promise and a guarantee for a bright future.”²⁴ Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, staunch believer in the redemptive role of Russia in world civilization, announced jubilantly:

. . . the question about the importance for art in general and for Russian art in particular of a Russian opera, a Russian music, indeed, of a national [narodnaia] music in general, has been answered in this opera. . . . The composer has plumbed deeply the character of Russian melody. Richly gifted, he has proven by brilliant example that Russian melody—already, of course, plaintive, joyous, bold—can be elevated to tragedy. . . .

In Glinka’s opera has appeared that which was so long sought but never found in Europe—a new principle in art, which inaugurates in art history a new era: the era of Russian music.²⁵

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), master of Russian literature and mystic seeker of the way to Russia’s “special destiny,” foresaw the fate of Russian music prophesied in Glinka’s work: “What an opera could be composed from our national melodies! Show me a people who have more song. . . . Glinka’s opera is only a glorious beginning.”²⁶ Pushkin, inspired voice of a generation, proclaimed his homage in a graceful pun that played on the Russian meaning of glinka—a diminutive of the word for clay, glina:

From the perspective of nearly 150 years, 1836 appears as a kind of watershed in Russian cultural history, marking the point when currents that would course together only during the second half of the century started to separate from the cultural mainstream of the earlier era. A Life for the Tsar, like Halley’s Comet the year before, was widely acclaimed as a harbinger of profound change. The next year, Pushkin’s luminous genius was senselessly extinguished, but only after he had given Russia her first important novel. The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia doch’) (1836). Gogol’s mordant comedy The Inspector General (Revizor) (1836) culminated the early phase of a career that would reach its apex only six years later in the masterful Dead Souls (Mërtvye dushi). Preaching profound change in the sacred cause of Russia’s “special destiny,” Pyotr Chaadaev’s (1794-1856) first lettre philosophique (1836) demanded radical rejection of both Russia’s past and present, thus launching the opening salvo in the often bitter debates between the Slavophiles and the “Westerners.” Karl Briullov (1799-1852) exhibited his monumental The Last Day of Pompeii (Poslednii den’ Pompei) (1833), prompting speculation that his painting prophesied the decline of the West and implied the coming preeminence of Russia.

In music, Glinka occupied the crucial position. On the one hand, he represented the final flowering of that movement toward national consciousness whose roots extended back into the eighteenth century; on the other, he represented the first fruit of the declared nationalist school of composers whose full harvest would yield only during the latter part of the nineteenth century. He shared that aspiration to a “special destiny” that constituted the undercurrent of Russian thought as his century passed its midpoint—an aspiration that would culminate toward the end of the century in a remarkable generation of composers, whose creative authority and originality would demand recognition by the West and would validate decisively Russia’s claim for equality, if not preeminence, in the community of Western music.

APPENDIX

Readers of English who do not know Russian often mistakenly believe that the Russian patronymic is a middle name, i.e., a second given name, such as one frequently encounters in the English-American cultural tradition. Moreover, the conventions of written English advocate that persons mentioned in context be identified by their given name or names, rather than by initials alone, as commonly happens in Russian writing. Patronymics, therefore, have been omitted from references to Russian names in the text of this essay. Still and all, a patronymic may be crucial to establishing the identity of someone in Russian history. For the convenience of the historian of Russian culture, the list following provides full name and patronymic for the native Russians mentioned in the essay.

NOTES

1. Among this fundamental research, a few books were indispensable, constantly at hand during the preparation of the present essay. I acknowledge them first:

A number of other books not cited in later footnotes also deserve mention for their important contribution to an understanding of the period under discussion:

2. Quoted in Abram Akimovich Gozenpud, Muzykal’nyi teatr v Rossii ot istokov do Glinki (Musical theater in Russia from its origins until Glinka) (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959), p. 83.

3. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the generosity of my distinguished colleague, musicologist and lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, who read through the entire typescript of my essay and made a number of helpful suggestions for improving it. He proposed “rustic” as the most appropriate translation of the Russian adjective prostoi in the title of Trutovsky’s collection.

4. I am indebted to my friend Simon Karlinsky—scholar, literary historian, and musician—for suggesting “leisurely” as an apt translation for the Russian protiazhnaia, which literally means “protracted” or “drawn-out.” Professor Karlinsky’s suggestion conveys the mood and pacing of such songs very well indeed. But my esteemed colleague Richard Taruskin has suggested what I believe to be an equally appropriate translation, “melismatic,” which has the advantage of conveying yet another important style feature of these protiazhnaia songs, their highly embellished vocal lines. Unable to choose between these two translations and incapable of coming up with a better one myself, I use them both.

5. Quoted in IRM, pp. 312-13.

6. Quoted in Aleksandr Semenovich Rabinovich, Russkaia opera do Glinki (Russian opera before Glinka) (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1948), p. 166.

7. Vol’man II, p. 12.

8. Maximovich’s collection of Ukrainian folk-song texts appeared in 1834, accompanied by a separate volume [tetrad’ 1] that contained Aliab’ev’s arrangements of tunes noted down by Maximovich. See Boris Solomonovich Shteinpress, “Pervyi muzykal’nyi sbornik ukrainskikh narodnykh pesen (istoriko-kriticheskii ocherk)” (“The first music collection of Ukrainian folk songs [a historical-critical essay]’’), in Golosa ukrainskikh pesen, izdannye Mikhailom Maksimovichem. Aranzhirovka Aleksandra Aliah’eva (Voice-parts of Ukrainian songs, published by Mikhail Maximovich. Arranged by Alexander Aliab’ev), ed. B. S. Shteinpress (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1961).

9. Vol’man II, p. 194.

10. Varlamov himself probably arranged the publication. It was so successful that a second printing came out the next year, 1834. See Voi’man II, pp. 192-93.

11. Quoted in IRM, p. 354, but erroneously attributed to A. N. Titov, who died in 1827. Undoubtedly the initials were simply transposed, and Nikolai Alexeevich Titov is correct.

12. IRM, p. 363.

13. Ibid., p. 356.

14. Quoted by N. Listova in her introduction to A. Varlamov, Romansy i Pesni, polnoe sobranie (Romances and Songs, complete edition), vol. 4 (Moscow: Muzyka, 1976).

15. Through Golitsyn’s initiative the world premiere of the Missa solemnis took place in St. Petersburg in 1824. Golitsyn commissioned Beethoven to write the overture “Consecration of the House,” op. 124, and the three string quartets, opp. 127, 130, and 132, all of which were dedicated to him.

16. ME, Vol. 2, p. no.

17. This folk-song text was originally published in the second edition of the Lvov-Práč collection, but comes here from V. M. Beliaev’s modern edition of the Lvov-Práč volume (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955), p. 204. The translation is mine.

18. Vladimir Il’ich Bunimovich (pseud. Muzalevskii) identifies this and the following variation set as undoubtedly by Alexander Lvovich Gurilyov, even though the title page of the printed copy of both reads “N. Gurilyov.” See V. I. Muzalevskii, Russkaia fortepiannaia muzyka (Russian piano music) (Leningrad & Moscow: Muzgiz, 1949), n. 1, p. 220.

19. See n. 16 above.

20. Quoted in Vol’man II, pp. 40-41.

21. Ibid., p. 43.

22. ME, Vol. 4, p. 754.

23. Quoted in IRM, pp. 395-96.

24. Quoted in Aleksandra Anatol’evna Orlova, Glinka v Peterburge (Glinka in Petersburg) (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1970), pp. 103-104.

25. V. F. Odoevskii, Muzykal’no-literaturnoe nasledie (Musical literary heritage), ed. G. B. Bernandt (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956), p. 119.

26. N. V. Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Collected works in seven volumes), vol. 6, ed. S. I. Mashinskii et al. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), p. 195.

27. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete works), vol. 3, part 1: Stikhotvoreniia 1826-1836; Skazki (Poems 1826-1836; Stories), ed. M. A. Tsiavlovskii et al. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1948), p. 490. The translation is mine.