Russian Choirs and Basses
Church music is another branch of the divine art that flourished in Russia before the advent of the great composers. Five centuries ago the court at Moscow already had its church choir, and some of the Czars, including Ivan the Terrible, took a special interest in the musical service. Peter the Great had a private choir which he even took along on his travels.
In 1840, the French composer, Adolphe Charles Adam, on a visit to St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) found that church music was superior to any other kind in Russia. The choir of the Imperial Chapel sang without a conductor and without instrumental support, yet “with a justness of intonation of which one can have no idea.”
A specialty of this choir, which gave it a “sense of peculiar strangeness,” was the presence of bass voices that produced a marvelous effect by doubling the ordinary basses at the interval of an octave below them. These voices, Adam continues, “if heard separately, would be intolerably heavy; when they are heard in the mass the effect is admirable.” He was moved to tears by this choir, “stirred by such emotion as I had never felt before … the most tremendous orchestra in the world could never give rise to this curious sensation, which was entirely different from any that I had supposed it possible for music to convey.”
RUSSIAN ORGAN GRINDER
Similarly impressed was another French composer, Berlioz, when he heard the Imperial Choir sing a motet for eight voices: “Out of the web of harmonies formed by the incredibly intricate interlacing of the parts rose sighs and vague murmurs, such as one sometimes hears in dreams. From time to time came sounds so intense that they resembled human cries, which tortured the mind with the weight of sudden oppression and almost made the heart stop beating. Then the whole thing quieted down, diminishing with divinely slow graduations to a mere breath, as though a choir of angels was leaving the earth and gradually losing itself in the uttermost heights of heaven.”