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.”
Italian and French Influences
Like all other European countries, Russia more than a century ago succumbed to the spell of Italian music. Young men were sent to Italy to study the art of song, while famous Italian singers and composers visited Russia and made the public familiar with their tuneful art. It was under the patronage of the Empress Anna that an Italian opera was for the first time performed in the Russian capital, in 1737. She was one of several rulers who deliberately fostered a love of art in the minds of their subjects. Under the Empress Elizabeth music became “a fashionable craze,” and “every great landowner started his private band or choir.” Russia became what it still is—the place where (except in America) traveling artists could reap their richest harvests.
PLAYER OF REED PIPE
The high salaries paid tempted some of the leading Italian composers, such as Cimarosa (Cheemahrosah), Sarti, and Paisiello (Paheeseello), to make their home for years in Russia, where they composed and produced their operas. Near the end of the eighteenth century French influences also asserted themselves, but the Italians continued to predominate, so that when the Russians themselves—in the reign of Catherine the Great (1761-1796)—took courage and began to compose operas, Italian tunefulness and methods were conspicuous features of them.