GLINKA, in his memoirs, relates how in the autumn of 1834 he met at a musical party in St. Petersburg, “a little man with a shrill treble voice, who, nevertheless, proved a redoubtable virtuoso when he sat down to the piano.” The little man was Alexander Sergeivich Dargomijsky, then about twenty-one years of age, and already much sought after in society as a brilliant pianist and as the composer of agreeable drawing-room songs. Dargomijsky’s diary contains a corresponding entry recording this important meeting of two men who were destined to become central points whence started two distinct currents of tendency influencing the whole future development of Russian music. “Similarity of education and a mutual love of music immediately drew us together,” wrote Dargomijsky, “and this in spite of the fact that Glinka was ten years my senior.” For the remainder of Glinka’s life Dargomijsky was his devoted friend and fellow-worker, but never his unquestioning disciple.
Dargomijsky was born, February 2/14, 1813, at a country estate in the government of Toula, whither his parents had fled from their own home near Smolensk before the French invaders in 1812. It is said that Dargomijsky, the future master of declamation, only began to articulate at five years of age. In 1817 his parents migrated to St. Petersburg. They appear to have taken great interest in the musical education of their son; at six he received his first instruction on the piano, and two years later took up the violin; while at eleven he had already tried his hand at composition. His education being completed, he entered the Government service, from which, however, he retired altogether in 1843. Thanks to his parents’ sympathy with his musical talent, Dargomijsky’s training had been above the average and a long course of singing lessons with an excellent master, Tseibikha, no doubt formed the basis of his subsequent success as a composer of vocal music. But at the time of his first meeting with Glinka, both on account of his ignorance of theory and of the narrowness of his general outlook upon music, he can only be regarded as an amateur. One distinguishing feature of his talent seems to have been in evidence even then, for Glinka, after hearing his first song, written to humorous words, declared that if Dargomijsky would turn his attention to comic opera he would certainly surpass all his predecessors in that line. Contact with Glinka’s personality effected the same beneficial change in Dargomijsky that Rubinstein’s influence brought about in Tchaikovsky some thirty years later; it changed him from a mere dilettante into a serious musician. “Glinka’s example,” he wrote in his autobiography, “who was at that time (1834) taking Prince Usipov’s band through the first rehearsals of his opera A Life for the Tsar, assisted by myself and Capellmeister Johannes, led to my decision to study the theory of music. Glinka handed over to me the five exercise books in which he had worked out Dehn’s theoretical system and I copied them in my own hand, and soon assimilated the so-called mysterious wisdom of harmony and counterpoint, because I had been from childhood practically prepared for this initiation and had occupied myself with the study of orchestration.” These were the only books of theory ever studied by Dargomijsky, but they served to make him realise the possession of gifts hitherto unsuspected. After this course of self-instruction he felt strong enough to try his hand as an operatic composer, and selected a libretto founded on Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris.” Completed and translated into Russian in 1839, the work, entitled Esmeralda, was not accepted by the Direction of the Imperial Opera until 1847, when it was mounted for the first time at Moscow. By this time Dargomijsky had completely outgrown this immature essay. The light and graceful music pleased the Russian public, but the success of this half-forgotten child of his youth gave little satisfaction to the composer himself. He judged the work in the following words: “The music is slight and often trivial—in the style of Halévy and Meyerbeer; but in the more dramatic scenes there are already some traces of that language of force and realism which I have since striven to develop in my Russian music.”
In 1843 Dargomijsky went abroad, and while in Paris made the acquaintance of Auber, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Fétis. The success of Esmeralda encouraged him to offer to the Directors of the Imperial Theatre an opera-ballet entitled The Triumph of Bacchus, which he had originally planned as a cantata; but the work was rejected, and only saw the light some twenty years later, when it was mounted in Moscow. Dargomijsky’s correspondence during his sojourn abroad is extremely interesting, and shows that his views on music were greatly in advance of his time and quite free from the influences of fashion and convention.
In 1853 we gather from a letter addressed to a friend that he was attracted to national music. As a matter of fact the new opera, upon which he had already started in 1848, was based upon a genuine Russian folk-subject—Poushkin’s dramatic poem “The Roussalka” (The Water Sprite). Greatly discouraged by the refusal of the authorities to accept The Triumph of Bacchus, Dargomijsky laid aside The Roussalka until 1853. During this interval most of his finest songs and declamatory ballads were written, as well as those inimitably humorous songs which, perhaps, only a Russian can fully appreciate. But though he matured slowly, his intellectual and artistic development was serious and profound. Writing to Prince Odoevsky about this time, he says: “The more I study the elements of our national music, the more I discover its many-sidedness. Glinka, who so far has been the first to extend the sphere of our Russian music, has, I consider, only touched one phase of it—the lyrical. In The Roussalka I shall endeavour as much as possible to bring out the dramatic and humorous elements of our national music. I shall be glad if I achieve this, even though it may seem a half protest against Glinka.” Here we see Dargomijsky not as the disciple, but as the independent worker, although he undoubtedly kept Russlan and Liudmilla in view as the model for The Roussalka. The work was given for the first time at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1856, but proved too novel in form and treatment to please a public that was still infatuated with Italian opera.
In 1864-1865 Dargomijsky made a second tour in Western Europe, taking with him the scores of The Roussalka and of his three Orchestral Fantasias, “Kazachok” (The Cossack), a “Russian Legend,” and “The Dance of the Mummers” (Skomorokhi). In Leipzig he made the acquaintance of many prominent musicians, who contented themselves with pronouncing his music “sehr neu” and “ganz interessant,” but made no effort to bring it before the public. In Paris he was equally unable to obtain a hearing; but in Belgium—always hospitable to Russian musicians—he gave a concert of his own compositions with considerable success. On his way back to Russia he spent a few days in London and ever after spoke of our capital with enthusiastic admiration.
In 1860 Dargomijsky had been appointed director of the St. Petersburg section of the Imperial Russian Musical Society. This brought him in contact with some of the younger contemporary musicians, and after his return from abroad, in 1865, he became closely associated with Balakirev and his circle and took a leading part in the formation of the new national and progressive school of music. By this time he handled that musical language of “force and realism,” of which we find the first distinct traces in The Roussalka, with ease and convincing eloquence. For his fourth opera he now selected the subject of The Stone Guest (Don Juan); not the version by Da Ponte which had been immortalised by Mozart’s music, but the poem in which the great Russian poet Poushkin had treated this ubiquitous tale. This work occupied the last years of Dargomijsky’s life, and we shall speak of it in detail a little further on. Soon after the composer’s return from abroad his health began to fail and the new opera had constantly to be laid aside. From contemporary accounts it seems evident that he did not shut himself away from the world in order to keep alive the flickering flame of life that was left to him, but that on the contrary he liked to be surrounded by the younger generation, to whom he gave out freely of his own richly gifted nature. The composition of The Stone Guest was a task fulfilled in the presence of his disciples, reminding us of some of the great painters who worked upon their masterpieces before their pupils’ eyes. Dargomijsky died of heart disease in January 1869. On his deathbed he entrusted the unfinished manuscript of The Stone Guest to Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov, instructing the latter to carry out the orchestration of it. The composer fixed three thousand roubles (about £330) as the price of his work, but an obsolete law made it illegal for a native composer to receive more than £160 for an opera. At the suggestion of Vladimir Stassov, the sum was raised by private subscription, and The Stone Guest was performed in 1872. Of its reception by the public something will be said when we come to the analysis of the work.
We may dismiss Esmeralda as being practically of no account in the development of Russian opera; but the history of The Roussalka is important, for this work not only possesses intrinsic qualities that have kept it alive for over half a century, but its whole conception shows that Dargomijsky was already in advance of his time as regards clear-cut musical characterisation and freedom from conventional restraint. In this connection it is interesting to remember that The Roussalka preceded Bizet’s “Carmen” by some ten or twelve years.
As early as 1843 Dargomijsky had thought of The Roussalka as an excellent subject for opera. He avoided Glinka’s methods of entrusting his libretto to several hands. In preparing the book he kept as closely as possible to Poushkin’s poem, and himself carried out the modifications necessary for musical treatment. It is certain that he had begun the work by September 1848. It was completed in 1855.
As we have already seen, he was aware that Glinka was not fully in touch with the national character; there were sides of it which he had entirely ignored in both his operas, because he was temperamentally incapable of reflecting them. Glinka’s humour, as Dargomijsky has truthfully said, was not true to Russian life. His strongest tendency was towards a slightly melancholy lyricism, and when he wished to supply some comic relief he borrowed it from cosmopolitan models. The composer of The Roussalka, on the other hand, deliberately aimed at bringing out the dramatic, realistic, and humorous elements which he observed in his own race. The result was an opera containing a wonderful variety of interest.
Russian folk-lore teems with references to the Roussalki, or water nymphs, who haunt the streams and the still, dark, forest pools, lying in wait for the belated traveller, and of all their innumerable legends none is more racy of the soil than this dramatic poem by Poushkin in which the actual and supernatural worlds are sketched by a master hand. The story of the opera runs as follows: