A young Prince falls in love with Natasha, the Miller’s daughter. He pays her such devoted attention that the father hopes in time to see his child become a princess. Natasha returns the Prince’s passion, and gives him not only her love but her honour. Circumstances afterwards compel the Prince to marry in his own rank. Deserted in the hour of her need, Natasha in despair drowns herself in the mill-stream. Now, in accordance with Slavonic legends, she becomes a Roussalka, seeking always to lure mortals to her watery abode. Misfortune drives the old Miller crazy and the mill falls into ruins. Between the second act, in which the Prince’s nuptials are celebrated, and the third, a few years are supposed to elapse. Meanwhile the Prince is not happy in his married life, and is moreover perpetually haunted by the remembrance of his first love and by remorse for her tragic fate. He spends hours near the ruined mill dreaming of the past. One day a little Roussalka child appears to him and tells him that she is his daughter, and that she dwells with her mother among the water-sprites. All his old passion is reawakened. He stands on the brink of the water in doubt as to whether to respond to the calls of Natasha and the child, or whether to flee from their malign influence. Even while he hesitates, the crazy Miller appears upon the scene and fulfils dramatic justice by flinging the betrayer of his daughter into the stream. Here we have the elements of an exceedingly dramatic libretto which offers fine opportunities to a psychological musician of Dargomijsky’s type. The scene in which the Prince, with caressing grace and tenderness, tries to prepare Natasha for the news of his coming marriage; her desolation when she hears that they must part; her bitter disenchantment on learning the truth, and her cry of anguish as she tries to make him realise the full tragedy of her situation—all these emotions, coming in swift succession, are followed by the music with astonishing force and flexibility. Very effective, too, is the scene of the wedding festivities in which the wailing note of the Roussalka is heard every time the false lover attempts to kiss his bride—the suggestion of an invisible presence which throws all the guests into consternation. As an example of Dargomijsky’s humour, nothing is better than the recitative of the professional marriage-maker, “Why so silent pretty lassies,” and the answering chorus of the young girls (in Act II.). As might be expected with a realistic temperament like Dargomijsky’s, the music of the Roussalki is the least successful part of the work. The sub-aquatic ballet in the last act is rather commonplace; while Natasha’s music, though expressive, has been criticised as being too human and warm-blooded for a soulless water-sprite. Undoubtedly the masterpiece of the opera is the musical presentment of the Miller. At first a certain sardonic humour plays about this crafty, calculating old peasant, but afterwards, when disappointed greed and his daughter’s disgrace have turned his brain, how subtly the music is made to suggest the cunning of mania in that strange scene in which he babbles of his hidden treasures, “stored safe enough where the fish guard them with one eye!” With extraordinary power Dargomijsky reproduces his hideous meaningless laugh as he pushes the Prince into the swirling mill-stream. The character of the Miller alone would suffice to prove that the composer possesses dramatic gifts of the highest order.
The Roussalka, first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in May 1856, met with very little success. The Director of the opera, Glinka’s old enemy Gedeonov, having made up his mind that so “unpleasing” a work could have no future, mounted it in the shabbiest style. Moreover, as was usually the case with national opera then—and even at a later date—the interpretation was entrusted to second-rate artists. Dargomijsky, in a letter to his pupil Madame Karmalina, comments bitterly upon this; unhappily he could not foresee the time, not so far distant, when the great singer Ossip Petrov would electrify the audience with his wonderful impersonation of the Miller; nor dream that fifty years later Shaliapin would make one of his most legitimate triumphs in this part. The critics met Dargomijsky’s innovations without in the least comprehending their drift. Serovit was before the days of his opposition to the national cause—alone appreciated the novelty and originality shown in the opera; he placed it above A Life for the Tsar; but even his forcible pen could not rouse the public from their indifference to every new manifestation of art. Dargomijsky himself perfectly understood the reason of its unpopularity. In one of his letters written at this time, he says: “Neither our amateurs nor our critics recognise my talents. Their old-fashioned notions cause them to seek for melody which is merely flattering to the ear. That is not my first thought. I have no intention of indulging them with music as a plaything. I want the note to be the direct equivalent of the word. I want truth and realism. This they cannot understand.”
Ten years after the first performance of The Roussalka, the public began to reconsider its verdict. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 changed the views of society towards the humble classes, and directed attention towards all that concerned the past history of the peasantry. A new spirit animated the national ideal. From Poushkin’s poetry, with its somewhat “Olympian” attitude to life, the reading public turned to the people’s poets, Nekrassov and Nikitin; while the realism of Gogol was now beginning to be understood. To these circumstances we may attribute the reaction in favour of The Roussalka, which came as a tardy compensation towards the close of the composer’s life.
During the ten years which followed the completion of The Roussalka, Dargomijsky was steadily working towards the formulation of new principles in vocal, and especially in dramatic music. We may watch his progress in the series of songs and ballads which he produced at this time. It is, however, in The Stone Guest that Dargomijsky carries his theories of operatic reform to a logical conclusion. One of his chief aims, in which he succeeded in interesting the little band of disciples whose work we shall presently review, was the elimination of the artificial and conventional in the accepted forms of Italian opera. Wagner had already experienced the same dissatisfaction, and was solving the question of reform in the light of his own great genius. But the Russian composers could not entirely adopt the Wagnerian theories. Dargomijsky, while rejecting the old arbitrary divisions of opera, split upon the question of the importance which Wagner gave to the orchestra. Later on we shall see how each member of the newly-formed school tried to work out the principles of reformation in his own way, keeping in view the dominant idea that the dramatic interest should be chiefly sustained by the singer, while the orchestra should be regarded as a means of enhancing the interest of the vocal music. Dargomijsky himself was the first to embody these principles in what must be regarded as one of the masterpieces of Russian music—his opera The Stone Guest. Early in the ’sixties he had been attracted to Poushkin’s fine poem, which has for subject the story of Don Juan, treated, not as we find it in Mozart’s opera, by a mere librettist, but with the dramatic force and intensity of a great poet. Dargomijsky was repelled by the idea of mutilating a fine poem; yet found himself overwhelmed by the difficulties of setting the words precisely as they stood. Later on, however, the illness from which he was suffering seems to have produced in him a condition of rare musical clairvoyance. “I am singing my swan song,” he wrote to Madame Karmelina in 1868; “I am writing The Stone Guest. It is a strange thing: my nervous condition seems to generate one idea after another. I have scarcely any physical strength.... It is not I who write, but some unknown power of which I am the instrument. The thought of The Stone Guest occupied my attention five years ago when I was in robust health, but then I shrank from the magnitude of the task. Now, ill as I am, I have written three-fourths of the opera in two and a half months.... Needless to say the work will not appeal to the many.”
“Thank God,” comments Stassov, in his energetic language, “that in 1863 Dargomijsky recoiled before so colossal an undertaking, since he was not yet prepared for it. His musical nature was still growing and widening, and he was gradually freeing himself from all stiffness and asperity, from false notions of form, and from the Italian and French influences which sometimes predominate in the works of his early and middle periods. In each new composition Dargomijsky takes a step forward, but in 1866 his preparations were complete. A great musician was ready to undertake a great work. Here was a man who had cast off all musical wrong thinking, whose mind was as developed as his talent, and who found such inward force and greatness of character as inspired him to write this work while he lay in bed, subject to the terrible assaults of a mortal malady.”
The Stone Guest, then, is the ultimate expression of that realistic language which Dargomijsky employs in his early cantata The Triumph of Bacchus, in The Roussalka, and in his best songs. It is applied not to an ordinary ready-made libretto, but to a poem of such excellence that the composer felt it a sacrilege to treat it otherwise than as on an equal footing with the music. This effort to follow with absolute fidelity every word of the book, and to make the note the representative of the word, led to the adoption of a new operatic form, and to the complete abandonment of the traditional soli, duets, choruses, and concerted pieces. In The Stone Guest the singers employ that melos, or mezzo-recitativo, which is neither melody nor speech, but the connecting link between the two. Some will argue, with Serov, that there is nothing original in these ideas; they had already been carried out by Wagner; and that The Stone Guest does not prove that Dargomijsky was an innovator but merely that he had the intelligence to become the earliest of Wagner’s disciples. Nothing could be further from the truth. By 1866 Dargomijsky had some theoretical knowledge of Wagner’s views, but he can have heard little, if any, of his music. Whether he was at all influenced by the former, it is difficult to determine; but undoubtedly his efforts to attain to a more natural and realistic method of expression date from a time when Wagner and Wagnerism were practically a sealed book to him. One thing is certain: from cover to cover of The Stone Guest it would be difficult to find any phrase which is strongly reminiscent of Wagner’s musical style. What he himself thought of Wagner’s music we may gather from a letter written to Serov in 1856, in which he says: “I have not returned your score of “Tannhäuser,” because I have not yet had time to go through the whole work. You are right; in the scenic disposition there is much poetry; in the music, too, he shows us a new and practical path; but in his unnatural melodies and spiciness, although at times his harmonies are very interesting, there is a sense of effort—will und kann nicht! Truth—above all truth—but we may demand good taste as well.”
Dargomijsky was no conscious or deliberate imitator of Wagner. The passion for realistic expression which possessed him from the first led him by a parallel but independent path to a goal somewhat similar to that which was reached by Wagner. But Dargomijsky adhered more closely to the way indicated a century earlier by that great musical reformer Gluck. In doing this justice to the Russian composer, a sense of proportion forbids me to draw further analogies between the two men. Dargomijsky was a strong and original genius, who would have found his way to a reformed music drama, even if Wagner had not existed. Had he been sustained by a Ludwig of Bavaria, instead of being opposed by a Gedeonov, he might have left his country a larger legacy from his abundant inspiration; but fate and his surroundings willed that his achievements should be comparatively small. Whereas Wagner, moving on from strength to strength, from triumph to triumph, raised up incontestable witnesses to the greatness of his genius.
In The Stone Guest Dargomijsky has been successful in welding words and music into an organic whole; while the music allotted to each individual in the opera seems to fit like a skin. “Poetry, love, passion, arresting tragedy, humour, subtle psychological sense and imaginative treatment of the supernatural,[15] all these qualities,” says Stassov, “are combined in this opera.” The chief drawback of the work is probably its lack of scenic interest, a fault which inevitably results from the unity of its construction. The music, thoughtful, penetrative, and emotional, is of the kind which loses little by the absence of scenic setting. The Stone Guest is essentially an opera which may be studied at the piano. It unites as within a focus many of the dominant ideas and tendencies of the school that proceeded from Glinka and Dargomijsky, and proves that neither nationality of subject nor of melody constitutes nationality of style, and that a tale which bears the stamp and colour of the South may become completely Russian, poetically and musically, when moulded by Russian hands. The Stone Guest has never attained to any considerable measure of popularity in Russia. In spite of Dargomijsky’s personal intimacy with his little circle of disciples, in which respect his attitude to his fellow workers was quite different to that of Glinka, the example which he set in The Stone Guest eventually found fewer imitators than Glinka’s ideal model A Life for the Tsar. At the same time in certain particulars, and especially as regards melodic recitative, this work had a decided influence upon a later school of Russian opera. But this is a matter to be discussed in a later chapter.
