The Merchant Kalashnikov, although somewhat of a hybrid as regards style, with its Russian airs handled à la Tedesca, and its occasional lapses into vulgarity, has at the same time more vitality and human interest than most of Rubinstein’s operas, so that it is to be regretted that it has remained so long unknown alike to the public of Russia and of Western Europe.

Rubinstein’s Biblical operas have now practically fallen into oblivion. Seeing their length, the cost involved in mounting them, and their lack of strong, clear-cut characterisation, this is not surprising. The Acts of Artaxerxes and the Chaste Joseph, presented to the Court of Alexis Mikhaïlovich, could hardly have been more wearisome than The Tower of Babel and The Shulamite. These stage oratorios are like a series of vast, pale, pseudo-classical frescoes, and scarcely more moving than the official odes and eclogues of eighteenth-century Russian literature. Each work, it is true, contains some saving moments, such as the Song of Victory, with chorus, “Beat the drums,” sung by Leah, the heroic mother of the Maccabees, in the opera bearing that title, in which the Hebrew colouring is admirably carried out; the chorus “Baal has worked wonders,” from The Tower of Babel; and a few pages from the closing scene of Paradise Lost; but these rare flashes of inspiration do not suffice to atone for the long, flaccid Handelian recitatives, the tame Mendelssohnian orchestration, the frequent lapses into a pomposity which only the most naïve can mistake for sublimity of utterance, and the fluent dulness of the operas as a whole.

Far more agreeable, because less pretentious, is the early secular opera, a German adaptation of Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” entitled Feramors. The ballets from this opera, the Dance of Bayadères, with chorus, in Act I., and The Lamplight Dance of the Bride of Kashmere (Act II.) are still heard in the concert room; and more rarely, Feramor’s aria, “Das Mondlicht träumt auf Persiens See.” From the dramatic side the subject is weak, but, as Hanslick observes in his “Contemporary Opera”—in which he draws the inevitable parallel between Félicien David and the Russian composer—it was the oriental element in the poem that proved the attraction to Rubinstein. Yet how different is the conventional treatment of Eastern melody in Feramors from Borodin’s natural and characteristic use of it in Prince Igor! But although it is impossible to ignore Rubinstein’s operas written to foreign texts for a foreign public, they have no legitimate place in the evolution of Russian national opera. It is with a sense of relief that we turn from him with his reactionary views and bigoted adherence to pre-Wagnerian conventions, to that group of enthusiastic and inspired workers who were less concerned with riveting the fetters of old traditions upon Russian music than with the glorious task of endowing their country with a series of national operas alive and throbbing with the very spirit of the people. We leave Rubinstein gazing westwards upon the setting sun of German classicism, and turn our eyes eastwards where the dawn is rising upon the patient expectations of a nation which has long been feeling its way towards a full and conscious self-realisation in music.

CHAPTER VIII
BALAKIREV AND HIS DISCIPLES

SOMETIMES in art, as in literature, there comes upon the scene an exceptional, initiative personality, whose influence seems out of all proportion to the success of his work. Such was Keats, who engendered a whole school of English romanticism; and such, too, was Liszt, whose compositions, long neglected, afterwards came to be recognised as containing the germs of a new symphonic form. Such also was Mily Alexevich Balakirev, to whom Russian national music owes its second renaissance. Born at Nijny-Novgorod, December 31st, 1836 (O.S.), Balakirev was about eighteen when he came to St. Petersburg in 1855, with an introduction to Glinka in his pocket. He had previously spent a short time at the University of Kazan, but had actually been brought up in the household of Oulibishev, author of the famous treatise on Mozart. It is remarkable, and testifies to his sturdy independence of character—that the young man had not been influenced by his benefactor’s limited and ultra-conservative views. Oulibishev, as we know, thought there could be no advance upon the achievements of his adored Mozart. Balakirev as a youth studied and loved Beethoven’s symphonies and quartets, Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Mendelssohn’s Overtures and Chopin’s works as a whole. He was by no means the incapable amateur that his academic detractors afterwards strove to prove him. His musical culture was solid. He had profited by Oulibishev’s excellent library, and by the private orchestra which he maintained and permitted his young protégé to conduct. Although partially self-taught, Balakirev had already mastered the general principles of musical form, composition and orchestration. He was not versed in counterpoint and fugue; and certainly his art was not rooted in Bach; but that could hardly be made a matter of reproach, seeing that in Balakirev’s youth the great poet-musician of Leipzig was neglected even in his own land, and it is doubtful whether the budding schools of Petersburg and Moscow, or even the long established conservatoires of Germany, would then have added much to his education in that respect. In his provincial home in the far east of Europe Balakirev stood aloof from the Wagnerian controversies. But his mind, sensitive as a seismograph, had already registered some vibrations of this distant movement which announced a musical revolution. From the beginning he was preoccupied with the question of transfusing fresh blood into the impoverished veins of old and decadent forms. Happily the idea of solving the problem by the aid of the Wagnerian theories never occurred to him. He had already grasped the fact that for the Russians there existed an inexhaustible source of fresh inspiration in their abundant and varied folk-music.

The great enthusiasm of his youth had been Glinka’s music, and while living at Nijny-Novgorod he had studied his operas to good purpose. Filled with zeal for the new cause, Balakirev appeared in the capital like a St. John the Baptist from the wilderness to preach the new gospel of nationality in art to the adorers of Bellini and Meyerbeer. Glinka was on the point of leaving Russia for what proved to be his last earthly voyage. But during the weeks which preceded his departure he saw enough of Balakirev to be impressed by his enthusiasm and intelligence, and to point to him as the continuator of his work.

The environment of the capital proved beneficial to the young provincial. For the first time he was able to mix with other musicians and to hear much that was new to him, both at the opera and in the concert room. But his convictions remained unshaken amid all these novel experiences. From first to last he owed most to himself, and if he soon became head and centre of a new musical school, it was because, as Stassov has pointed out, “he had every gift for such a position: astonishing initiative, love and knowledge of his art, and to crown all, untiring energy.”

Balakirev left no legacy of opera, but his influence on Russian music as a whole was so predominant that it crops up in every direction, and henceforth his name must constantly appear in these pages. Indeed the history of Russian opera now becomes for a time the history of a small brotherhood of enthusiasts, united by a common idea and fighting shoulder to shoulder for a cause which ought to have been popular, but which was long opposed by the press and the academic powers in the artistic world of Russia, and treated with contempt by the “genteel” amateur to whom a subscription to Italian opera stood as the external sign of social and intellectual superiority. It was known as “Balakirev’s set,” or by the ironical sobriquet of “the mighty band.”

At the close of the ’fifties César Cui and Modeste Moussorgsky had joined Balakirev’s crusade on behalf of the national ideal. A year or two later Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov were admitted to the circle; and subsequently a gifted young amateur, Nicholas Lodyjensky, attached himself for a time to the nationalists. To these names must be added that of the writer, Vladimir Stassov, whose active brain and pen were always at the service of the new school. Although Glinka had no further personal intercourse with Balakirev and his friends, Dargomijsky, as we have already seen, gladly opened his house as a meeting place for this group of young enthusiasts, who eagerly discussed questions of art with the older and more experienced musician, and watched with keen interest the growth of his last opera, The Stone Guest.

Rimsky-Korsakov, in his “Chronicle of my Musical Life,” gives some interesting glimpses of the pleasant relations existing between the members of the nationalist circle during the early years of its existence. Rimsky-Korsakov, who was studying at the Naval School, St. Petersburg, made the acquaintance of Balakirev in 1861. “My first meeting with Balakirev made an immense impression upon me,” he writes. “He was an admirable pianist, playing everything from memory. The audacity of his opinions and their novelty, above all, his gifts as a composer, stirred me to a kind of veneration. The first time I saw him I showed him my Scherzo in C minor, which he approved, after passing a few remarks upon it, and some materials for a symphony. He ordained that I should go on with the symphony.[30] Of course I was delighted. At his house I met Cui and Moussorgsky. Balakirev was then orchestrating the overture to Cui’s early opera The Prisoner in the Caucasus. With what enthusiasm I took a share in these actual discussions about instrumentation, the distribution of parts, etc! Through November and December I went to Balakirev’s every Saturday evening and frequently found Cui and Moussorgsky there. I also made the acquaintance of Stassov. I remember an evening on which Stassov read aloud extracts from “The Odyssey,” more especially for my enlightenment. On another occasion Moussorgsky read “Prince Kholmsky,” the painter Myassedov read Gogol’s “Viya,” and Balakirev and Moussorgsky played Schumann’s symphonies arranged for four hands, and Beethoven’s quartets.”