Le Flibustier, composed between 1888-1889, was dedicated to that distinguished amateur the Countess Mercy-Argenteau, whose influence counted for so much in Cui’s later musical development. This work, written to a French libretto from a play by Jean Richepin, was originally produced at the Opéra Comique, Paris, in 1894. It is described as a “Comédie lyrique en trois actes.” It is frankly French in style and contains some graceful and effective music, but lacks the natural emotion and ardour which in Ratcliff and Angelo atone for some limitations of expression and for the lack of unity of style.

An opera in one act, Mam’selle Fifi, based upon Guy de Maupassant’s well-known tale of the Franco-Prussian war, was produced by the Private Opera Company at the Hermitage Theatre in the autumn of 1903. The work was well received by the public. The scene is laid in a chateau near Rouen which is occupied by a detachment of Prussians and their commanding officers. Bored by their life of inaction, the officers induce some young women from Rouen to come and amuse them. They entertain them at dinner, and sub-lieutenant von Eirich (nicknamed Mam’selle Fifi) pays attention to the patriotic Rachel; but while at table he irritates her to such a degree by his insulting remarks and vulgar jokes that she seizes a knife and stabs him mortally in the throat. Afterwards she makes her escape. Kashkin says: “The music of this opera flows on smoothly in concise declamatory scenes, only interrupted from time to time by the chorus of officers, and the light-hearted songs of Amanda. Rachel’s aria introduces a more tragic note. The music is so closely welded to the libretto that it appears to be an essential part of it, clothing with vitality and realism scenes which would otherwise be merely the dry bones of opera.”

While I was in Russia in the spring of 1901, Cui played to me a “dramatic scene,” or one-act opera, entitled A Feast in Time of Plague. It proved to be a setting of a curious poem by Poushkin which he pretended to have translated from Wilson’s “City of the Plague.” Walsingham, a young English nobleman, dares to indulge in “impious orgies” during the visitation of the Great Plague. The songs of the revellers are interrupted at intervals by a funeral march, as the dead-cart goes its round to collect its victims. Cui has set Poushkin’s poem word for word, consequently this little work is more closely modelled upon Dargomijsky’s The Stone Guest than any other of his operas. When I heard the work, I was under the impression that it was intended only as a dramatic cantata, but it was afterwards produced as an opera at the New Theatre, Moscow, in the autumn of 1901. The song sung by Walsingham’s mistress, Mary (“Time was”), which is Scotch in character, has considerable pathetic charm, and struck me as the most spontaneous number in the work, which, on the whole, seems an effort to fit music not essentially tragic in character to a subject of the gloomiest nature.

In summing up Cui’s position as a composer, I must return to my assertion that it is paradoxical. First, we may conclude from the preponderance of operatic music and songs that Cui is more gifted as a vocal than as an instrumental composer; that, in fact, he needs a text to bring out his powers of psychological analysis. But when we come to examine his music, the methods—and even the mannerisms—of such instrumental composers as Chopin and Schumann are reflected in all directions. A style obviously founded on Schumann will necessarily lack the qualities which we are accustomed to regard as essential to a great operatic style. Cui has not the luminous breadth and powerful flow of simple and effective melody which we find in the older type of opera; nor the pre-eminent skill in declamation which is indispensable to the newer forms of music-drama. His continuous use of arioso becomes monotonous and ineffective, because, with him, the clear edges of melody and recitative seem perpetually blurred. This arises partly from the fact that Cui’s melody, though delicate and refined, is not strongly individual. He is not a plagiarist in the worst sense of the word, but the influences which a stronger composer would have cast off at maturity seem to obtain a stronger hold on him as time goes on. His talent reminds me of those complex recipes for pot-pourri which we find in the day-books of our great-grandmothers. It is compounded of many more or less delightful ingredients: French predilections, Schumannesque mannerisms, some essence distilled from the grace and passion of Chopin, a dash of Russian sincerity—a number of fragrant and insidious aromas, in which the original element of individuality is smothered in the rose leaves and lavender winnowed from other people’s gardens. Then there is a second perplexing consideration which follows the study of Cui’s music. Possessed of this fragrant, but not robust, talent, Cui elects to apply it to themes of the ultra-romantic type with all their grisly accompaniments of moonlit heaths, blood-stained daggers, vows of vengeance, poison-cups, and the rest. It is as though a Herrick were posing as a John Webster. Surely in these curious discrepancies between the artist’s temperament and his choice of subject and methods of treatment we find the reason why of all Cui’s operas not one has taken a permanent hold on the public taste in Russia or abroad. And this in spite of their lyrical charm and graceful workmanship.

Cui is now the sole remaining member of “the invincible band” who originally gathered round Balakirev for the purpose of founding a national school of music. He is now in his eightieth year, but still composes and keeps up his interest in the Russian musical world. Within the last three years he has published a four-act opera on the subject of Poushkin’s tale, “The Captain’s Daughter.”[45]

CHAPTER XII
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV

A CONTEMPORARY critic has pointed to Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky as having, between them, built up Russian music to its present proud condition, “constructing their majestic edifice upon the everlasting foundation laid by Glinka.” Making some allowance for grandiloquence of language, this observation is particularly true as applied to Rimsky-Korsakov, for not only was he consistently true to the national ideal in all his works, but during his long activity as a teacher he trained a whole group of distinguished musicians—Liadov, Arensky, Ippolitov-Ivanov Grechyaninov, Tcherepnin, Stravinsky—who have all added their stones to the building up of this temple of Russian art. At the same time, we must regard Rimsky-Korsakov as the last of those national composers who chose to build with exclusively local materials and in purely Russian style. The younger generation are shaping their materials under more varied influences. Rimsky-Korsakov, therefore, stands out in the history of Russian opera as one of the most distinguished and distinctively racial composers of that circle to whom we owe the inauguration of the national school of music in Russia.

The subject of this chapter was born in the little village of Tikvin, in the government of Novgorod, on March 6th, 1844, and, until he was twelve years old, he continued to live on his father’s estate, among the lakes and forests of northern Russia, where music was interwoven with every action of rustic life. His gifts were precocious; between six and seven he began to play the pianoforte, and made some attempts at composition before he was nine. It was almost a matter of tradition that the men of the Korsakov family should enter the navy; consequently in 1856, Nicholas Andreivich was sent to the Naval College at St. Petersburg, where he remained for six years. Not without difficulty he managed to continue his pianoforte lessons on Sundays and holidays with the excellent teacher Kanillé. The actual starting point of his musical career, however, was his introduction to Balakirev and his circle. From this congenial companionship Rimsky-Korsakov was abruptly severed in 1863, when he was ordered to sea in the cruiser “Almaz.” The ship was absent on foreign service for three years, during which she practically made the round of the world. While on this voyage Rimsky-Korsakov wrote and revised a Symphony, Op. 1 in E Minor, and surely never was an orchestral work composed under stranger or less propitious conditions. Balakirev performed this work at one of the concerts of the Free School of Music in the winter of 1866. It was the first symphony ever composed by a Russian, and the music, though not strong, is agreeable; but like many other early opus numbers it bears evidence of strong external influences.

In the chapters dealing with Balakirev and his circle I have given a picture of the social and artistic conditions in St. Petersburg to which the young sailor returned in the autumn of 1865. In common with other members of this school, Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical development at this time was carried on as it were à rebours, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Glinka being his early ideals and models. During the years of his pupilage with Balakirev, he composed, besides his first symphony, the Symphonic Picture “Sadko,” a Fantasia on Servian Themes, the Symphony with an Oriental programme entitled “Antar,” and the opera The Maid of Pskov, now usually given abroad under the title of Ivan the Terrible. In his “Chronicle of my Musical Life” Rimsky-Korsakov shows clearly that after passing through a phase of blind idolatry for Balakirev and his methods, he began, largely by reason of his orderly, industrious, and scrupulously conscientious nature, to feel the need of a more academic course of training. He realised the defects in his theoretical education most keenly when, in 1871, Asanchievsky, who had just succeeded Zaremba as Director of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, offered him a post as professor of practical composition and also the direction of the orchestral class. Urged by his friends, and prompted by a certain self-assurance which he asserts was born of his ignorance, Rimsky-Korsakov accepted the post, being permitted at the same time to remain in the naval service. Although he had composed “Sadko,” “Antar,” and other attractive and well-sounding compositions, he had worked, so far, more or less intuitively and had not been grounded in the particular subjects which form the curriculum of a musical academy. Probably it mattered much less than his scrupulous rectitude prompted him to suppose, that he felt unfit to lecture upon rondo-form, and had his work as a conductor yet to learn. The main thing was that he brought a fresh, breezy, and wholly Russian current of thought into the stuffy atmosphere of pedantic classicism which must have been engendered under Zaremba’s directorate.[46] Indeed, according to his own modest account, things seem to have gone well with the orchestral and instrumentation classes. From this time, however, began that strong reaction in favour of classicism and “the schools,” upon which his progressive friends looked with dismay; to them his studies appeared merely the cult of musical archæology—a retrogressive step to be deeply deplored. On the other hand Tchaikovsky hailed it as a sign of grace and repentance. “Rimsky-Korsakov,” writes the composer of the “Pathetic” symphony to N. von Meck, in 1877, “is the one exception (in the matter of conceit and stiff-necked pride) to the rest of the new Russian school. He was overcome by despair when he realised how many profitable years he had lost and that he was following a road which led nowhere. He began to study with such zeal that during one summer he achieved innumerable exercises in counterpoint and sixty-four fugues, ten of which he sent me for inspection.” Rimsky-Korsakov may have felt himself braced and strengthened by this severe course of musical theory; it may have been a relief to his extremely sensitive artistic conscience to feel that henceforward he could rely as much on experience as on intuition; but his remorse for the past—supposing him ever to have felt the sting of such keen regret—never translated itself into the apostasy of his earlier principles. After the sixty-four fugues and the exhaustive study of Bach’s works, he continued to walk with Berlioz and Liszt in what Zaremba would have regarded as the way of sinners, because in his opinion it coincided with the highway of musical progress, as well as with his natural inclinations. He knew the forms demanded by his peculiar temperament. Genius, and even superior talent, almost invariably possess this intuition. No one should have known better than Tchaikovsky that in spite of well-intentioned efforts to push a composer a little to the right or the left, the question of form remains—and will always remain—self-selective. Rimsky-Korsakov, after, as before, his initiation into classicism, chose the one path open to the honest artist—musician, painter, or poet—the way of individuality.