[10] See Chapter IV.
[11] Walter Niemann: Die Musik Skandinaviens.
CHAPTER IV
THE RUSSIAN NATIONALISTS
The founders of the 'Neo-Russian' Nationalistic School: Balakireff; Borodine—Moussorgsky—Rimsky-Korsakoff, his life and works—César Cui and other nationalists, Napravnik, etc.
I
The most significant phase in the history of Russian music is that which represents the activity of the Balakireff group and the founders of the St. Petersburg Free School of Music. This belongs to the middle of the past century, when the seed sown by Glinka, Dargomijsky and partly by Bortniansky began to bear its first fruits. Up to that time the question of Russian national music had not been aroused. The country was dominated either by German or the Italian musical ideals. Art, particularly music, was in every direction aristocratic, academic, and pedantically ecclesiastic. The ruling class was foreign to the core and followed literally the timely æsthetic fads of other countries. The idea that there could be any art in the life of a moujik was ridiculed and flatly denied. O, Bóje sohraní! a patron of music would exclaim at any attempts at a national music.
To the middle class and the common people the admission to high-class musical performances and the opera was legally denied. The concerts of the Imperial Musical Society and the performances of the Imperial Opera were meant only for the élite, and the direction of those institutions was in the hands of bureaucratic foreigners. It was at a critical moment that Balakireff, who had come as a young lawyer from Nijny Novgorod to St. Petersburg, laid the foundation of the Free School of Music. This institution was meant to train young Russians, to arouse in them an enthusiasm for the possibilities latent in their native music, and at the same time to arrange free concerts for the people and perform the works of those native composers who were turned away by the existing organizations. Founded by Balakireff, the composer, Lomakin, the talented choirmaster, and Stassoff, the celebrated critic, the free school became the institution of Borodine, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. Balakireff, Borodine and Moussorgsky can be considered as the real founders of the Russian 'realistic' school of music, if not the pioneers of a new musical art movement altogether. Upon their principles and examples rest the original vigor and the subjective glamour of all subsequent Russian music. The vague initiative given by Glinka and Dargomijsky underwent a thorough process of reconstruction at the hands of these three reformers; the stamp set by them upon the Russian music is as unique and as lasting as the semi-oriental spirit that permeates Russian life and character with its exotic magic.
The ideal of building up an art out of national material seemed to hang in the air, for this was the time of a great national awakening in Russia. Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and Turgenieff in poetry and fiction, Griboiedoff and Ostrovsky in the drama, Stassoff, Hertzen, and Mihailovsky in critical literature, and the revolutionary movement of the so-called narodno-volts in politics were all symptoms of a vigorous reform period. It should be noted that in this great and far-reaching movement the Russian church, with all its seeming supremacy, exercised but little influence over matters of art and literature. While the church in Western Europe was aristocratic in its institutions, in Russia it remained throughout the centuries democratic. A Russian clergyman has remained nothing but a more or less refined moujik, a man who lives the life of the common people and associates with the people. As such he has never been antagonistic to the spirit of the common people, as far as their æsthetic tendencies and traditions are concerned. He has never tried to make art an issue of the church. Music, less than any other of the arts, has never been influenced in any way by ecclesiastical interests. No instrumental music of any kind has ever been performed in Russian churches. Hence, unlike those of Western Europe, Russian composers never came under the sway of the church. The western church was, as we have seen, originally opposed to the influence of folk music. In Russia, on the other hand, it favored any assertion of the people's individuality. It was, therefore, unlike the aristocratic classes, sympathetic to such a work as that which the Free School of Music made the object of its existence.
Before treating the works of the three great Russian reformers individually we may remark that none of them made music his sole profession. Balakireff was sufficiently well off to devote himself to his art without thought of material gain. Borodine earned his living as a scholar and pedagogue, and so maintained his independence as a composer. Moussorgsky alone felt the pinch of poverty; his official duties were strenuous and left him little leisure for composition. Yet, like his colleagues, he never compromised with public taste.
The real initiator of this new movement, Mily Alekseyevitch Balakireff, was born at Nijny Novgorod in 1837. He studied law at the University of Kazan, though music was his hobby from early childhood on. His musical ideals were Mozart, Beethoven, and Berlioz. During one of his summer vacations Balakireff met in the country near Nijny Novogorod a certain Mr. Oulibitcheff, a retired diplomat and friend of Glinka, an accomplished musician himself and thoroughly familiar with the classic composers of every country. It was he who converted Balakireff to the idea that Russia should have its own music, and that the lines to be followed should be those indicated by Glinka. With an introduction to that apostle of nationalism Balakireff journeyed to St. Petersburg in 1855. He found the city under the spell of German and Italian music, and the masses limited to the musical enjoyment to be derived from military bands and boulevard artists. With all the youthful energy at his command Balakireff set himself to combat the foreign influence and advance nationalistic ideas of music.