Mikhail Glinka (1804 – 1857): Kamarinskaya
Although widely credited for putting the Russianness into nineteenth century Russian music, Mikhail Glinka was an unlikely standard bearer. According to one of his musical successors, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the aristocratic Glinka was “very much of his time, pettishly vain, intellectually underdeveloped, full of vanity and self-adoration…” He was a man much more likely to fuss over his day-to-day health (a lot of his time was spent consulting unreliable homeopaths) than to worry about musical manifestos. Largely self-taught and somewhat dilettantish in his habits, he tended to be driven by instinct rather than erudition. It’s just that at key moments in his life, his instincts could rise up to the levels of a genius.
The other paradox about Glinka was that while his music would come to be regarded as a key expression of Russian nationalism, he himself was the most cosmopolitan of artists. He would spend important periods of his life in Poland, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, with each musical culture leaving a clear imprint on his creativity.
The son of a retired army captain turned landowner, Mikhail Glinka grew up in some comfort in the rural district of Smolensk (nowadays situated close to the Russian-Belarusian border). Less propitiously, much of his early upbringing was left in the hands of his maternal grandmother who cosseted the boy to a degree that may ultimately have been damaging. “As a child”, Glinka recalled, “I was delicate, and subject to nervous and other disorders; my grandmother, an aged lady, was almost always unwell, and her room, in which I was confined, was kept at a temperature never lower than 25 Celsius.” This arrangement, lasting for several years, with Mikhail rarely allowed to leave his room in that time, quite possibly weakened his overall health. He would be unusually prone to catching colds and chills for the rest of his life.
But it was also during these long periods of confinement that Glinka’s creative identity was sparked into life. Certain sounds outside of the family home fired his imagination. He would develop a particular fascination with the sound of bells from a nearby church and the striking dissonances they could produce. He was also very alive to the unusual, non-western harmonies created by the local peasant choirs: such music invoked in him long reveries “possessed by a delicious languor”, as he put it.
At the age of thirteen he was sent to the Chief Pedagogical Institute in St Petersburg, remaining there for the next four years and receiving a fairly wide education, despite driving several of his teachers to despair with his general indolence. Although he received little academic training as a musician, he was quite good at the piano, and even took some lessons from the famous Irish émigré John Field (then living in the Russian capital).
Glinka senior hoped to find Mikhail a career in the civil service, even as he recognized that a heavy workload would not suit his constitutionally fragile son. A position was therefore arranged for him at the Ministry of Communications involving only light duties, thus allowing Mikhail ample time to pursue the thing now dearest to him – music – among the society men and women of St Petersburg. It was during these years that he began to turn out his first compositions – songs and piano salon pieces, plus the occasional work for chamber or orchestral ensemble. But none of these would yet show any sign of genuine artistry – indeed, if Glinka’s life had continued on its same comfortable track in St Petersburg it’s quite possible he would never have gone on to produce the masterworks for which he is remembered today.
Although his fragile health could reduce his productivity, it also became his eventual liberator, with Glinka’s doctors decreeing in 1830 that the ailing young man should give up his job and travel to a warmer climate to build himself back up. Glinka was all too happy to accept their proposal: he would end up travelling extensively around Europe for the rest of his life, all the while discovering his true artistic identity.
He spent the next three years in Italy, taking lessons in counterpoint (a discipline he always disliked) at the Milan conservatory, while befriending the up-and-coming opera composers, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini, both of whom would become a great inspiration. At first wishing to simply emulate them, Glinka gradually began to conceive of creating a version of their art for his own country.
En route back to Russia, he broke his journey in Berlin to study composition with Siegfried Dehn, an amiable though scholarly musicologist who set about adding some rigour to Glinka’s inventive but largely undisciplined talent. According to Glinka, his new teacher “had me write fugues in three or four parts… on themes from well-known compositions.”
Soon after, Glinka showed his new patriotic intent by starting work on a Symphony for Orchestra on Two Russian Motifs. But as he still searched for a bigger Russian theme, something around which he could build his whole artistic being, a poet friend suggested he write an opera on Ivan Susanin, a famous martyr of the early seventeenth century, generally believed to have sacrificed himself to save the life of Tsar Mikhail I from invading Polish soldiers.
Glinka immediately knew he had his subject, as he announced his grand plan to a friend soon after. “I have a project in view”, he wrote:
… this is not perhaps the moment to make a complete avowal; perhaps if I told you everything your face might wear an expression of incredulity. I may as well tell you at any rate that you may expect to find me not a little altered… probably you will be astonished at the change that has taken place in me since last we met in St Petersburg. Shall I confess?… I am in hopes of contributing to our national repertory a work of an ambitious kind… The most important thing is to make a good choice of subject. It must be national by virtue not only of its literary material but of its music as well. I am anxious that my fellow-countrymen shall, when listening to it, feel that they are at home, that the foreigner shall not take me for an upstart who struts about as might a crow in a peacock’s plumage.
Glinka was so confident in the success of his enterprise, that he now decided (after years of womanizing among the aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg) to get married. His bride, Maria Petrovna Ivanova, once described as his “sister’s brother-in-law’s wife’s sister”, also had a father who was a retired army officer. There, sadly, ended the similarities, as Maria Petrovna also had a pronounced aversion towards music.
Never the most analytical type, Glinka appeared not to notice anything amiss, and at first the union seemed to go excellently. It also appeared to give him an extra creative impetus at just the right moment. “The work was progressing splendidly,” he later wrote of his new opera. “Every morning I sat at my table and wrote about six pages in small score… In the evening, sitting on the sofa, surrounded by the whole family and on occasion by a few intimate friends as well, I was for the most part oblivious of what was going on around me. I was wholly absorbed in my works.”
The opera he eventually turned out, A Life For the Tsar, would transform Glinka from a virtually unknown salon composer to overnight sensation. Early audiences were immediately beguiled by the inventiveness of the music and not least its striking use of Russian folksong and folk idioms, in a country long thought to have been overly polluted with foreign musical elements. Even at its premiere, one of Glinka’s friends described it as “an epoch-making event in the history of Russian artistic accomplishment. The Russian theatre was witness of an indescribable enthusiasm; and not merely enthusiasm but emotion.” Many of the audience were in tears, while Glinka himself, having been personally blessed by the Tsar after the performance, “cried like a child on the homeward drive.”
Epoch-making A Life For the Tsar may have been, but its creation was also entirely unexpected and even improbable when you considered the immediate history of its creator. In the opinion of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the opera was
… an unprecedented, astonishing phenomenon in the sphere of art. A dilettante, who could play the violin and the piano a bit, who had composed utterly colourless quadrilles, fantasias on fashionable Italian themes, who had even tried his hand at serious musical forms (quartet, sextet), as well as songs, but who had not written anything else apart from banalities in the style of the 1830s, suddenly, at the age of 34 [sic 32], creates an opera, which in terms of its genius, sweep, novelty, and faultless technique, is on a par with the very greatest and profoundest works of art. One’s amazement becomes still greater when one remembers that the author of this opera is… a man who is kind and nice, but empty, insignificant, and ordinary. It just haunts me sometimes, this question as to how such colossal artistic power could be combined with such nonentity, and how Glinka, from being a colourless dilettante for so long, could suddenly, in one step, draw level (yes, level!) with Mozart, with Beethoven, with anyone you care to name.
Still only in his early thirties, A Life For the Tsar should have been the start of a long and glittering stage career for Glinka. But oddly he would never again attain such a peak, or even come close. His disastrously crumbling marriage may have been a factor in draining his creative powers: Maria Petrovna complained that he was “wasting too much money” on manuscript paper and started buying expensive dresses as a form of retaliation. When Glinka’s poet friend, Alexander Pushkin, lost his life in a duel, Maria Petrovna unsympathetically opined that “all artists inevitably come to a bad end.” With Madame Glinka embarking on a series of love affairs, while enlisting the support of her combative mother every time there was a marital dispute to be settled, Glinka soon found that his domestic life had become close to unbearable. He eventually complained to a friend, “marriage is like counterpoint: nothing but opposition and contrary motion.”
It was partly down to such personal difficulties that Glinka would take six years to produce his next opera: Ruslan and Lyudmila. Based on a poem by Pushkin, it’s a medieval tale of evil wizards, damsels in distress and valiant knights riding to the rescue. But in comparison to its immediate predecessor, it was a relative flop, probably owing to its slightly convoluted plot, exotic settings and challengingly innovative music, now incorporating oriental elements (and even whole-tone scales) as well as Glinka’s now customary Russian folk elements. But Ruslan still has its own legion of fans who regard it as musically superior to the Tsar, while its frenetically joyous Overture has become Glinka’s single most popular piece of music.
Disappointed by Ruslan’s reception, and with his wife by now having run off with another man, Glinka decided to hit the road again, spending much of the next five years in France and Spain. In France he became friends with Hector Berlioz, who did much to promote his Russian colleague, performing excerpts from his two operas in Paris, while writing several important articles introducing his music to French audiences.
Glinka also spent some time in Spain, hoping to imbibe the local folk music and create some Hispanic style works. His two “Spanish” overtures, Capriccio Brilliante on the Jota Aragonesa (1845) and Recollection of a Summer Night in Madrid (1851) are testimony to his success of his efforts, with the latter later acknowledged by Tchaikovsky as a primary inspiration for his own Capriccio Italien.
Although Glinka never wrote a completed symphony, his later orchestral works (mainly overtures and tone-poems) are so full of symphonic elements that they would come to be feted just as much as his operas. Tchaikovsky even thought Glinka “first and foremost a lyrical symphonist” while reserving particular praise for Kamarinskaya, an orchestral fantasia based on two Russian folk-songs, which Glinka wrote in 1848 during a stay in Poland.
For Tchaikovsky, the piece was “staggeringly original.” It is, for one thing, the first Russian orchestral work built entirely on folksong. But its real innovation is in the way Glinka treats its two main, alternating melodies – the first a slow, rather ponderous bridal song, “Iz-za gor” (From Beyond the Mountains), the second, a Kamarinskaya (from which the piece takes its title), a quick, ostinato-like dance notable for its unusual three-bar phrase lengths.
Rather than make any attempt to develop or integrate the two themes (in the then approved European manner), Glinka keeps them entirely apart, instead finding the most brilliant and inventive ways to vary the harmonies and instrumental colours around them. It was the latter that Tchaikovsky and his generation would find so admirable, as a way of building an entirely new form of symphonic-sounding music: “all later Russian composers (including me of course) are to this day still drawing on [the piece]”, Tchaikovsky himself would write. “Many Russian symphonic works have been written since then, and one can say that we have a real Russian symphonic school. But what do we find? Why, all of it is in the Kamarinskaya, just as the whole oak is in the acorn!” The finale of Tchaikovsky’s own 2nd Symphony would take direct inspiration in the treatment of folk-themes from this work by Glinka.
In all, Kamarinskaya would prove to be one of Glinka’s last great works. He lived on for another decade in his own quiet, unspectacular way, spending several further years in Paris (where the Jardin des Plantes became one of his favourite haunts) before moving on to Berlin. In 1855 he published an entertaining and somewhat whimsical volume of memoirs. No musical or material ascetic, he continued to show a very human weakness for praise of any kind while seemingly unable to see the wild inconsistencies in his own music. According to Tchaikovsky, Glinka could compose a “feeble, disgraceful polonaise”, one day or a “childish polka” on another, and then discuss each composition “so smugly in his memoirs as if it were some masterpiece”.
Perhaps Glinka’s greatest strength was his perennially open-minded curiousity, something that had allowed him to so successfully challenge his country’s musical traditions. Although now in his early fifties, he showed a certain humility in electing to study “ancient” counterpoint with his old Berlin teacher Siegfried Dehn. He also expressed an interest in studying the ecclesiastical modes of the early Russian Znamenny chants (something that would later be an inspiration on the likes of Rachmaninov and Stravinsky).
While in Berlin, Glinka attended several performances of his music, genuinely excited to hear his work played in Germany for the first time. Having hosted an all-night party after one particularly successful concert in early 1857, he caught one of his chills while returning to his lodgings. At first he thought little of it, but this time the infection did not lift, instead developing into pneumonia, and two weeks later Glinka was dead at the age of just 52.
Unlike many composers, Glinka had not died before attaining a reasonable idea of his place in musical history. Having befriended the young composer Mily Balakirev in the last years of his life, he may even have had a sense of passing on a baton. Balakirev worshipped the older man and in many ways wanted to emulate him. But Balakirev also had many qualities that Glinka did not – he was bullish, systematic, much more opinionated and often unable to comprehend why anyone would disagree with him. It was Balakirev and not Glinka who would for a time create an elite group of young nationalist composers known as the “Mighty Handful” (Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, plus Balakirev himself).
Glinka would always remain a more elusive, enigmatic figure, as if forever looking on from the sidelines. Yet at his best he was as brilliant as anyone. And he is still today regarded as one of the greatest Russians of the nineteenth century.