Mam’selle Fifi. Analysis of Cui’s style.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s position as a national composerand as a teacher. Biographical. Joins Balakirev’s circle. Leaves the naval service. His early works. A tone-painter. His first Opera. The Maid of Pskov (Ivan the Terrible). Accession of the Emperor Alexander III. He encourages Russian music. A Night in May. The Snow-Maiden (Sniegourochka). Mlada. Christmas Eve Revels. Mozart and Salieri. Boyarinya Vera Sheloga. Sadko. The Tsar’s Bride. The Legend of Tsar Saltan. The use of the leitmotif. Servilia. Kastchei the Immortal. Wagnerian influence. Pan Voyevode. The Tale of the City of Kitezh. The Golden Cock.

Tchaikovsky considered apart from the nationalistcircle. His early love of Italian opera. The Voyevode. Undine. The Oprichnik. The libretto described. Cherevichek, or Le Caprice d’Oxane. Passing influence of Balakirev’s circle. Eugene Oniegin. The Maid of Orleans. The composer’s enthusiasm for this opera. Mazeppa. Analysis of the subject. Charodeika (The Enchantress). The Queen of Spades. Iolanthe. Analysis of Tchaikovsky’s operatic styles.

Some minor composers. Napravnik: The Citizens ofNijny-Novgorod, Harold, Doubrovsky, Francesca da Rimini. Blaramberg: Skomorokhi, The Roussalka-Maiden, Toushino, The Wave. Arensky: A Dream on the Volga, Raphael, Nal and Damyanti. Rachmaninov: Aleko. Grechyaninov: Dobrynia Nikitich. Ippolitov-Ivanov: Ruth, Assya. Kalinnikov: The Year 1812. Taneiev: Orestes. Foreign influence in contemporary Russian music. Rebikov: In the Storm, The Christmas Tree. Kazachenko, Korestchenko, Kochetov, Stravinsky. Famous operatic singers: Platonova, Petrov, Melnikov, the Figners, Shaliapin. Mamantov and the Moscow Private Opera Company. Great increase of opera companies in Russia. Concluding observations.

THE
RUSSIAN
OPERA

THE RUSSIAN OPERA

CHAPTER I

THE DAWN OF MUSIC IN RUSSIA

THE early history of the development of the national music, like that of most popular movements in Russia, has its aspects of oppression and conflict with authority. On the one hand we see a strong natural impulse moving irresistibly towards fulfilment; on the other, a policy of repression amounting at moments to active persecution. That the close of the nineteenth century has witnessed the triumph of Russian music at home and abroad proves how strong was the innate capacity of this people, and how deep their love of this art, since otherwise they could never have finally overcome every hindrance to its development. That from primitive times the Slavs were easily inspired and moved by music, and that they practised it in very early phases of their civilisation, their early historians are all agreed. In the legend of “Sadko, the Rich Merchant” (one of the byline of the Novgorodian Cycle) the hero, a kind of Russian Orpheus, who suffers the fate of Jonah, makes the Sea-king dance to the sound of his gusslee, and only stays his hand when the wild gyrations of the marine deity have created such a storm on earth that all the ships on the ocean above are in danger of being wrecked. In the “Epic of the Army of Igor,” when the minstrel Boyan sings, he draws “the grey wolf over the fields, and the blue-black eagle from the clouds.” In peace and war, music was the joy of the primitive Slavs. In the sixth century the Wends told the Emperor in Constantinople that music was their greatest pleasure, and that on their travels they never carried arms but musical instruments which they made themselves. Procopius, the Byzantine historian, describing a night attack made by the Greeks, A.D. 592, upon the camp of the Slavs, says that the latter were so completely absorbed in the delights of singing that they had forgotten to take any precautionary measures, and were oblivious of the enemy’s approach. Early in their history, the Russian Slavs used a considerable number of musical instruments: the gusslee, a kind of horizontal harp, furnished with seven or eight strings, and the svirel, a reed pipe (chalumet), being the most primitive. Soon, however, we read of the goudok, a species of fiddle with three strings, played with a bow; the dombra, an instrument of the guitar family, the forerunner of the now fashionable balalaïka, the strings of which were vibrated with the fingers; and the bandoura, or kobza, of the Malo-Russians, which had from eight to twenty strings. Among the primitive wind instruments were the sourna, a shrill pipe of Eastern origin, and the doudka, the bagpipe, or cornemuse. The drum, the tambourine, and the cymbals were the instruments of percussion chiefly in use.

Berezovsky makes a convenient division of the history of Russian music into four great periods. The first, within its limits, was purely national. It included all the most ancient folksongs and byline, or metrical legends; it saw the rise and fall of the Skomorokhi, the minstrels who were both the composers and preservers of these old epics and songs. This period reached its highest development in the reign of Vladimir, “The Red Sun,” first Christian prince of Russia, about A.D. 988. The second period, which Berezovsky describes as already falling away from the purely national ideal, dates from the establishment of Christianity in Russia, at the close of the tenth century, when the folk music lost much of its independence and fell under Byzantine influence. Russian music entered upon its third period about the middle of the eighteenth century;