St Petersburg полностью

In fact, a talented student needs so little; it is so simple to show him everything needed in harmony and counterpoint to set him on his feet in that work, it is so simple to direct him in understanding the forms of composition, if one goes about it the right way. Just one or two years of systematic study in the development of technique, a few exercises in free composition and orchestration, assuming a good knowledge of the piano—and the studies are over.17

At the conservatory there were many students in the famous professor’s class, and this irritated the fifteen-year-old Sergei Prokofiev, who wanted Rimsky-Korsakov’s undivided attention. The maestro sat at the piano and looked through all the exercises in counterpoint his students brought him. He played endless fugues, preludes, canons, and arrangements, but refused to look through a student’s work if written in pencil, declaring, “I do not wish to go blind because of you.” (Later Shostakovich would also insist that his composition students write their scores in ink.)

Rimsky-Korsakov would begin his first class at the conservatory this way, according to one of his students, Nikolai Malko: “‘I will speak, and you will listen. Then I will speak less, and you will start to work. And finally I will not speak at all, and you will work.’ And that’s the way it was,” Malko concluded. “Rimsky-Korsakov explained everything so clearly and simply that all we had to do was to do our work well.”18

Prokofiev had trouble breaking through the crowd that surrounded the maestro.

The ones who knew how much they could learn from Rimsky-Korsakov got the benefit despite the crowding. I approached the lessons half-heartedly, and the Schubert marches for four hands that Rimsky-Korsakov made us orchestrate I found clumsy and uninteresting. My instrumentation did not satisfy Rimsky-Korsakov. “Instead of thinking, you simply choose on your fingers whether it should be oboe or clarinet,” he used to say. Shutting his eyes, he would twirl his index fingers and then try unsuccessfully to make them meet. I would look triumphantly at my comrades, to gloat at the old man being angry, but their faces would be serious.19

Despite the fact that Prokofiev was offended by the maestro’s attitude toward him, the ambitious teenager was thrilled by Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which premiered in February 1907. Prokofiev was captivated by the grand mystical fresco that told in epic tones of the miraculous salvation of the ancient Russian city from the Tatar invasion.

The legend of Kitezh became popular in the elite circles of Petersburg. Kitezh, which was inundated by God’s will and made invisible, was discussed in the fashionable religio-philosophical societies of those years as a symbol of the desired purity that was unattainable in modern times. Zinaida Hippius even juxtaposed the legendary Kitezh and the real Petersburg, mired in sin.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera was almost immediately compared to Wagner’s Parsifal. Interestingly, Akhmatova thought more highly of Kitezh than of Parsifal; for all the similarity in approach of the two composers to a mystical theme, Akhmatova sensed a false piety in Parsifal and an intuitive, pure religious feeling, typical of the Russian people, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s work.20

Akhmatova also noted the exceptional literary quality of the libretto of Kitezh, written by Vladimir Belsky. The libretto’s influence is apparent in Akhmatova’s lengthy mystical poem of 1940, The Way of All Earth, in which she considers herself a denizen of the vanished Kitezh. At that moment, she associated the legendary Kitezh with the beloved city on the Neva that had lived through such horrible trials. By 1940, Petersburg’s image was transformed from the antithesis of Kitezh to its twin.

Prokofiev was awed by the fantastical orchestration in Kitezh, its rhythmic diversity, the psychological complexity of the characters, especially the “Dostoyevskian” part of the traitor Grishka Kuterma, performed by Ivan Ershov, Petersburg’s best Wagnerian tenor, “with extraordinary brilliance and drama,” as Prokofiev recalled. “But most of all I liked The Battle of Kerzhenets, which at the time I thought was the best thing Rimsky-Korsakov had written.”21