A regular member of Kukolnik’s rowdy gatherings, with music and champagne, was the composer Mikhail Glinka. Thirty-two-year-old Glinka became popular after the premiere of his first opera in 1836, in which the peasant Ivan Susanin surrenders his life to save Mikhail Romanov from the invading Poles. It was a legendary subject, from the same historical period represented in Kukolnik’s play. The composer called his opera
Russians justly consider Glinka to be the father of their national music, as Pushkin is the father of their national literature. Glinka’s talent and oeuvre have much in common with Pushkin’s—the same lightness and precision, naturalness and expressiveness, simplicity and harmony. Both Glinka and Pushkin possessed innate mastery, an ability to assimilate different Western influences but also an instinctive understanding and original interpretation of the Russian national psyche.
As in the case of Pushkin, the respectful attitude of the West toward Glinka is based on his reputation as a national cultural hero. His music is not understood here, or liked, or regularly performed. Mountings of Glinka’s operas, which are always present on Russian stages, are rare in the West. It is even more astonishing because in music there is no real language barrier to impede comprehension, as in the case of literature.
Unconditional delight in Glinka, however, has never crossed beyond the borders of the Slavic countries, even though confident assurances that his music was just about to be accepted in Europe began to be heard in Russia during the composer’s lifetime. In the West Glinka is still viewed merely as a talented imitator of European musical formulas of the time, not as an original genius.
The Russian cult of Glinka, like the cult of Pushkin, is universal, reaching its apogee in prerevolutionary years; Igor Stravinsky noted later, “poor Glinka, who was only a kind of Russian Rossini, had been Beethovenized and nationally-monumented.”6 It’s curious that in the 1971 Soviet edition of the conversations between Robert Craft and Stravinsky, in which I first encountered this rather complimentary quotation (that is, in terms of Stravinsky’s tastes, for at the time he much preferred Rossini to Beethoven), the word “only” was omitted by the editor because it was thought to be apparently “derogatory” toward Glinka.
Glinka’s music became an intrinsic part of the childhood of most of the figures of early Russian modernism, and therefore was always wrapped for them in special memories. The family of Alexander Benois was particularly proud of an Italian great-grandfather who was “director of music” in Petersburg and Glinka’s predecessor. Benois’s ancestor even wrote an opera on the same legendary subject of Ivan Susanin, but twenty years earlier, and subsequently, without envy, diligently conducted the premiere of his rival’s work.
Benois recalled that the young Sergei Diaghilev “idolized Glinka”:7 Glinka’s operas were sung by heart at Diaghilev’s house. Nikolai Roerich, later coauthor of the libretto and first designer for Stravinsky’s ballet
It seemed as if the musicians were playing from golden scores. There was anxiety that everybody in the box take their seats promptly. The gentleman with the baton had come!—this important information would be delivered from the front, in fear that there would be latecomers moving their chairs and talking, while down there the musicians would already be playing magically from the golden pages.8
After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Glinka became an inconvenience because of his monarchist opera. In those years Igor Stravinsky cultivated appreciation of Glinka in the West, but it did not take here, and the pragmatic Stravinsky gradually moderated his praise. In the Soviet Union Stalin turned out to be an unexpected admirer, and Glinka was force-fed to the public aggressively and almost violently, as potatoes had been in the reign of Catherine the Great.
In the years after World War II, Soviets proclaimed Glinka the “measure of all things,” the official cultural icon, and his harmonic and optimistic music was used by the authorities as an antidote (in numbing doses) to the works of “pessimists and decadents” from Wagner to Shostakovich.
