One of Glinka’s most impressive works, Farewell to Petersburg is a kaleidoscope of pictures and emotions, united by a noble and expressive manner of vocal writing; it includes a passionate confession of love, sorrowful meditations, a lullaby, an attempt to capture the beauty of the Russian landscape (“The Lark,” popular in Russia), and a musical depiction of a Petersburg spree among a circle of delighted and loyal friends. With typically Russian “universal responsiveness” (Dostoyevsky’s expression) and Petersburgian sensibility, it uses an Italian barcarole, a Spanish bolero, and a Jewish song; the song, as well as some references to Palestine in the text, kept the cycle from being performed in full in the Soviet Union after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, when Brezhnev broke diplomatic ties with Israel.
One of the pieces in Farewell to Petersburg, “Travel Song,” is of particular interest. It is probably the world’s first truly artistic vocal depiction of a railroad trip. The first railroad in Russia, connecting Petersburg with suburban Tsarskoe Selo, was still considered an innovation since it had opened only a few years earlier, in October 1837.
Contemporaries perceived the introduction of railroad transport not simply as a current sensation but as a symbolic event confirming the wisdom and correctness of the historical path chosen by Peter the Great: “Fire breathes from the nostrils! And twenty carriages attached to one another roll down cast-iron tracks, like a single arrow shot from a bow! What would Peter I say and feel if by some miracle he was here among us and could fly the twenty-five versts from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo in twenty-five minutes! What joy would reign in his heart!”12
After writing Farewell to Petersburg, Glinka suddenly changed his mind about leaving. Instead, he published his cycle, with “extraordinary success,” as the press noted: it went into three editions. The popular Petersburg journal Library for Reading particularly singled out “Travel Song,” “in which movement defines a special life, hustle and bustle—the necessary qualities of a trip on the railroad. The external sense of the trip and inner excitement, passionate and imbued with hope and expectation, are presented with exquisite refinement. In terms of artistry, this is probably the best number in Farewell to Petersburg”13
Still, subsequent works by Glinka, especially major ones, had at best succès d’estime. Nicholas I left the theater before the end of the long-awaited and highly publicized premiere of Ruslan and Lyudmila. Taking that as a signal, the aristocratic audience applauded Glinka’s opera mildly; some even hissed. Discouraged, Glinka sat nervously in the director’s box with his friend, the chief of the gendarmes corps. Seeing Glinka hesitate over whether to come out for bows, the sympathetic but cynical gendarme pushed the composer onto the stage with the words, “Go on, Christ suffered more than you.”14
A contemporary recalled that after the premiere of Ruslan and Lyudmila, “everyone went home subdued, as if after a nightmare.”15 The public rushed to the conclusion that Glinka has written himself out in his first opera, A Life for the Tsar. The composer, no Christ at all (his acquaintances compared Glinka to the delicate blossom Mimosa sensitiva), fell into a deep depression.
Glinka couldn’t live without the high of adulation for his creative gifts. He blossomed only when supported and applauded. Then, in the appropriate atmosphere and after a few glasses of champagne, he would gladly perform his marvelous songs as he had in the past. He had a tenor voice, not very high but resonant and unusually flexible, and so he interpreted his works for friends to an explosion of sincere delight.
In 1849 the young Dostoyevsky heard Glinka when the composer sang before some members of the dissident Petrashevsky circle. Ruslan and Lyudmila was always one of Dostoyevsky’s favorite operas. And hearing Glinka sing, the writer was greatly moved; that evening remained in his memory as one of the most powerful impressions of his life. Many years later Dostoyevsky described Glinka performing his art song in the novella The Eternal Husband, judging the performance in terms of his “realistic aesthetic” of that period: “No adept musician or some sort of salon singer could ever have achieved that effect…. In order to sing that small but extraordinary piece, what was needed was the truth, real, total inspiration, real passion.”
