In the end Glinka fled the city, which he called “vile,” “hateful Petersburg.” “The local climate is definitely harmful to me, or perhaps, my health is even more affected by the local gossips, each of whom has at least one drop of poison on the tip of his tongue,”16 he complained to his beloved sister. Count Sollogub recalled visiting Glinka in those days at his Petersburg apartment, when the composer frightened him with his “martyred look and gloomy cynicism.”17
But before leaving for Berlin (where Glinka died in 1857 at the age of fifty-two of the aftereffects of the flu, which led to paralysis of the heart), the composer left behind a work that, despite its seeming lack of pretension and its modest length, became the true model and powerful source of Petersburg music. It was the orchestral version of Glinka’s old piano piece, “Valse-Fantaisie,” a remembrance of “the days of love and youth,” as the composer elegiacally informed the paralyzed friend to whom the score was dedicated.
This astonishing waltz, pure Pushkin in its mood and mastery, is the real inspiration behind the magical waltzes of Tchaikovsky, which later conquered the world. (There are echoes of the “Valse-Fantaisie” even in the famous “Blue Danube” waltz by Johann Strauss, Jr., who held Glinka in esteem.) Tchaikovsky said of another piece by Glinka, “Kamarinskaya,” that it contained, as an acorn contains an oak, the entire Russian symphonic school. “Valse-Fantaisie,” that incomparable Petersburg musical poem of love, longing, and suffering, already contains the emotional intensity, smooth melodic curves and swings, and the virtuoso “silver” orchestration of the waltz revelations of Tchaikovsky (and later of Glazunov), but in a classically pure and balanced form.
In composing this sentimental music without sentimentality, Glinka could have repeated Pushkin’s line “My sorrow is radiant.” “Valse-Fantaisie” is pure Petersburg erotica—passionate but controlled. In Petersburg (as in Europe) a young woman from an aristocratic home could not dance the waltz without special permission from an adult chaperone. Petersburg adapted the European waltz by “hiding” its sexual daring, and so Glinka gave the erotic longing an almost spiritual tone, as if foreshadowing by half a century the basic motif of Anna Akhmatova’s early poetry.
It was probably exactly this quality that made “Valse-Fantaisie” one of the favorite musical works of George Balanchine, who had danced in
Balanchine told me how Diaghilev, laughing at and mocking the ignorance of Western critics, showed him a clipping from a French newspaper that asserted Glinka would have been all right if he had not stolen his melodies from Tchaikovsky!18 Becoming one of Stravinsky’s closest friends and collaborators, Balanchine understood the importance for the composer, unknown to many Western observers, of Glinka’s oeuvre. Stravinsky’s biographer, Robert Craft, recalled that as he listened with Balanchine to a recording of Stravinsky’s
Balanchine staged “Valse-Fantaisie” three times for the New York City Ballet, in 1953, 1967, and 1969, revealing a spectacle of nostalgic elegance. His friend and collaborator, the artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, always associated that work of Glinka’s with the magic and poetry of the Petersburg white nights. Balanchine’s ideas on the “Valse-Fantaisie” were so explicit and powerful that even John Martin, the influential ballet critic of the
