When he left Petersburg forever in 1856, Glinka got out of his carriage at the city limits and spat on the ground that, in his opinion, did not give his genius its due. He returned to the capital only in his coffin; fewer than thirty people attended his interment. Among them was Count Sollogub, who recorded in his memoirs that when the coffin was lowered into the grave, the composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky, standing next to him, remarked bitterly, “Look at that, please, it’s as if they were burying some titular councillor.”21 On the hierarchical ladder of tsarist Russia, titular councillor was one of the lowest ranks. Perhaps Dargomyzhsky recalled those words a few years later, when he composed his famous art song, “Titular Councillor,” a musical satire imbued with bitterness about the fate of “the little man” in St. Petersburg.
Sollogub felt that Glinka, who was “ambitious and proud to the extreme,” had been destroyed by the lack of official recognition and status commensurate with the composer’s great aspirations: “Sensing his extraordinary gift, he quite naturally dreamed of an extraordinary position, which, incidentally, in those circumstances, was impossible. Had there been a conservatory, he would have been made director, of course. But there was no conservatory.”22
In the Petersburg of Nicholas I, the social position of music and musicians was uncertain and ambiguous. The other arts—painting, sculpture, architecture—were supervised by the Academy of Arts, founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth. This gave their practitioners some status and rights—great help in the severely codified and over-bureacratized state that was Russia. In particular, graduates of the Academy of Arts were given the official title “free artist,” which gave them certain privileges.
The artists of the opera and ballet belonged to the system of imperial theaters and were thus considered to be in government service; the same was true of the members of the Court Singing Capella. But the profession of musician per se did not exist from the legal point of view in Russia, and for musicians this created countless unpleasant incidents.
The first Russian performer to become world famous, the pianist Anton Rubinstein, recalled encountering one such absurd situation. Rubinstein was the son of a Jew who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and once the pianist went to the Kazan Cathedral in Petersburg to sign up for confession. The deacon asked him, “Your name? Who are you?”
“Rubinstein, artist.”
“Artist, does that mean you work in a theater? No? Perhaps, you’re a teacher at some institute? Or you are in service somewhere?”
Rubinstein tried to explain to the deacon that he was a concert pianist. Finally, the deacon had the sense to ask Rubinstein about his father. Satisfied, he listed the great artist in the confession book as “son of a merchant of the second guild.”23
Petersburg’s musical life in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century was concentrated in several aristocratic salons, because until 1859 public concerts were allowed only during Lent, when the theaters were closed, that is, six weeks a year. The most famous of these salons was in the home of the wealthy Counts Vielgorsky—the brothers Mikhail and Matvei, eccentric and refined music lovers, but also clever courtiers.
The counts had, weekly, sometimes quite impressive concerts: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first heard in Russia at the Vielgorskys’. Three hundred or more guests would come to listen to Franz Liszt playing piano or to see Robert Schumann conduct one of his symphonies. It was there that people enjoyed the art of the Italian prima donnas visiting Petersburg and stared with curiosity at the famous European avant-garde composers of the day—Berlioz and Wagner.
Berlioz called the Vielgorsky house “a small ministry of fine arts,” and for good reason: there one could regularly hear the metallic voice of Russia’s main patron of the arts—His Majesty Nicholas I; frequently it was after a concert at the Vielgorskys’ that the fate of a visiting European musician would be decided—whether he would leave Russia rich or without a penny. Among the accepted, Clara Schumann enthusiastically reported to her father, “Those Vielgorskys are marvelous people for artists; they live only for art and do not spare any expense.”
Another concert series with a solid reputation (and a European fame) was held at the house of General Alexei Lvov, the ambitious and imperious director of the Court Singing Capella and composer of the Russian national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Glinka had hoped passionately that the unofficial contest in 1833 would result in his monumental, joyful chorus “Glory” from
