This was an enormously significant step. The Petersburg Conservatory bred the performing and composing schools that would conquer the entire world in the twentieth century. The names Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist, Milstein, Mravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich speak for themselves. George Balanchine also attended that conservatory, and he always recalled his musical mentors with affection and gratitude.
The flood of candidates for study at the first Russian conservatory was overwhelming, and naturally it included some oddballs; one noble lady brought her retarded son to Rubinstein “because everyone chases him away, so let him study music at least.” The first students (there were 179 of them) were a motley crowd that had gathered from all corners of the empire; among them was a shy, unassuming senior clerk of a department in the Ministry of Justice, the twenty-two-year-old Peter Tchaikovsky.
The accusations, complaints, and arguments, so typically Russian, overheated and often unfair, filled the air almost immediately; the strife was about both the idea of the conservatory and about Rubinstein personally. Vladimir Stasov, the temperamental and quite influential critic, insisted that higher education could be useful in science but not in art, and so conservatories would interfere “with creativity in the most harmful way” and “serve only as a hotbed for mediocrities.”29
Stasov, who was playfully called “Bach” by his friends and ridiculed as an ignoramus by his enemies, asserted that small-scale schools were better for the development of original Russian music. He was defending the vital tradition of intimate Petersburg musical circles, which by that time had produced remarkable artistic results. Among them, the most curious group gathered in the late 1850s around the composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky.
The wealthy landowner Dargomyzhsky had long attracted admirers of his art, primarily young and pretty amateur female singers. Small and bewhiskered like a cat, the composer, in imitation of Glinka, spent hours at his piano illuminated by two candelabra, while accompanying his lovely students as they sang his unconventional, expressive art songs. He sang along in his strange, almost contralto voice. This is how Dargomyzhsky’s
After the success of his opera
Dargomyzhsky blossomed in the company of these young geniuses, and his art songs became sharper and bolder. If Glinka’s music can be considered congenial to the works of Pushkin, Dargomyzhsky’s works were beginning to echo the Petersburg of Gogol’s tales and the world of
In those years the satirical chansons of the French poet Pierre-Jean Béranger, translated into Russian, were very popular. Dargomyzhsky wrote his two masterful art songs, very Petersburgian in mood and outlook, to texts by Béranger. He presented them in the form of an originally conceived ballad, almost a stage monologue, in which the Frenchman’s themes, transplanted to Petersburg’s soil, sounded daringly freethinking and challenging. “The Old Corporal” was a frontal attack on one of the two main institutions of Nicholas’s empire, the army, and “The Worm” on the other, the bureaucracy.
From a purely artistic point of view, these are two marvelous, melodramatic musical tales, with an expressive vocal part and laconic accompaniment. The great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin recalled singing “The Old Corporal” for Leo Tolstoy at his home (with twenty-six-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff at the piano): “When I tearfully spoke the last words of the soldier about to be shot: ‘God grant you get home,’ Tolstoy took his hand from under his belt and wiped two tears that fell from his eyes.”31
