St Petersburg полностью

Audiences were just as touched when Chaliapin performed with Russian passion “The Worm” and Dargomyzhsky’s other song about a miserable, intimidated clerk, “The Titular Councillor.” Their striking, almost caricatured depiction of these men who were so close to the heroes of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Overcoat provoked one hostile critic to describe the characters as “this scum of Petersburg’s corners.”

While he was creating these sarcastic and at the same time deeply felt sketches in the late 1850s, Dargomyzhsky practically preordained the manner of performance, inserting numerous author’s remarks as if in a dramatic scene by Gogol: “with a sigh,” “squinting,” “smiling shyly.” This attention to close detail combined with his general satirical but compassionate attitude put Dargomyzhsky next to Gogol’s followers in the “natural school” and brought him together with radical writers grouped around Iskra (The Spark), the popular, ultraleftist Petersburg satirical journal.

It seemed that Dargomyzhsky, who was respected paradoxically by both the establishment (he had become a board member of the Imperial Russian Musical Society in 1859) and the young intellectual rebels, had positioned himself comfortably at last and could rest safely on his laurels. This hard-won security makes his last artistic leap even more amazing—a kind of swan song, the opera The Stone Guest, which would have far-reaching influence on the subsequent avant-garde strivings of Petersburg music. Dargomyzhsky wrote it to the almost unchanged text of one of Pushkin’s Small Tragedies, a variation of the Don Juan theme.

Just as Pushkin had, in his day, competed with no less than the mighty shadow of Molière, Dargomyzhsky challenged Mozart. Naturally, the Russian’s chamber opera was in an altogether different “weight class” from Mozart’s monumental and all-encompassing Don Giovanni. But no less incisive a music critic than Shostakovich told me that of the two musical interpretations of the Don Juan legend, he definitely preferred Dargomyzhsky’s.32

We may appreciate Shostakovich’s point of view better if we understand that Dargomyzhsky’s opera is, from start to finish, an experimental—to the point of being polemical—work, a quality which probably endeared it so to Shostakovich. It was created in accordance with his profession de foi: “I want sound to express the word directly. I want the truth.”

Dargomyzhsky’s intention was nothing more or less than a radical reform of the operatic genre. In The Stone Guest he rejected most traditional operatic techniques. There are no developed arias, no ensembles, no choruses in his work; instead there is only a flexible recitative that follows closely Pushkin’s text. The music flows whimsically, sensitively re-creating the subtlest change in mood, but it is subordinated to the logic of speech; and it is exactly this quality, conveying to the Russian listener of Dargomyzhsky’s opera an acute and almost physical pleasure, that gets in the way of the work’s appreciation in the West. To Russians this work sounds astonishingly daring and bold to this day.

In writing The Stone Guest, the already severely ill composer relied as never before on the moral support of his talented young friends. Balakirev, Cui, and Mussorgsky were joined by the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, the rosy-cheeked and handsome Alexander Borodin, and a young naval officer, the tall and bespectacled Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This group, eventually led by the fanatical and despotic Balakirev, met almost weekly at Dargomyzhsky’s to follow the progress of The Stone Guest. Dargomyzhsky sang Don Juan with inspiration while Mussorgsky helped with the part of Leporello. And every time the master would muse, “I’m not writing it, it’s some force I do not understand.”

Stasov, an eyewitness of these unforgettable Petersburg evenings, later said,

It was delight, awe, it was an almost prayerful bowing before a mighty creative force, which had transformed that weak, bilious, sometimes petty and envious man into a powerful giant of will, energy, and inspiration. The Balakirev group’ was overjoyed and delighted. It surrounded Dargomyzhsky with its sincere adoration, and with its profound intellectual sympathy rewarded the poor old man in the final days of his life for all the long years of his moral loneliness.33