St Petersburg полностью

All these works have in common the composer’s persistent, almost fanatical desire to conquer new musical territory and revolutionize musical language. By “cross-breeding” music with prose, not poetic texts as had been the custom, these works produced sometimes shocking, though ultimately deeply satisfying, results. More important, the composers’ very approach to their themes was refreshingly unorthodox, without reliance on traditional postromantic effects. In these respects, all these operas could count The Stone Guest and The Marriage as their forerunners.

At the same time, The Stone Guest’s music served as a model for Russian lyrical dramatic recitative, construed as closely as possible to cantilena (usually not the case with Italian recitative). Dargomyzhsky’s opera was built as an unbroken line of miniature ariosos and monologues. This device gave a powerful impetus to structural experiments in Russian opera. As for The Marriage, it was the first extended work to develop satirical, grotesque musical language, with all its jolting contrasts and exaggerations, when the composer, in the best Russian-Petersburg tradition, mocks his characters but at the same time “weeps” over them. Taking into account all these aspects, we see how Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich are all deeply indebted to Dargomyzhsky and Mussorgsky.

The rich musical life of Petersburg in the 1860s and 1870s, attracting ever more participants and larger audiences, was defined by a strident conflict between two seemingly unequal forces. The camp of the Imperial Russian Musical Society and the Petersburg Conservatory was headed by the capricious Anton Rubinstein. To counterbalance their Western-oriented and, in the opinion of the young nationalists of the Five, decidedly anti-Russian direction, the other dictator, Balakirev, founded his own educational organization, called “Free Music School.”

At Balakirev’s school not only were the basics of music taught free of charge to poor students, clerks, and craftsmen, but regular concerts were given with programs consisting primarily of works by the Five. However, Balakirev and his friends had trouble competing with the Russian Musical Society, because the participation of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (“the muse Euterpe,” as she was called by admirers and foes alike, owing to her role as august patroness) gave Rubinstein access to a constant and generous imperial subsidy.

Trapped in the vise of an exhausting financial deficit, Balakirev and his circle found release in cursing Rubinstein along the lines of “Stupinstein.” They did not eschew anti-Semitic cracks, either. The wounded Rubinstein complained, “Sad is my lot, no one considers me his own. In my homeland I am ‘kike,’ in Germany I am a Russian, in England, I’m Herr Rubinstein, everywhere a stranger.”37

In his battle with the hated Russian Musical Society, Balakirev even used the advice of a Petersburg fortune-teller who was in love with him, “a real witch,” according to Rimsky-Korsakov. Cui attacked the “conservatives” in his music column in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, an influential newspaper. The most radical member of the “Balakirev party,” Mussorgsky, was mobilized to help by composing a rather mean musical parody called Rayok (The Peepshow), in which he mocked the enemies of the Mighty Five, including “Euterpe” Elena Pavlovna.*

The life and work of Mussorgsky is woven from paradoxes. The composer resembled one of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Many of his confused views and tastes were formed by the idealism of the radical youth of the 1860s in Petersburg.

It was in Petersburg, in May 1855, right after the death of Nicholas I, that the twenty-six-year-old Nikolai Chernyshevsky published his influential booklet, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” with its basic thesis, “the beautiful is life.” This became the guiding motto of the sixties generation. According to Chernyshevsky, true art re-creates reality in the forms of life itself and at the same time is a “textbook of life.” In other words, art must be “realistic” and “progressive,” actively participating in the political struggle, the final goal of which is revolution and a specifically Russian socialism that somehow does not resemble the Western models.

An even more radical critic, Dmitri Pisarev, also an idol of Petersburg youth, rejected the very meaning of art. In his opinion the only thing that art might be good for was to depict “the suffering of the starving majority, to dwell on the causes of that suffering, constantly to draw society’s attention to economic and social issues.”