St Petersburg полностью

Borodin’s music, including his three powerful symphonies, two string quartets, exquisite in beauty and inspiration, and a few lovely art songs, did not win great popularity in the West. In America, Borodin is best known through the musical Kismet, which was based on his melodies. Prince Igor is staged relatively infrequently, even though the Polovtsian dances, choreographed by Michel Fokine, which created a sensation in Diaghilev’s Paris season of 1909, are familiar to lovers of ballet. But Borodin had a marked influence on Western musical professionals, especially the French impressionists. Both Debussy and Ravel were enchanted with his exotic melodies and unusual harmonic idiom. For the Western ear Borodin’s Orientalism is the most significant and interesting aspect of his legacy.

But for Russian audiences, what is essential in Borodin—his opera and his symphonies, especially the second, the “Bogatyr”—is his patriotic appeal. This was confirmed yet again during World War II, which the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. In those years the most popular opera, overshadowing both Mussorgsky and the eternal favorite, Tchaikovsky, was Prince Igor, along with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, renamed Ivan Susanin, an epiclike and triumphant tale of the exploits of a Russian warrior and his passionate love of his homeland.

If Borodin can be called the leading proponent—in terms of talent and significance—of the imperial idea in Russian music, then Tchaikovsky comes immediately behind him. Such a coupling may seem unlikely only at first glance. After all, Tchaikovsky is a true child of Petersburg, the most imperial of imperial cities.

Boris Asafyev, the most perspicacious Russian specialist on Tchaikovsky, while insisting that only two great Russian cultural figures had felt at home in Petersburg—Pushkin and Dostoyevsky—would immediately add a third name: Tchaikovsky. In Petersburg the young Tchaikovsky graduated from law school with the title titular councillor, then served for over three years in the Ministry of Justice, living the typical life of a young clerk in the capital.

Like his friends, Titular Councillor Tchaikovsky spent his days properly writing draft resolutions on legal cases and his evenings strolling like a dandy along Nevsky Prospect, stopping at fashionable restaurants. He regularly attended dance halls, was an avid theatergoer, and enjoyed bachelor parties. Delighted by Petersburg society, Tchaikovsky announced, “I admit I have a great weakness for the Russian capital. What can I do? I’ve become too much a part of it. Everything that is dear to my heart is in Petersburg, and life without it is positively impossible for me.”68

Tchaikovsky’s career was progressing swiftly at the Ministry of Justice, and he soon became a court councillor. It came as a great surprise for many of his relatives when in 1862 Tchaikovsky’s name was listed among the first students of the capital’s conservatory, founded by Anton Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky’s uncle, a highly proper gentleman, was embarrassed: “What a shame! To trade jurisprudence for a honker!”

His studies at the Petersburg conservatory made Tchaikovsky a real musical professional. But not only that. Introducing him to European principles and forms of organizing musical material, the conservatory training also gave the young composer a sense of belonging to world culture. This feeling became very important for Tchaikovsky’s relations with Petersburg, since it saved the composer from the traditional conflicts with the city’s cosmopolitan spirit, which were almost inescapable at that time in the circles of the artistic elite.

Becoming the bard of St. Petersburg was more natural and easier for the worldly Tchaikovsky than for any other Russian composer after Glinka. Petersburg was a musical melting pot. Italian tunes were whistled on Nevsky Prospect, and a few steps away one could hear an organ grinder playing a Viennese ländler. The emperor liked French operas, but there was also a tradition at the court, dating back to Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, to invite singers from the Ukraine to Petersburg.

Tchaikovsky soaked up the capital’s music like a sponge: Italian arias from the stage of the imperial theater, French ditties and cancans, the solemn marches of military parades, and the sensuous waltzes that had conquered aristocratic Petersburg. The popular, melancholy Petersburg lieder called romansy held a special sway over Tchaikovsky’s imagination. They were beautiful, darkly erotic flowers that grew in fashionable salons after a complex cross-fertilization of Russian folk tunes and Italian arias. Glinka and a group of Russian amateur composers had worked over the creation of this strange and attractive hybrid. Spicy notes of anguish and passion, borrowed from Gypsy songs that filled Petersburg at that time, were added to their refined creations.