St Petersburg полностью

It was Golovin, who had the ear of even high-placed bureaucrats, who got Meyerhold into the imperial theaters. Now, questioning the great singer casually about his recent triumph in Paris—Chaliapin had stunned the French with his Boris Godunov in the production brought to France by Diaghilev, with scenery by Golovin—the artist swiftly sketched Holofernes with charcoal on a large canvas, while his scenery for the next premiere dried in a corner beside them. In 1967, in the same place, I saw the scenery, painted in the lacquerbox style of Palekh folk artists, drying for Yakobson’s forthcoming adventurous ballet, Wonderland. Golovin’s portrait of Chaliapin as Holofernes had been hanging for many years by then in a place of honor at the Tretyakov Gallery, the country’s most famous museum of Russian art.

Wednesdays and Sundays were ballet days at the Maryinsky. In 1908 Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky starred in the productions of the twenty-eight-year-old Michel Fokine. In one night could be seen two of Fokine’s most innovative works, his one-act Egyptian Nights and Chopiniana, a plotless wonder that later became famous in the West under the title Les Sylphides. The court balletomanes sniffed: even ballet, that holy of holies, was being taken over by the nasty modernists! They had to put up with it, for Nijinsky and Pavlova were just wonderful, air and champagne! Of course, Fokine could create a real dance, if he tried. Have you seen his “Dying Swan?” A lovely piece and Pavlova is incomparable in it. They say she is off on her first European tour. Petersburg won’t be the same without her….

But not everyone, after all, was crazy about the ballet alone. Petersburg’s snobs attended the refined concerts of the avant-garde circle, called “Evenings of Contemporary Music.” This association could be considered the musical branch of Mir iskusstva; connoisseurs met in small hallways to sample the latest musical morsel from Paris, Berlin, or some Scandinavian capital.

In December 1908, the forty-fifth concert of the Evenings of Contemporary Music, in the hall of the Reformation School, presented the debut of a seventeen-year-old student of the Petersburg Conservatory, Sergei Prokofiev. “Touchy, clumsy, and ugly” in Nathan Milstein’s words,5 Prokofiev at the piano looked even younger than he was. The reviewer of the reputable newspaper Rech was rather sympathetic: “The author, a young student who interpreted his own music, is undoubtedly talented, but his harmonies are often strange and even bizarre and thus go beyond the bounds of the beautiful.”6

At that same concert the Petersburg audience, among whom was the twenty-six-year-old Igor Stravinsky, heard for the first time the music of Petersburger Nikolai Myaskovsky, another conservatory student. The know-it-alls compared Myaskovsky’s three settings of the “decadent” poems of Zinaida Hippius with the vocal works of Stravinsky, who was becoming quite famous, heard at Evenings of Contemporary Music last year. Well, Myaskovsky’s works were probably more refined and mature than the sweet but naive attempts of Stravinsky, who was much too influenced by his teacher, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov….

Rimsky-Korsakov, that master of Russian music, had died recently, in June 1908, from heart paralysis. Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky’s friend and mentor in the Evenings of Contemporary Music, who was called the arbiter of the arts by the modernists, liked to say, “I feel that the sooner Rimsky-Korsakov dies the better for Russian music. His enormous figure oppresses the young and keeps them from taking new paths.”7 Just in May Prokofiev had seen Rimsky-Korsakov in the hallway of the conservatory and noted somewhat wistfully in his diary, “I looked at him and thought—there he is, a man who has achieved true success and fame!”8 And in August Stravinsky was writing to Rimsky-Korsakov’s widow, “If you only knew how I share your terrible grief, how I feel the loss of the endlessly dear and beloved Nikolai Andreyevich!”9

Stravinsky asked the widow of his teacher to help him have performed his “Funeral Song” for wind instruments, op. 5, which he wrote with incredible speed. It was dedicated to the memory of Rimsky-Korsakov. The widow pulled strings and Stravinsky’s tribute would be played in Petersburg in early 1909 in a special memorial concert….