This study is an extract of the DLA doctoral thesis entitled Puskin’s Lyric Poetry and the 19th-Century Russian Romance, defended in 2009
(research director: Márta Papp).
1. Introduction
I have the Russian progressive theatre director Anatoly Vasilyev, director of the Moscow School of Dramatic Arts, to thank for my first encounter as a singer with the Russian romance, a unique genre in Russian Romantic song literature.1 I was involved in 1994 for almost six months in rehearsing at the Művész Theater, Budapest (now the Thália) his stage adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novella Uncle’s Dream. One important theatrical element in this was the use of interludes in the form of Russian romances, which I was asked to perform. Years later, Vasilyev’s very sensitive and appropriate selection be-came the basis on which I put together my first song recital in Moscow. Singing songs in Russian to a Russian audience was a great challenge. I was taken by their attentive-ness, the way they followed my performance not critically, as cognoscenti would, but almost as if they were singing along, for they knew the verses by heart. Even now I bear in mind the advice on performance, emphases, and articulation gained from my unknown Moscow listeners.
I am sure these romances, integral to my repertory since the start of my career, can-not be omitted from our cultural perception of Russia, as elements of the Russian self-image. This was my starting point; it was around this theme that I set about weaving the results of several years’ collecting, research, and experience and knowledge gained as a concert performer. This study is intended to be a brief exposition of a vocal genre that has been largely ignored in modern musicology and omitted from the concert scene in Hungary, but it is also a kind of “emotional voyage”, born of a conviction that I can share with others, even outside the concert hall, the joy to be gained from these works.
How come that the romance genre is still so embedded in the entirety of every-day Russian music? What is the integral link between these vocal works and Russian Romantic poetry, along with social and public events in the Russia of the late 18th century and early 19th century? To answer involves finding the root beneath the
in-1 As the Russian genre romance has no precise equivalent term in English, in this writing I use the term romance for the Russian art songs on literary texts.
separability of the Russian music and literature that arose in the early 18th century and deciding to what, if any extent, Russian music became subordinate to literature after the reforms of Tsar Peter the Great. According to Boris Gasparov, in a recent exploration of Russian Romanticism in the light of five great operas, music served to express and strengthen literature’s “intellectual and aesthetic underpinning”.2 It is possible to argue against this view, but there was certainly mutual influence and effect on music and literature, and on each other’s sources and references. The Russian romance is in sep ar-able from Russian identity. As a new, independent, and typical genre of Russian vocal music, it spread rapidly through Europe, and reached Reform-era Hungary, probably through Gypsy musicians.3 Mór Jókai, in an episode entitled “The one great power” in the first chapter of his Novel of the Coming Century, quotes a “dreamy Russian song”:
Over the resounding jubilation came the tune of that beautiful Russian romance, which was being sung in the street: Hermione Peleia’s favourite song:
“The dove addressed the great pine tree:
Shield me well, O trunk of pine, The pine replied then to the dove:
Sit here, live here on these boughs of mine.”
Of the many romances I have performed on the concert platform, the ones closest to my heart are the Pushkin settings. So I was keen to find out what influence the artistry, poetic idiom, and musicality of Pushkin’s works the development of the genre, and how much of a catalyst the social transformation Pushkin himself became in Russian vocal music. Pushkin’s artistry, of course, was not confined to the realm of the ro-mance and cannot be divorced from the whole of Russian music, as his works gave rise also to operas, ballets and symphonic poems, but his lyric poetry is inseparable from the romance genre, for it inspired composers from Dargomyzhsky to Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Schnittke. It linked Russian music in with European traditions, for although Pushkin never traveled outside Russia, the songs set to his verses communi-cated an experience of Europe to Russian audiences. Furthermore, Pushkin is associated with the Russian romance genre not just as a lyricist, but as a collector of song texts in conjunction with his friend Sergey Aleksandrovich Sobolevsky. This volume – thanks
2 Boris Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005), xvii.
3 For more detail see Ferenc Liszt’s A czigányokról és a czigány zenéről Magyarországon [On the Gypsies and Gypsy Music in Hungary – a Hungarian translation of Des Bohémiennes et de leur mu-sique en Hongrie] (Budapest: Magyar Mercurius, 2004); and Bálint Sárosi, A cigányzenekar múltja [The Past of Gypsy Band] (Budapest: Nap, 2004).
to the editing work of the folklorist Pyotr Kireyevsky in 1826 – is an important source for research into Russian folk music.4
Numerous later composers in Russia (including the Soviet era) returned to Pushkin’s verses. The source material is sizable, and so I introduce from the volumi-nous repertory those whose typical – or atypical – nature serve to explain this uniquely toned genre of Russian vocal music. I approach the analysis of Pushkin lyrics from the angle of per form ance. And of the many composers of varying importance, I deal primarily with those who exerted a decisive influence, primarily the compositions of Aleksandr Sergeyvich Dargomyzhsky, which serve to support or illustrate the majority of my observations. Besides personal preference – I was singing Dargomyzhsky ro-mances in the Vasilyev adaptation mentioned initially – there are other reasons for this.
Dargomyzhsky is associated with the development of a new musical idiom in romance and Russian vocal culture, with creating a singing style that paid close attention to the stresses of the text language, and so produced a declamatory style of vocal speech. His oeuvre is not widely known, but his compositional devices were influential precursors to the work of Mussorgsky and Stravinsky.
I received fundamental assistance in writing this study from Márta Papp, who helped to orientate me in the tangled, complex realm of Russian songs. I also thank her for joining János Bojti in enriching Hungarian musicology with extensive and much needed editing work on Mussorgsky’s correspondence and related documents and memoirs,5 knowledge of which, besides providing source material, gives pleasure comparable to that of reading of a great Russian novel. Vasilyev, apart from his artistry, was a profound inspiration to me in my work with Russian romance, both as a singer and as a doctoral student.
2. The antecedents of the Russian romance
Russian literature does not encompass such figures of love as those found in West European literature. We have nothing to compare with the love of the troubadours,
4 Márta Papp, “Orosz népdal – dal – románc” [Russian folk songs, songs, romances], Magyar Zene 44/1 (February 2006), 5–30. This lengthy comparative study of numerous Russian musical an thol-ogies, song publications, and folk song collections, analyzes how peasant folk music and urban folk-lore, village music and city music-making, were drawn into 18th-century Russian vocal music. It is an indispensable source for understanding the antecedents of 18th- and 19th-century folk music, and so I do not deal with these folk music collections here in any detail.
5 Muszorgszkij – Levelek, dokumentumok, emlékezések [Mussorgsky – Letters, documents, reminis-cences], ed. by János Bojti and Márta Papp (Budapest: Kávé, 1997).
with Tristan and Isolde, with Dante and Beatrice, with Romeo and Juliet. […] We did not experience the age of chivalry; there were no troubadours here.6
Of the many linguists, musicologists, anthropologists, and other researchers quoted in this study, almost all seek the Russian romance’s cultural roots in folklore and re-ligious chant. Without taking issue with them specifically, I also see antecedents else-where: in the absence of beauty, love, femininity, and aesthetics, and in discovery of this hiatus. I see in the want of a cult of love described in the quotation from Berdyaev that heads this section, and in its unexpectedly powerful emergence, contributors to an ethos that spans the social periods and art trends of the Russian romance. The advent of national Romanticism brought an explosive transformation to Russian society and culture. No age of chivalry though there may have been, the embourgeoisement of society was sudden enough. Alongside all this social change, the arts and culture re-generated with remarkable speed, despite the transition from the Middle Ages to the new era taking place in Russia without the Renaissance or Reformation that played such important roles in cultural renewal in the countries of Western Europe. Russia’s secular culture turned both “western” and “national”; it used all it learned from Europe, but in language, choice of theme and unique approach, it remained uniquely Russian.
Berdyaev called this circumstance the secret of “The Soul of Russia”. This vocal genre with antecedents so different from European music tradition beat a kind of path toward European modernity.
Russia, due to its cultural milieu, traditions of history, philosophy and literature, own brand of mysticism, and tardy emergence of literacy, was deprived for centuries of depictions of nature and of everyday emotional relations and human feelings. In a word, it was deprived of the beauty that the culture of the West (and even the Far East) had been depicting boldly since the 11th and 12th centuries. In neither specific nor allegorical depiction is beauty or its relationship present: beauty such as woman, the female soul (dusha), and others that in Russian are feminine in gender and embody beauty, such as love (lyubov), nature (priroda), landscape (myestnost), moon (loona), star (zvyezda), hope (nadyezhda), farewell (razlooka), regret (toska), joy (radost), etc.
And as I list these words, they already take shape as a song: “Ya pomnyoo val’sa, zvook pryelyestny” [In my ears rings the waltz, sweet melody], and as the opening lines of a popular waltz romance by Listov, one suited to the subject.
6 Nikolai Berdyaev, Dosztojevszkij világszemlélete [The world outlook of Dostoyevsky], transl. by István Baán (Budapest: Európa, 1993), 256.
3. Roots in Slav mythology and Russian folk music
An examination of the principal figures in Slavic mythology and Old Russian literature, and Eastern Slav folk poetry, appears to confirm that beauty did not serve as a model, that depiction of it was absent from the outset in Russian cultural history, along with the female idol and the figure of the woman in love. Although the concept of duality, Rod i Rodici, is a basic principle in Eastern Slav mythology, the only important goddess found is Mokos, the Earth Mother. She was worshiped across the centuries, and in the later Orthodox liturgy the ritual of prostration survived, while the figure of the goddess subsisted in the cult of the martyred Paraskeva (as almost the only important female figure in the Eastern Slav church, apart from the Virgin Mary), worshiped as the patron saint of the home and soil, and later of merchants, and a surviving tradition to this day.
Russian folk poetry only contributes tangentially to Russian romance. Though love motifs are found in the courtship games (gorelki) of folk tradition, which later returned in Romantic literature,7 the influential genre of folk poetry, the bilina,8 deals more with monumental and heroic themes. In Russian epics, the songs are about male valor and heroic battles. Jesters are not the amorous heroes of European cultures, who are neither troubadours nor bards. By the same token, there is a characteristic formal element of the grotesque, mockery and satire in certain bilina and stories. These return later in the russkaya pesnya, the narodnaya pesnya, and a class of romances. Thematically the closest to the romance are Russian folklore lyrics (work songs, convict and sol-dier songs, love songs), especially the emotionally drenched love songs that resemble Hungarian folk poetry in expressing feelings in nature metaphors and visual contrasts (often bird symbols). From these songs derive the bird metaphors (cuckoo, nightingale, swan, falcon) popularly used in the romance. Another precursor are the short songs called kolyadka linked to myths and beliefs about heavenly bodies: the sun and stars.
After 988, when Prince Vladimir I made Byzantine Christianity the religion of the Old Russian Empire, the genre of sacred song, church folk songs, the dukhovniye pesnyi developed. In these medieval songs, which frequently take dialog form, can be discerned an element also present in the romance: repetition and its cumulative effect, as one of the stylistic hallmarks of Russian culture, irrespective of genre. Ritual repeti-tion marks the Orthodox Church liturgy and the pictorial iconostasis as well.
The first major secular work – also important to an account of the origin of the romance – is the 12th-century Song of Igor’s Campaign, concerning battles with the
no-7 Turgenyev in his play A Month in the Country quotes a gorelki as a love-song: “No flame flickers, no ember boils, / But my fiery heart burns and boils for a maiden so fair.”
8 Bilina spread through oral Slav folklore as remarkable creations. The word bity (to be) comes from the past tense of them. They incorporate historical hymns, legends, ballads and stories about heroes of the past, like Greek mythology, in the language of story-telling and in remarkably detailed and varied forms.
madic people around Kiev. The natural images and dirges of the epic survive in copies and exerted great influence on Russian poetry in the first half of the 19th century, and to these Russian Romanticism often returns. The traditions of folk and secular poetry merge well in the opening lines of this brief extract from the Song of Igor, Yaroslavna’s Lament fuses:
a Dunae Jaroslavnin golos slyshitsya kukushkoyu bezvesnoju rano kukut
“Polechu”, – govorit, – “kukushkoyu, po Dunaju…”9
By the Danube Yaroslavna’s voice is heard, Like an unknown cuckoo cuckooing wide:
“I will fly”, she weeps, “like a cuckoo bird By the Danube side…”
Both folk songs and religious chants speak unreservedly about beauty, be it an image or instance of nature, sexuality, femininity or even liturgical sanctity. Only the lyrical songs deal typically with gladness and sorrow, building their metaphors on par-allels and contrasts, but not even the outbursts and onomatopoeia of the wealth of 16th-century madrigal literature in Europe can be found in these songs, most of them sung in unison. For anyone who knows the often exaggerated, overwritten, even musical cliché-ridden world of the Russian romance and Romanticism with its music overflow-ing with emotion, in fact to the extent of it often beoverflow-ing “over the top” finds it hard to fathom how all this could have been absent, or only faintly visible in Russian culture for century after century. This cannot be ascribed only to the centralized power struc-ture and insular church, or the complete lack of secular culstruc-ture and education, which restricted tastes and aspirations, for Russian culture, right up to the reforms of Peter the Great, defined its identity purely in its own terms. In the 16th-century centralized Russian state of Ivan the Terrible, world culture – by then enriched in music and lit-erature with countless works of troubadour poetry and chivalrous epics and arriving at such genres as the sonnet, frottola and madrigal – was represented only by translations.
Only in 1547 was the first important Russian secular work published: The Tale of Peter and Fevroniya of Murom, a tragic love narrative on the lines of Abélard and Héloïse.10
9 By an unknown poet.
10 The tragic 11th-century story of Pierre Abélard, a creator of French scholasticism, and of the
edu-cated Héloïse, was popular as a literary theme among contemporaries and among later writers and poets. The Russian poem in English: “Peter and Fevronia of Murom”, in S. Zenskovsky: Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (New York: Meridian, 1974).
4. Social and literary turning point
Russia at the beginning of the 17th century, despite significant modernization, remained an isolated world. It had to wait for that century’s Raskolnikov movements for any dem oc ra tiza tion of culture: for works about beauty, love, passion and desire as opposed to religious moral philosophy. The religious and social struggles that ended the Russian Middle Ages brought also the publication of world literature and poetry. This intellec-tual rejuvenation is inseparable from the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1696–1725), who made radical attempts to integrate Russia into European culture. This was the first time since Russia had adopted the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium that there was an opening up to outside culture. Peter flouted cultural and religious traditions, confronted the church establishment, and chose Europe. This “open a window on Europe” move-ment (v Evropu prorubity okno)11 led to such important intellectual results as reform of the Russian church and creation of the Academy.
This reform, which we might term an “intercultural dialogue” today, brought also a renewal of music. The use of musical instruments had been forbidden in the Orthodox Church liturgy and there were no trained performers or composers of instrumental music in Russia. As with architecture and the visual arts, Peter invited Italian, French and German masters to his court. These composers not only raised musical life to a fresh level, but informed Europe of their experiences in Russia and exported news of Russian culture, which had been effectively unknown in the West. Interestingly, the first musical expression of Russian identity came from such foreign composers work-ing in Russia (among them Domenico Dall’Oglio, Luigi Madonis, Reinhardt Keiser), who used folk music elements in instrumental works on Russian themes. The court of Peter the Great and then of Catherine II the Great (1762–1796) became important artis-tic centers. By the mid-18th century, the country had gain twin intellectual centers, St.
Petersburg and Moscow, which are still rivals to this day. Catherine paid great attention to culture – she herself wrote verse – and lavishly supported new literary and musi-cal initiatives. This was the era when Russia first appeared on Europe’s intellectual scene, escaping out of centuries of isolation. Compositions by Paisiello, Cimarosa and Galuppi, all guests at the court of the Tsar, began to inspire Russian composers as well.
Under Catherine the Great, the situation of women also changed. Russian women assumed a role as true custodians of intellectual education, familiar to us from the hero-ines of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy, without which the 20th-century artistry of Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Ahmatova, Sofia Gubaidulina and Ludmilla Ulickaya could not have arisen. Aristocratic women learned languages, became familiar with Western culture, and attained considerable musical ability as well. They inspired Russian poets as muses emboldening them with their love or torturing them through their
indiffer-11 “Open a window on Europe” – phrase from the poem by Alexander Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”.