song as an expression of national identity
8. The literary content and musical traits of the romance
The romance as a song form involves a continual weave of text and music, with senti-ments being described through the union between them, but the genre cannot be as-sociated with any single typical verse form; it possesses a definitive, individual sound realm of its own. The syllabic Slavic languages are not renowned for metrical verse, so that verses gain their meter and inner rhythms from the sound pattern (of course alter-nation of stressed and unstressed syllables can create in the language constructs that are equivalent to the feet of metrical verse), which Igor Smirnov termed verse sonority.25 Naturally this does not imply an absence in the lyrics of pathos-laden hexameters or lamenting anapaests. It just means that rhythmic “scansion” is not a unique property of the language, and the rhythm “deviates” frequently.26 When heard as a romance, the textual character comes to the fore because it is linked to music: the rhythm of thought and enjambement is easily “singable”. The romance is a manner of speaking: making prose out of poetry through music (among other factors).
So the special character of the genre lies in choice of themes and use of poetic and musical elements. One typical poetic device is introspection, a metaphoric and al-legoric mode of expression with associative comparisons and repeated duality (earth and sky, here and there, inside and out, far and near), desires and hopes, frank commu-nication of overwhelming emotions, and idealized description of daily life and natural landscape. These are classed below in ten major groups based on utilized poetic devices and subject-matter, but the categories are not rigid or exclusive.27
24 Papp, “Orosz népdal”.
25 Igor Smirnov, Úton az irodalom elmélete felé [Towards the theory of literature] (Budapest: Helikon,
1999), 133. Quoted by Kornélia Horváth, “A verselméletről és egy Puskin versről” [On verse theory and a Puskhin poem], in Puskintól Tolsztojig, 41.
26 This is the term coined by the Polish literary scholar Jerzy Faryno for such twists of rhythmic
direc-tion.
27 The literary scholar Thomas P. Hodge likewise analyzed in a comprehensive work the Russian art
song and 19th-century Russian poetry itself in a comprehensive work, but he did not create similarly strict classes. Thomas P. Hodge, A Double Garland: Poetry and Music in Early 19th-Century Russia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 66–107.
Type 1
First place goes indisputably to works of poetic passion, about love, fidelity and male friendship but it includes songs about unhappy memories of broken relationships, as well as elegies, epitaphs and laments. A typical formal element is the strophic use of refrains. One fine example of a lyrical romance with simple harmonization is Dargomyzhsky’s strophic “Ya vas lyubil” [I Loved You], setting a sorrowful verse by Pushkin. Here – and in Russian romance literature this compositional device is fre-quent – the composer arbitrarily adapts the verse as well, repeating the final line to heighten emotion and act as a kind of refrain, and using dynamic and tempo changes to indicate the style of performance.
Ya vas lyubil bezmolvno, beznadezhno, To robost’yu, to revnost’yu tomim;
Ya vas lyubil tak iskrenno, tak nezhno, Kak day vam Bog, lyubimoy byt’ drugim.
I loved you mutely, of hope shorn, oppressed, First calmly, then jealously spilled –
In devotion I loved and in tenderness:
God grant others’ love be so filled!
One small alteration, freer treatment of the text, a four-line verse extended to five – this well exemplifies how naturally Russian art song alters a literary text. The linguis-tic and verse features mentioned permit this, leaving the literary work augmented and unimpaired.
There is a wealth of romances to be placed in this category, in many of which the influence of Italian bel canto, the Italian cantilena, can be sensed, not least due to a marked presence of Italian composers in Russia. The ingratiating tunefulness of many songs of this type made them popular hits, perhaps the best-known being Dargomyzhsky’s setting of a Baratinsky verse, “Poceluy” [Kiss], whose use of ritar-dando and stresses on word and melody become a stereotype of the passionate, man-nered Russian salon-romance (Example 1).28
28 The classical musicological verdict on the Russian romance is unclear, in part because the
emo-tional, “popular” melodies of Russian songs often turned them into international hits. An example is a setting of the “Dorogoy dlinnoyu” by Podrevsky, which became familiar in 1968, in an arrange-ment by Gene Raskin, as the pop song “Those Were the Days”. By a similar convoluted path, the Dmitriev romance of 1793, “My Little Gray Turtle-dove” was arranged by Prokofiev for his score for Aleksander Faintsimmer’s 1934 film Lieutenant Kijé and for his suite op. 60. This melody was to be used by Sting on his 1985 album The Dream of the Blue Turtles in his famous anti-Cold War song, “Russians”.
Type 2
Another typical subject in the period, and so in romances, was to communicate the sense of being a “superfluous person”, made famous by Lermontov. This sense of bore-dom and quiet, sorrowful resignation, is not uniquely Russian, though a stereotype. It is more a spirit of the age (familiar from Byron, Baudelaire and others), even if there is no doubt that it is also characteristic of the “Russian soul” and became part of Russian self-awareness. This Slavonic “otherness” was formulated in 1832 in an untitled verse by Lermontov:
Example 1: Dargomyzhsky, Poceluy, bars 1–12
Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy, Eshhe nevedomy izbrannik, Kak on, gonimy mirom strannik, No tol’ko s russkoyu dushoy.
No, I am no Byron; I part:
In the unknown path I tread I’m like him ill-used by fate, But in me beats a Russian heart.
One of the most beautiful examples of the Russian romance is another Lermontov verse, “I skuchno i grustno” [I am weary and sad] as set by Dargomyzhsky. This medi-tative soliloquy and its melodic course precisely reflect the dynamics and structure of the verse. The slow, melancholy, upward melody, with a plaintive, Phrygian-style upbeat leads into the lines “I skuchno i grustno, i nekomu/ruku poda’” [I am weary and sad! – No one will ever / hold your hand] appears in text-like sixteenth notes in the music. The words zhelan’ya [desires], lyubit’ [to love], radost’ [joy], muki [tortures]
are exclamatory sighs of hope, with a rising-falling intonation, and they are depicted syllable by syllable, with marcato quasi-stage instructions or “commentaries” that steer us back to reality: “vse luchshie gody” [the best years], “kak posmotrish’” [if you look around], “glupaya shutka” [stupid joke]. The composer emphasizes the resignation of the line “i vse tam nichtozhna” [and everything is meaningless] that closes the second verse section with a great descending ritardando. This is the most moving part of the song, denoting utter resignation once the euphoria of passion has fled and life becomes no more than an “empty, stupid joke”.29
Type 3
Inseparable from the history of the period (indeed from the modern history of Russia) are persecution, imprisonment, exile and homesickness. Institutional censorship was a powerful presence. Publication bans and exile were the lot of many exponents of the arts, philosophers, and officials, not just the famous “Caucasian Prisoner” Pushkin, or Lermontov, banished to the Caucasus himself for writing a verse about Pushkin’s. Such an experience lay behind many works, among them Pushkin’s 1822 verse “Uznik” [The Prisoner]. In 1843 Alyabyev turned this into a harsh-toned song that underlined the
29 György Kurtág made an exceptionally thoughtful and musical setting of this verse as the first
move-ment of his 1994 choral work Songs of Despair and Sorrow op. 18. For more detail see Márta Papp,
“A csüggedés és keserűség dalai. Kurtág György kórusciklusáról” [Songs of despair and sorrow:
On György Kurtág’s choral cycle], Muzsika 44/2 (February 2001), 5–11. (Part 1), and 44/3 (March 2001), 26–30 (Part 2).
Example 2: Dargomyzhsky, I skuchno i grustno, bars 1–18
rebellion of the prisoners with a repeated forte in the last line of each verse. The same verse was set later by Anton Rubinstein, probably under the influence of his musical studies in Germany, as its style approaches that of German Romanticism. The opening melody is reminiscent of the folk song settings of Mendelssohn and Schumann, and its central section, with dreams of freedom – “My vol’nye pticy; pora, brat, pora!” [We are free as birds, let us fly!] and sequences of hammering triplets, of Schubert’s “Erlkönig”.
Type 4
National feelings brought forth by political and social conditions encouraged romances that told of Slavic heroism and noble struggles. A big role in this was played by the patriotic war against Napoleon, which inspired plaintive soldiers’ songs. Glinka re-juvenated the Russian song, and notably its patriotic vocal works, primarily through the new musical idiom he spread with his rhythmic forms of the text, his treatment of tempo, and his transposition of folk song elements, although his works also bear traits of European Classicism and early Romanticism, and operatic hallmarks: the sonata form, rondo themes, and the use of the melodic aria and cavatina as self-contained songs. A favored subject of his songs and romances – and of both his operas, A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, despite their story background – is the heroic struggle of the Russian people.
The strophic romance Virtus Antique, written in 1840, creates pathos, although it is a little shrill with its 44 meter, the piano and voice moving in unison, and sharp rhythms imitating the beating of drums. It was written to verses by Nestor Kukol’nik as the ninth of twelve-part song cycle, Proshchaniye s Peterburgom [Farewell to St. Petersburg], and bears the subtitle Rycarsky romans [chivalrous romance]. It tells of the de ter min-ation of a knight setting off for the Holy Land but wanting to return back home. To be found in the romance are melodic fragments of the heroic theme in Ruslan’s second act aria (the composer was already working on the opera at the time). Glinka’s set of ro-mances for soprano/mezzo-soprano, bass, and chorus (along with Alyabyev’s triptych Farewell to the Nightingale) is one of the first song cycles in Russian music history.
Although Glinka did not name it as such, the identical lyrical language (and that of the poetic verses) and the choice of themes evoked the construction of the great Romantic cycles, even though there remains a marked difference between Glinka’s set and similar ones by Schubert and Schumann, with their themes of farewell, separation and return.
With Glinka the melodies were written first and the texts completed later by Kukol’nik.
But Glinka’s melodies are effective without texts, and the majority are played enthu-siastically by instrumental soloists. The educated Count Vladimir Odoyevski, whose salon in St. Petersburg was visited by Liszt, had this to say of him:
As was the habit of Mikhail Ivanovich, the melody was ready before the text.
What can I say? A wealth of musical ideas spilled onto the paper from his splendid
fingers, where his ideas seemingly continued to develop on their own, to blossom, and to be reborn…30
The 1842 Dargomyzhsky song setting of Pushkin’s very early (1815) verse “Sleza”
[Tears] is a fine narration with an intimate tone, describing the laments of lonely, home-sick soldiers. Its musical setting – unlike the great majority of early melodic romances, where the piano accompanies with simple triads and chords and the vocal melody pro-vides the variety, is notable for the way Dargomyzhsky gives the piano the decision role in the song, which makes it more comparable with Mussorgsky’s. In the romance, divided into five strophes, the vocal part monotonously tells the story in a musical question-and-answer format, to a uniform rhythm, while exceptionally varied material is heard from the piano. The song opens with a long, descending chromatic progres-sion above a tonic pedal in the piano bass, which returns as an interlude between the strophes (Example 3). Despite its extended rhythms, the first motif begins weightlessly in sixteenth notes, so that the melodic stress is different from that of the vocal line, which enters later (and the melodic progression begins with a sixteenth-note upbeat) and is rhythmically contrasted to it. During the vocal line, the piano plays brief chords,
30 Vladimir Odoyevski, “Dva pisma 1892–93”, in Slifstein, Glinka i Pushkin (Moszkva: GMI,
1950), 85.
Example 3: Dargomyzhsky, Sleza, bars 1–9
except in the lento third-verse section, where the vocal line becomes emphatic and the piano prepares the way with triads for the singer’s plaintive exclamation: “Gusar! uzh net yiyo so mnoyu!” [Hussar, my beloved is not with me!] Dargomyzhsky emphatically repeats the final lines of the first, second and fifth verse sections with forte-piano dy-namic alternations as the usual formal element.
Type 5
With foreigners arriving in the country in increasing numbers and the experiences of an increasing number of the Russian aristocracy traveling abroad, many romances focus on foreign peoples, journeys, and exotic folk customs. A popular theme was the Mediterranean and the exoticism of Italy and Spain, but there are many songs also about Gypsies and about people from the East. As Márta Papp put it:
[…] Eastern color in Russian music is neither an outward effect, nor a decadent hut for the exotic, but an integral part of the music: it has a folk conception – it feeds on the music of the neighboring Eastern and South-eastern peoples belonging to the Russian empire of that time.31
Dargomyzhsky set many verses about the sun-drenched South. Let us compare his setting of a Shirkov verse and a work with a similar theme, Laura’s romance, from his opera based on a Pushkin text, The Stone Guest (Act 1, Scene 2). (In the latter two Spanish romances are heard, both sung by Laura. They are the only self-contained numbers in the opera, the rest of which is parlando or spoken.)
The first two lines of the Shirkov verse are:
Odelas’ tumanami Sierra-Nevada Volnami igraet kristal’niy Henil’.
The mist is down on Sierra Nevada, The crystal Genil plays with the waves.
The interlude song written to Pushkin’s verse “The Stone Guest” starts:
Odelas’ tumanom Grenada vsjo dremlet vokrug.
Granada is swimming in mist Around it everything dozes.
31 Márta Papp, “Glinka: Ruszlán és Ludmilla – A hét zeneműve (1984)” [radio broadcast: Ruslan and
Lyudmilla, musical work of the week]. <http://www.mr3-bartok.hu> (8 December 2007).
The subtitle of the Shirkov romance is “Bolero”, and the piano introduces its mel-ody with trilled ornamentation and a characteristic 34 Spanish dance rhythm. The ro-mance has an A–B–Bv–A structure, with the bolero returning at the end in the tempo of the opening Allegro. The two central verse sections are constructed on identical mu-sical material, but their tempi alternate fast and slow. The piano accompaniment, in contrast to the bolero’s rhythmic chords, has legato broken chords. Although the theme is identical, the musical formulation of the romance heard in Laura’s evening party in The Stone Guest differs strongly. The meter is still a dancing 34, but there is no trace of rattling sixteenth notes or runs. The melody progresses in an even dance step in the piano and in the vocal part, consistently reflecting the textual emphases of the verse.
Broadening the melody every four bars is a characteristic Andalusian seguidilla, while the theme of the piano introduction is a melody from Glinka’s famous orchestral ca-priccio, Yota Aragonesa (cf. Examples 4 and 5).
Songs about Gypsies were also popular. Folk-poetry sources and song collections held many Gypsy songs, but the theme was only taken up in literature in 1824 by Pushkin, in his narrative poem “Cygany”, [Gypsies] which was not published until 1827. However, it is very important in Russian song as well. Zemfira, the Gypsy girl and female protagonist, sings two songs in the work. The first is a sorrowful bird song:
Ptichka bozhiya ne znayet / Ni zaboty, ni truda [Look at God’s bird, / no cares, no sor-rows]. The second, Stary muzh, grozny muzh [You are a monster, old friend] was based on a Moldavian folk song. Pushkin’s work became one of the romance texts most often set, with over twenty composers producing songs out of it. The text is important as a precursor to the romance parodies associated with Dargomirzhsky. The song was made popular by Mikhail Vielgorsky32 who published the Pushkin text in 1825 (two years be-fore Pushkin’s own publication) in the Moscow Telegraph with his own harmonization.
Of the better known composers, it was set by Vertovsky in 1832, Gurilyov in 1849, Alyabyev in 1860 and Rubinstein in 1868.
Type 6
Travel experiences led to evocation of specific regions. Descriptions of times of day, seasons, and natural phenomena are linked to various landscape descriptions. These are pleasingly fused in a Dargomyzhsky romance setting of the Pushkin verse men-tioned earlier, “Nochnoy zefir” [Nocturnal Zephyr]. The 68 rondo theme (Example 6) with its A–B–A–C–A form, rich in acoustic and “visual” musical images, is a broad vocal legato, a musical imitation of an undulating river disturbed by nocturnal breezes in the moonlight. The theme is introduced by fast broken triads in sixteenth notes in the
32 His name is familiar from Liszt bibliographies. Liszt’s farewell concert of his first concert tour in
Russia was held in Vielgorsky’s St Petersburg salon on 16 May 1842, at which Glinka was present.