You can read some of the historical background of the Russian Revolution in the first post, here - and about Tchaikovsky's quartet and the Tsar who ruled Russia at the time of its composition, here. The final post will be about Shostakovich and his quartet, but historically focusing on his life as a student during the time of the Revolution.The final post concerns the lives of both Glazunov and Shostakovich in the years leading up to and immediately following the October Revolution.
Join us for the concert on Saturday night, 8pm, at Market Square Church, with a pre-concert talk at 7:15 by Dr. Truman Bullard who specializes in Russian music.
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| Glazunov in 1887 |
Like many of his generation, he is overshadowed on one hand by the fame of his teachers, especially Rimsky-Korsakov, and on the other by the fame of his students, particularly Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Yet in Russia in his day, he was regarded as a major composer, a prodigy who'd written his first symphony when he was 16, the darling of the nationalists until he became too much a cosmopolitan academic. Today, his ballet “The Seasons” survives in a dance world starved for works from the Golden Age of the Russian Imperial Ballet, his Violin Concerto (once very popular) is still occasionally heard in the concert hall, though in this country few of his symphonies or string quartets are ever dusted off.
In light of this program, presenting music before and after the Revolution, it is interesting to note that while Glazunov's career straddled the Revolution, he was unable to be very productive as far as helping the new regime establish its own musical style. He was regarded as a relic of the Imperial past and considered incapable of understanding the new music that would be needed to shape this new culture.
Glazunov's style is usually regarded as a mix of his mentors' nationalism with a dash of the romantic aura of Orientalism (perhaps most famous in Rimsky-Korsakoff's “Scheherezade”) combined with the cosmopolitan absorption of Western European elements also heard in Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky that in itself became more of a mash-up of Liszt on the one hand and Mendelssohn on the other.
The Novelettes by Glazunov are a suite of five pieces composed in 1886, around the time he wrote his 2nd Symphony which he dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt and then began his 3rd String Quartet. Even the title, Novelettes, strike one as old-fashioned.
“Novelettes” is a title straight out of Schumann, who'd died 30 years earlier – short pieces inspired by something vaguely literary, along with the “ballades” of Chopin or Schumann's short character pieces inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman (Kreisleriana, Papillons). His “Novelettes,” a collection of eight piano pieces published in 1838, tell no specific story but have a “literary quality” about them, despite any direct narrative: no story is supplied, the pieces lack any fanciful titles beyond tempo indications and a generic mood (“Lightly and with Humor”).
It's probably not entirely coincidental that Schumann's father was a book-seller and Glazunov's was a publisher.
A novelette, by the way, was a once popular alternate term for a “novella” or short novel, somewhere between a short story and a full-fledged novel. One source suggested it was decided more by word-count (7,000 to 17,000 words) than by the nature of its content. Later, in the 20th Century, given the attitude about size and quality, it became a derogatory term implying triteness or sentimentality, or a “not-quite-ready-for-prime-time” novel.
Of course, if we remember that Fyodor Dostoievsky published his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880 and that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina dates from 1877 and his "novella" The Death of Ivan Ilyich was published in 1886, we might expect more than is fair from a Russian composer borrowing a literary title. The idea of a "string quartet," with Beethoven's shadow never lurking very far away, carries enough baggage to always expect the most serious.
Glazunov's approach to that title might be more “what the heck do I call these five pleasant little pieces?” than emulating Schumann or deciding to offer some vague literary allusions. If anything, they're mood pieces in various styles and whether the similarity in the material is conscious (as in “theme and variations in different styles”) or an accident of their all being composed quickly at the same time, I'm not sure (nor am I sure it really matters).
The music is, above all, elegant and charming, not meant to challenge or unsettle, a passing dance not intended for long, personal ruminations on the meaning of life. They are purely entertainments - they were initially written for a party, after all - "little novels" that would never be mistaken for works by Dostoievsky or Tolstoy. If anything, they might be pleasant interludes while one is lounging around reading Goncharov's Oblomov or maybe spending an evening or two on a farm near Dikanka with short stories by Gogol.
Here is a "video" from an old Melodiya recording with the Shostakovich of all five of the Novelettes in one clip (I apologize for the duplication of Ilya Repin's portrait of the composer but it really is appropriate to the music and makes more sense than some of the unrelated visual stuff one often finds with so many You-Tube posts):
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The first is marked “In the Spanish Style.” The second is subtitled Orientale. The third is called (without irony) “Interlude in an old style,” evoking perhaps Russian Orthodox chant but in a highly romanticized arrangement, complete with a very non-Russian fugue (speaking of Western academicism).
The fourth one is a Waltz, typical of Glazunov's ability with a lush (as in luscious) dance tune from the golden Imperial Age of Russian ballet. The set ends (rather than concludes) with a Hungarian Dance.
This is, basically, Glazunov at the age of 20 or 21. Glazunov composed with legendary facility and his music was generally greeted without much concern or controversy (beyond the initial debut when people refused to believe a 16-year-old could write a symphony like that and accused his well-to-do parents of paying someone to write it for him).
But around the time he turned 40, this ease came to a grinding halt. Part of this may have been the responsibilities of taking over the St. Petersburg Conservatory from his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov in 1905 after he ran afoul of government during the political upheaval that almost became a revolution. His alcoholism worsened – though it had already played a very likely part in the disaster of Rachmaninoff's 1st Symphony in 1897: it was enough that he didn't care for the piece and made comments about not understanding it. He was finding himself a man-out-of-touch with what was going around him, musically.
In the 25 years from his first published works to the 1905-1906 Season when he completed his last symphony, there are 85 opus numbers in his catalog. In the remaining 30 years of his creative life, there are only 24 works, mostly inconsequential by comparison even though they include both his piano concertos (the 2nd, in B Major, is one I've always liked and wondered why no one plays), the last two string quartets (the last one, subtitled “Hommage au passé”) and the Saxophone Concerto which one occasionally hears as much because there aren't many Romantic-style concertos for the instrument (despite its being composed in 1934) as it's the last major work he composed.
If his teaching responsibilities didn't have a serious enough impact on him – whether or not the alcoholism was a symptom or a contributor to his creative decline – the political and social climate of the new 20th Century certainly undermined everything he as a conservative held dear, both socially and musically. Though he stayed after the Communists took control of the government and lived through the privations of the 1st World War, the two 1917 Revolutions and the ensuing Civil War, he never really regained the status he had enjoyed as a young man in the Imperial Age.
When he left the Soviet Union for the West, he did so “for reasons of health” rather than as a political refugee like Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev or Stravinsky: if nothing else, this allowed his music to still be performed “back home.” But he spent the last eight years of his life as an exile in Paris, a man without a country (or even a culture) and, ironically for a man as “cosmopolitan” as he was, musically, little musical inspiration.
He was deeply suspect of New Music at the time. He told a colleague that Stravinsky's Petrushka was not music though skillfully orchestrated. Looking at Debussy's “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” he thought it was “orchestrated with great taste,” then wondered “Could it be that Rimsky and I influenced the orchestration of all these contemporary degenerates?”
Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading symphonist of the Soviet era, owed a great deal to Glazunov the teacher and administrator. His recollections in Semyon Volkov's highly questionable memoir, “Testimony,” include stories of Glazunov's legendary memory.
We owe the Overture to Borodin's Prince Igor to that memory since Borodin, a busy chemist and professor as well as composer, did not live to complete the opera or jot down anything for the overture. He'd played through it at the piano for his friends: Glazunov had heard one of these performances and was able to write it down later.
Another story was how the composer Sergei Taneyev (a student of Tchaikovsky's) had come to Belyayev to play his new symphony at the piano for him: meanwhile, the teen-aged Glazunov had been hidden in an adjacent room, listening to the performance. When it was over, Belyayev called Glazunov into the room as if he'd just arrived and said, as it happened, this young man was going to play through his new symphony as well. And he sat down and played Taneyev's symphony back to him, note for note.
While there is also the famous story of Glazunov, now a professor at the Conservatory, keeping a bottle of vodka in his desk drawer, a rubber hose hidden in his coat connecting to the bottle so he could sip on it during his lessons, it's perhaps kinder to end with this fact: whatever he thought of “new music,” Glazunov arranged the premiere of his young student Shostakovich's 1st Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic in the same hall where his own 1st Symphony had been premiered 44 years earlier and had created just as much of a stir when a teenaged composer walked on-stage to accept the cheers of the audience.
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When young Glazunov was composing his “little novels,” Alexander III had been tsar for five years after his father, Alexander II, had been assassinated by the revolutionary (today, we would call them the “terrorist”) group, “The People's Will.” (For more information about this part of our history, check Part 2 of the post on Tchaikovsky's 2nd Quartet.)
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| Alexander III & his wife |
Standing 6'3” and of, shall we say, large and ungainly build, the new tsar might have been the conservative mirror of his liberal-minded father, but he was also more of a music-lover which was good news for Tchaikovsky, and especially for the world of Russian ballet. The tsar's enjoyment of the ballet and his patronage of the Imperial Ballet Theater ushered in a Golden Age of Dance that would be unequaled in the history of ballet.
Alexander Benois, famous later as an artist and set designer for the Imperial theater, described seeing the Emperor for the first time, following a performance at the theater:
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“I first caught sight of the Emperor. I was struck by the size of the man, and although cumbersome and heavy, he was still a mighty figure. There was indeed something of the muzhik [Russian peasant] about him. The look of his bright eyes made quite an impression on me. As he passed where I was standing, he raised his head for a second, and to this day I can remember what I felt as our eyes met. It was a look as cold as steel, in which there was something threatening, even frightening, and it struck me like a blow. The Tsar's gaze! The look of a man who stood above all others, but who carried a monstrous burden and who every minute had to fear for his life and the lives of those closest to him. In later years I came into contact with the Emperor on several occasions, and I felt not the slightest bit timid. In more ordinary cases Tsar Alexander III could be at once kind, simple, and even almost homely.”
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| Alexander III & Family |
Politically estranged from his father (as well as morally), Alexander III immediately began reversing his father's reforms, beginning with a decree that Alexander II had planned to announce the day of his assassination which would have created “advisory commissions,” the first step towards a constitution which could lead to a weakening of the imperial autocratic power. Alexander III had the document destroyed and essentially returned to the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationalism” ideology of his grandfather, Nicholas I.
While his isolationist policies may have prevented Russian involvement in foreign wars during his reign – for which he was often called “Alexander the Peaceful” – he felt that across the Empire, with its numerous nationalities especially along the European borders, the only way to save Russia was to make it a nation of one nationality, and therefore he enforced the mandatory teaching of the Russian language and the destruction of the remaining German, Polish, Baltic and Swedish institutions as still existed. By 1882, he had initiated laws limiting the settlements of Jews even within “The Pale” (established in 1791) – speaking of going further back for an explanation, this was the region covering much of the Baltic, modern Belarus and most of Ukraine beyond which it was forbidden for Jews to settle – and further restricting what occupations Jews could engage in.
Reducing the power of local governments and courts, the tsar established “land captains” to oversee the peasant populations, causing great resentment and fear among a large percentage of the rural population. If there had been hope for a constitution and a parliamentary government under Alexander II, the tsar now quarreled with his uncle, the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaievich – to whom Tchaikovsky had dedicated his 2nd String Quartet – who had been advocating for a constitution since 1865 and who was largely responsible for the “advisory council” decree Alexander II was due to sign the day of his death. No longer “welcome at court” (essentially a decree of banishment), the Grand Duke retired from the fray, suffering various personal setbacks including a stroke in 1889 that left him an invalid.
Given the success of “The People's Will” in murdering his father, Alexander III was advised he could not be kept safe at the easily accessible Winter Palace so he lived primarily at a heavily guarded palace outside the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg and, when in the city, stayed at the Anichkov Palace, easier to fortify. Though “The People's Will” fell apart by 1884, political zeal for political and social reform was too ingrained in certain disaffected factions across the Empire and in 1887, the Secret Police uncovered an assassination plot against Alexander III, arresting five conspirators who were then hanged. One of these was a 21-year-old student named Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Ulyanov, better known to history as Lenin.
It is easy to underestimate the power of these repressed political activists, called generally the intelligentsia, people who were educated, capable of political leadership but unable to exercise it. They theorized and critiqued society but could do little to change it directly, the more repressive the government became. As a term, it originated in the 1860s even though, as a class, the concept existed not only in Russia but in many poor communities across industrial Europe late in the 18th Century (speaking of “going back a bit”).
In 1871, Fyodor Dostoievsky caricatured these underground revolutionaries and their network of pamphlets and secret meetings in his novel Demons (for years, translated as “The Possessed”), initially inspired by a true event, a murder committed by a group calling itself “The People's Vengeance.” It is an allegory about “the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s.”
But this was not a united front and just as any other political organization, “grass-roots” or otherwise, it was fragmented very often by opposing factions as well as extremists of various viewpoints. Tsar Peter the Great (who is generally not considered “Great” by the Russians themselves) is credited with introducing the idea of “progress” into his essentially medieval, Asiatic nation at the end of the 17th Century, opening the “window on the West” and creating out of sheer will (and arrogance) a Europeanized society which, among other things, included importing Italian musicians and architects to fill the vacuum that existed in Russian culture at the time (again, too long a story for this post).
But by opening this “window” to progress, as several writers have said, came various flies and gnats that then became the primary force behind the destruction of Peter the Great's empire, resulting in the Bolshevik Party's overthrow of the provisional government that had already overthrown the tsar.
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| Tsar Nicholas II, 1898 (signed "Niki") |
As the heir, the tsarevich had visited the United States and observed the workings of Congress (presumably, a time when Congress did work) and also England where he was much impressed by Parliament and the machinery of a constitutional monarchy. However, once his reign as Emperor began, suggestions of pursuing such political reforms in Russia were met with the strong re-affirmation of his father's policy of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationalism.”
At his coronation in 1896, a large field had been set up with food and beer for the people of Moscow but rumors spread that there would not be enough for the 100,000 people estimated to have shown up for the festivities, and so a rush of people eager to get their share turned into a stampede and over 1,300 people were killed in the crush and another 1,300 injured. Preferring to stay in the palace to pray for the dead, Nicholas was talked into attending a coronation ball given by the French ambassador and so the people saw their new tsar as frivolous, uncaring, and insensitive. This earned him the nickname “Nicholas the Bloody.”
Given the increasing labor unrest and the strikes that were being called in the opening years of the new century, Nicholas II's minister thought a war with a small nation like Japan might rally the people behind the banner of patriotism, convinced of an easy victory because the Japanese were considered “racially inferior” and a small country with no real military power against the vast Russian Empire.
The Russo-Japanese War began in February, 1904, with a pre-emptive strike by Japan. An expensive, unwieldy, long-distance war, it ended in May, 1905, with the Japanese destroying the entire Russian fleet in a single battle. Forced to sue for peace, Nicholas acknowledged the defeat.
In January, 1905, a group of workers led by a priest who was also a labor leader, carried icons, banners, and portraits of the tsar, approaching the Winter Palace to peacefully petition the tsar, unaware the Emperor had left the city on the advice of his ministers. Troops were brought in to fortify the police and as the petitioners, singing hymns and the tsarist anthem, saw their way blocked by soldiers and mounted Cossacks. Then the soldiers opened fire. There were 92 dead and over one hundred wounded after the bullets had riddled their icons and the portraits of the tsar.
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| At the Winter Palace: Bloody Sunday (from a 1925 Soviet film) |
A future British prime minister called the tsar a "blood-stained creature and a common murderer."
The leader of the demonstration wrote from a subsequent hiding place, “Nicholas Romanov, formerly Tsar and at present soul-murderer of the Russian empire. The innocent blood of workers, their wives and children lies forever between you and the Russian people ... May all the blood which must be spilled fall upon you, you Hangman. I call upon all the socialist parties of Russia to come to an immediate agreement among themselves and bring an armed uprising against tsarism.”
In the midst of all this, one of the ladies of the Imperial court introduced a monk newly arrived in St. Petersburg who might be able to serve the Empress as a spiritual advisor. His name was Grigori Rasputin.
Strikes continued to plague the country, especially a paralyzing railway strike in 1906. His chief minister, Count Sergei Witte, urged the tsar to begin political reforms. When Nicholas asked his uncle Nicholas, a strong military man, to take on the temporary role of Dictator to oversee the crisis, the Grand Duke took out a pistol and said he would shoot himself “then and there” if the tsar did not accept Witte's memorandum.
And so, a constitution came to Russia with the creation of the parliament-like body called the Duma, and though it was not the constitutional monarchy we're familiar with in England, it was clear the Autocrat of All the Russias was no longer an autocrat.
Following what is called the 1905 Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II signed a declaration appointing a liaison between the Winter Palace and the Duma on October 26th, 1906, by the Old Style calendar. Ironically, by the morning of October 26th, 1917, the Bolshevik workers will have overthrown the government to declare a new nation which would become known as the Soviet Union.
But that is a story for the next chapter as we meet Dmitri Shostakovich, born September 25th, 1906, and hear his 11th String Quartet which the Amernet Quartet performs on this program.
Dick Strawser
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