PORCELAIN FROM CLAY

This entry is about Russia’s first music genius Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857). It is also symbolically significant in the context of Russian history that the very first Russian opera was a patriotic historical drama about the nation’s liberation from a foreign (in this case, Polish) occupation, while the composer’s second and last operatic masterpiece was a charming patriotic fairytale about a Russian hero’s triumph over the forces of evil, both foreign and domestic.

Curiously, Glinka was a music amateur who never received a formal musical education. He became serious about music at the late age of eighteen, taking private music lessons in St. Petersburg, then going to Europe to learn more, also informally. This self-taught amateurism he would share with Richard Wagner, nine years his junior, but, unlike Wagner, who tried himself in opera-writing several times without success, and also unlike Tchaikovsky who composed ten operas in all, of which only two (or three, if you are a Russian) have achieved the masterpiece status,-- Glinka wrote the total of two, both entering the gold reserve of world music.

After attending the premiere performance of Glinka’s opera Ivan Susanin (hastily, albeit reluctantly, retitled A Life for the Tsar, to appease an insistent censor, who, in turn, strove to please Tsar Nicholas I, personally interested in this opera and attending its premiere), Glinka’s great admirer and supporter Pushkin wrote the jocular poem, alluded to in the title of this entry, declaring that thereafter “our Glinka (the composer’s name means clay in Russian) is no longer clay, but porcelain!” Continuing our Glinka-Pushkin line, immediately after that glorious event, taking place near the end of 1836, the two geniuses enthusiastically agreed that the next opera Glinka was going to write would be based on Pushkin’s fairytale poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, for which Pushkin was going to make the stage adaptation and write the libretto. This incredibly promising and exciting project was thwarted however by Pushkin’s tragic death in a duel just slightly more than a month later. A distraught Glinka was nevertheless loath to abandon the project, and a different cast of writers that included the composer himself set to work on the libretto, and after five long years of work and numerous revisions, the opera was presented to the public at the end of 1842 to a cold reception and scathing criticism by the critics, who apparently misunderstood it completely. And even as the public attitude quickly changed after that to enthusiastic acceptance, the critical verdict remained that the opera was erratic and random.

The decisive critical reassessment came only in Soviet times, thanks in large part to the work of the leading Soviet music critic and a composer in his own right, Boris Asafiev. Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila has been considered ever since a conscientious and revolutionary musical experiment by Glinka who very well knew what he was doing and delighted himself in doing it.

Glinka was a great genius of Russian music. It would be ridiculous to rank his genius against that of Mussorgsky, or Tchaikovsky, or any other great Russian composer. He was the first, the true pathfinder of Russian music. In his assessment of Glinka’s historic role, Tchaikovsky thus commented on his eight-minute-long symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaya, written in 1848:

“…All Russian symphonic school, like an entire oak inside an acorn, is enclosed in the symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaya.”

This Tchaikovsky assessment is too modest, in my opinion. It was not just the Russian school, but all European music, the great Verdi prominently included, that benefited from Glinka’s fairytale experimentation, and who was better suited to provide the fairytale than the greatest giant of Russian literature, a descendent of an African negro, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin?

…There couldn’t be a better way to conclude this short but important entry on Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s musical legacy!