RUSSIAN NATIONALISM IN MUSIC
In the
1830s, a national musical style -marked with emphasis on folk songs,
folk-dances, and especially folk rhythms- began to emerge in Russia. This
coincided with similar nationalistic movements in other countries such as
Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavian countries. The Russian music is considered to
be among the greatest of national music. Before the 1830s, music in Russia was
dominated by Italian and French music, mainly opera. The few operas written by
Russian composers before Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) were not good enough to
compete with their foreign counterparts.
Musical life in the capital St.
Petersburg was no doubt very rich. The major works of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart
and Weber were known. John Field lived there, and Liszt, Schumann and Berlioz
all visited Russia. The Italian composer and conductor C Cavos (1776-1840) who
spent his life in Russia from 1798 absorbed the Russian musical idioms into his
own. The first ever complete performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis
took place in St Petersburg in April 1824. In his operas Ilya the Hero (1807)
and Ivan Susanin (1815), Cavos anticipated Glinka's work. Glinka used the same
subject as Ivan Susanin in his first patriotic opera A Life for the Tsar
(1836). His second opera Russlan and Ludmilla (1842) has some oriental
elements. Glinka is with good reason considered to be the father of Russian
classical music. He brought it up to date and into the European mainstream
without sacrificing its national identity. The Russian composers before him
were no more than feeble imitators of the Italians or Germans.
There was not a distinguished
Russian Art Music style before the 1830s. Two important sources of genuine
Russian music as inspiration for the nineteenth century Russian composers were
church music (Russian chants) and folk music. The modal sounds of Russian
church music and folk-songs were echoed in much of the art music in Russia in
the nineteenth century (as in the music of Stravinsky, Glazunov and
Rachmaninoff). Composers were already using folk-songs to write variations on
them or as a basis for their compositions. In the hands of Glinka and Borodin,
most of them became world-known. Despite a comparatively small output, Glinka
formed the basis for a Russian nationalist school which resulted in the Russian
Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff). The Russian
Five used the folk material extensively in their music. Balakirev's symphonic
poem Tamara, Borodin's Polovtzian Dances from Prince Igor, and
Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade are examples of Russian orientalism.
Kamarinskaya is free
variations on two Russian folk songs written by Glinka in 1848. In this piece,
he surmounted the restrictions of folk songs by the additions of
countermelodies to them. The folk tunes (a wedding song and a dance song) are
used as a cantus firmus against which new melodies and figurations are worked.
The songs he used are extremely repetitive which makes arabesque-like
ornamentations inevitable. The theme is at times accompanied by its own decorated
version. Motivic development is replaced by obsessive repetition. He shows his
genius during the transition from the first to the second song. He makes two
dissimilar folk-tunes to have something in common. The woodwind variation in
bars 1312-1371 is in effect a simultaneous variation on
both folk tunes. This is an excellent example of the art of combining melodies.
Tchaikovsky, the first great
Russian symphonist, only rarely used folk material in his large orchestral
music (the second and fourth symphonies make use of folk songs), but his songs,
piano music and chamber music are full of examples. He noted the problems with
their tonality and rhythm. In his second string quartet in F, he uses the
combination of Russian harmony with a Norwegian melodic contour (falling
leading note) in the Scherzo.
As in Glinka's Kamarinskaya,
Borodin (1833-87), used two different songs in the symphonic poem In the
Steppes of Central Asia (1880). A peaceful Russian song and the melancholy
notes of an oriental melody join in a common harmony. In b.193-227, the two
tunes are presented simultaneously. Minor, major and modal elements based on
the note A are all present in different parts of the piece.
By carrying the folk song elements
into their art music, the Russian composers developed a unique idiom which
contained the following: the cell development technique (a short motif or
phrase repeated exactly or slightly varied), pronounced interest in orchestral colour,
variety of dynamics, use of (inverted) pedal points, drone basses, dominant
hovering, use of exotic harmony (chromatic or modal), pentatonic or modal tunes
and their associated harmonies, and additive structures resulting from the cell
development on a big scale, small melodic compass, recurring intervallic shapes
(like the falling fourth in Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings). By the
second half of the nineteenth century, original Russian tunes could almost be
mistaken for folk songs as the folk idiom had been assimilated so successfully.
In the nineteenth century, folk elements (repetition
of single notes, motifs, phrases; dance-like rhythms; real or imitation
folk-tunes) were integrated into Russian music. Folk tales were used as
subjects for opera and symphonic poems. Russian music made an important
contribution to the development of harmony by the use of whole-tone elements,
chromaticism and higher discords. The use of whole tones inevitably resulted in
a frequent use of augmented triads as all triads using whole tones are
augmented. A common harmonic cliché in Russian music, chord I - followed by
augmented chord I - and VIb, has, for example, tonal/modal ambiguity. A new
harmonic language was needed because of the employment of monodic modal tunes.
Therefore, Russian national music is full of tonal/modal ambiguities (In the
Steppes of Central Asia). There was also a pronounced interest in new
rhythmic patterns. Quintuple time, five-bar phrases and the general disruption
of conventional rhythmic patterns were typical features. Polysyllabic Russian
words had an obvious influence on the newly emerged rhythmic patterns which
influenced instrumental music too. Repetition rather than motivic development
produced new attitudes to form. Such repetition or breakdown of extended
phrases into small bricks (or mosaics) replaced thematic development and
created new additive structures (Mosaic form). Constantly changing rhythm,
dynamics, volume and orchestral tone colour disguises repetitiveness and
prevent monotony. The overall result was a distinctively national style, which
is colourful, exotic and immediately attractive. Realism was another feature of
the Russian music (opera) in the nineteenth century. The plots were true to
contemporary life (Boris Godunov). Composer's preferences for the
juxtaposition of static and unrelated tonal areas rather than employment of
conventional modulation processes, led much Russian music into the twentieth
century. As a result, the continuation of traditional tonality was put in
question. The whole-tone scale due to inevitable augmented triads and lack of
semitonal pull of the leading note was s significant factor in the
disintegration of tonality.
Resources Used
1. The Open University A314 Course
Team: Russian nationalism (Unit 32a). In From Baroque to Romantic: Studies
in Tonal Music: Romantic Music III (Units 30-32). Milton Keynes: The Open
University Press, 1994 (pp. 52-67) (ISBN 0 335 11208 0)
2. Longyear RM: Nineteenth century nationalism
in music. In Longyear RM: Nineteenth Century Romanticism in Music (pp.
214-271). New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1973
(ISBN 0 13 622647-7)
3. Several articles in
the New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians. 2nd Edition, 2001. Macmillan Publishing Group.
Further Reading
Meas F: A History of Russian
Music. From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2002
Compiled by M.Tevfik Dorak
B.A. (Hons)
Last updated on 23 May 2002