Lawrence Gilman

(Alexander Glazounoff: born in St. Petersburg, August 10, 1865; now living there)

"STENKA RÂZINE," SYMPHONIC POEM: Op. 13

Stenka RÂzine (or RÂzin), the subject of Glazounoff's symphonic poem, was a Cossack rebel and outlaw who flourished in the seventeenth century. In 1667 he was elected leader of the insurgent Cossacks, and, after a tumultuous career of plunder and devastation, was finally executed at Moscow in 1671. He is the hero of numerous Russian ballads, and Nikolai Kostomaroff, in 1859, made him the subject of one of his famous historical monographs.

In the legend selected by Glazounoff for musical treatment, Stenka RÂzine is portrayed as the hero of an incident which is related by the composer as follows in an explanatory note (in French) prefaced to the score:

"The Volga, vast and calm. For long years the region about the great river dwelt in peace; then suddenly there appeared the terrible Ataman [Cossack chief] Stenka RÂzine, who, at the head of his ferocious horde, began to sweep along the Volga, devastating and pillaging the towns and villages situated along its banks. His ship was splendidly adorned, his sails were of silk, his oars were gilt; in the midst of a tent of cloth of silver, upon barrels full of gold and silver, reclined the Persian princess, Stenka RÂzine's captive and mistress. On a certain day she fell into deep thought, and, addressing her master's comrades, began to tell them that she had dreamed a dream, in which it had been revealed to her that Stenka RÂzine would be shot, that his band of warriors would be cast into dungeons, and that she herself would perish in the waves of the Volga. The dream of the princess came true. Stenka was surrounded by the soldiers of the Tsar. Seeing that the day was lost, Stenka said: 'Never, during all the thirty years of my raids, have I offered the Volga a gift. To-day I will give it what is dearest to me among all the treasures of the earth,' and with these words he hurled the princess deep into the waves. The fierce band began to sing in honor of its Ataman, and all hurled themselves upon the soldiers of the Tsar."

Glazounoff's music is based on three main themes. We hear first the melancholy chant of the bargemen on the Volga (derived from a celebrated Russian folk-tune); by it the Volga is typified (the theme is announced by the oboe, against tremolos in the strings). Stenka himself is next portrayed by a theme that is brutally forceful and savage. Then follows a gracious and dulcet melody (sung, pp, by clarinet, with accompaniment of harp, flutes, bassoon, and horn), in which the princess, Stenka's captive and beloved, is suggested. By his vivid and dramatic juxtaposition of these themes, Glazounoff suggests the progress and culmination of his tonal narrative.

The score bears the date-line: "St. Petersburg, 1885."

"THE KREMLIN," SYMPHONIC PICTURE IN THREE PARTS: Op. 30

This "symphonic picture" (composed in 1890) is a delineation, in three sections, of scenes associated in the imagination of the composer with the historic and picturesque citadel at Moscow. They are arranged and titled as follows:

"The Kremlin," writes Mr. Arthur Symons in his Cities, "is like the evocation of an Arabian sorcerer, called up out of the mists of the North; and the bells hung in these pagan, pagoda-like belfries seem to swing there in a lost paradox, as if to drive away the very demons that have fixed them in mid-air.... All the violence of the yellow, Mongolian East is in these temples, which break out into bulbs, and flower into gigantic fruits and vegetables of copper and tiles and carved stone; which are full of crawling and wriggling lines, of a kind of cruelty in form; in which the gold of the sun, the green of the earth's grass, and a blue which is to the blue of the sky what hell is to heaven, mock and deform the visible world in a kind of infernal parody....

"... The priests, with their long hair and Christ-like presence, wearing heavy vestments of blue and red velvet and gold-embroidered stuff (in which one sees the hieratic significance of the blue of the domes), pass through the concealing door from the presence of the people to the presence of God, the door which, at the most sacred moment, shuts them in upon that presence; and a choir of sad, deep, Russian voices, the voices of young men, chants antiphonally and in chorus, weaving, in a sort of instrumental piece in which the voices are the instruments, a heavy veil of music, which trembles like a curtain before the shrine."