IN the preceding chapters I have shown how long and persistently Russian society groped its way towards an ideal expression of nationalism in music. Gifted foreigners, such as Cavos, had tried to catch some faint echo of the folk-song and reproduce it disguised in Italian accents; talented, but poorly equipped, Russian musicians had exploited the music of the people with a certain measure of success, but without sufficient conviction or genius to form the solid basis of a national school. Yet all these strivings and aspirations, these mistaken enthusiasms and immature presentiments, were not wasted. Possibly the sacrifice of many talents is needed before the manifestation of one genius can be fulfilled. When the yearning after a musical Messiah had acquired sufficient force, the right man appeared in the person of Michael Ivanovich Glinka. With his advent we reach the first great climax in the history of Russian music.

It is in accordance with the latent mysticism and the ardour smouldering under the semi-oriental indolence of the Russian temperament that so many of their great men—especially their musicians—seem to have arrived at the consciousness of their vocation through a kind of process of conversion. Moussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, to mention but one or two examples, all awoke suddenly from a condition of mental sloth or frivolity to the conviction of their artistic mission; and some of them were prepared to sacrifice social position and an assured livelihood for the sake of a new, ideal career. Glinka was no exception. He, too, heard his divine call and followed it. Lounging in the theatres and concert rooms of Italy, listening to Italian singers and fancying himself “deeply moved” by Bellini’s operas, suddenly it flashed upon Glinka, a cultivated amateur, that this was not what he needed to stimulate his inspiration. This race, this art, were alien to him and could never take the place of his own people. This swift sense of remoteness, this sudden change of thought and ideal, constituted the psychological moment in the history of Russian music. Glinka’s first impulse was merely to write a better Russian opera than his predecessors; but this impulse held the germ of the whole evolution of the new Russian School as we know it to-day.

It is rather remarkable that outside the Russian language so little has been written about this germinal genius, who summed up the ardent desires of many generations and begat a great school of national music. The following details of his childhood and early youth are taken from his Autobiographical Notes and now appear for the first time in an English translation.

“I was born on June 2nd (May 20th, O.S.), 1804, in the glow of the summer dawn at the village of NovospasskoÏ, which belonged to my father, Ivan Nicolaevich Glinka, a retired army captain.... Shortly after my birth, my mother, Eugenia Andreievna (nÉe Glinka), was obliged to leave my early bringing up to my grandmother who, having taken possession of me, had me transferred to her own room. Here in company with her, a foster mother, and my nurse, I spent the first three or four years of my life, rarely seeing anything of my parents. I was a child of delicate constitution and of nervous tendencies. My grandmother was in her declining years, and almost always ailing, consequently the temperature of her room in which I lived was never less than 20 RÉaumur.... In spite of this, I was not allowed to take off my pelisse, and night and day I was given tea with cream and quantities of sugar in it, and also cracknels and fancy bread of all kinds. I seldom went into the fresh air, and then only in hot weather. There is no doubt that this early upbringing had a great influence on my physical development and explains my unconquerable affection for warm climates....

“My grandmother spoilt me to an incredible degree and never denied me anything I wanted. In spite of this I was a gentle and well-behaved child, and only indulged in passing fits of peevishness—as indeed I still do when disturbed at one of my favourite occupations. One of my chief amusements was to lie flat on the floor and draw churches and trees with a bit of chalk. I was piously inclined, and church ceremonies, especially at the great festivals, filled me heart and soul with the liveliest poetic enthusiasm. Having learnt to read at a remarkably early age, I often moved my grandmother and her elderly friends to tears by reading the Scriptures aloud to them. My musical proclivities showed themselves at that time in a perfect passion for the sound of bells; I drank in these harsh sounds, and soon learnt how to imitate them rather cleverly by means of two copper bowls. When I was ill they used to give me a little hand-bell to keep me amused.

“On the death of my grandmother, my way of living underwent some changes. My mother spoilt me rather less, and tried to accustom me to the fresh air; but her efforts in this direction were not very successful.... My musical sense still remained undeveloped and crude. In my eighth year (1812), when we were delivered from the French invasion, I listened with all my old delight to the ringing of the bells, distinguishing the peals of the different churches, and imitating them on my copper bowls.

“Being entirely surrounded by women, and having for playmates only my sister, who was a year younger than myself, and my nurse’s little daughter, I was never like other boys of my age; moreover the passion for study, especially of geography and drawing—and in the latter I had begun to make sensible progress—drew me away from childish pastimes, and I was, from the first, of a quiet and gentle disposition.

“At my father’s house we often received many relatives and guests; this was usually the case on his name-day, or when someone came to stay whom he wished to entertain with special honours. On these occasions he would send for the musicians belonging to my maternal uncle, who lived eight versts away. They often remained with us for several days, and when the dances were over and the guests departed, they used to play all sorts of pieces. I remember once (it was in 1814, or 1815, when I was about ten) they played a quartet by Cruselli; this music produced in me an inconceivably new and rapturous effect; after hearing it I remained all day long in a state of feverish excitement, lost in inexplicably sweet dreamy emotions, and the next day at my drawing lesson I was quite absent-minded. My distracted condition increased as the lesson proceeded, and my teacher, remarking that I was drawing very carelessly, scolded me repeatedly, until finally guessing what was the matter with me, said that I now thought of nothing but music. ‘What’s to be done?’ I answered: ‘music is the soul of me!’

“In truth at that time I loved music passionately. My uncle’s orchestra was the source of the liveliest delight to me. When they played dances, such as Écossaises, quadrilles and valses, I used to snatch up a violin or piccolo and join in with them, simply alternating between tonic and dominant. My father was often annoyed with me because I did not dance, and deserted our guests; but at the first opportunity I slipped back again among the musicians. During supper they generally played Russian folk-songs arranged for two flutes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons; this poignantly tender, but for me perfectly satisfactory, combination delighted me (I could hardly endure shrill sounds, even the lower notes of the horn when they were not played loud), and perhaps these songs, heard in my childhood, were the first cause of my preference in later years for Russian folk-melodies. About this time we had a governess from St. Petersburg called Barbara Klemmer. She was a girl about twenty, very tall, strict and exacting. She taught us Russian, French, German, geography and music.... Although our music lessons, which included reading from notes and the rudiments of the piano, were rather mechanical, yet I made rapid progress with her, and shortly after she came one of the first violins from my uncle’s band was employed to teach me the fiddle. Unfortunately he himself did not play quite in tune and held his bow very stiffly, a bad habit which he passed on to me.

“Although I loved music almost unconsciously, yet I remember that at that time I preferred those pieces which were most accessible to my immature musical intelligence. I enjoyed the orchestra most of all, and next to the Russian songs, my favourite items in their repertory were: the Overtures to ‘Ma Tante Aurore,’ by Boieldieu, to ‘LodoÏska,’ by Rodolph Kreutzer, and to ‘Les Deux Aveugles,’ by MÉhul. The last two I liked playing on the piano, as well as some of Steibelt’s sonatas, especially ‘The Storm,’ which I played rather neatly.”

I have quoted verbatim from Glinka’s record of his childish impressions, because they undoubtedly influenced his whole after career, and the nature of his genius was conditioned by them. Like most of the leading representatives of Russian music, Glinka was born and spent the early years of his life in the country, where he assimilated subconsciously the purer elements of the national music which had already begun to be vulgarized, if not completely obliterated, in the great cities. Saved from the multitudinous distractions of town life, the love of the folk-music took root in his heart and grew undisturbed. Had he been brought up in one of the capitals, taken early, as Russian children often were, and still are, to the opera and to concerts, his outlook would have been widened at the expense of his individuality. Later on, as we shall see, he was led away from the tracks of nationality by his enthusiasm for Italian opera; but the strong affections of his childhood guided him back instinctively to that way of art in which he could best turn his gifts to account. It has been said that Glinka remained always somewhat narrow in his ideas and activities; but it was precisely this exclusiveness and concentration that could best serve Russia at the time when he appeared. In his letters and Autobiographical Notes, he often adopts the tone of a genius misunderstood, and hints that an unkind Providence enjoyed putting obstacles in his path. It is true that in later life, after the production of his second opera, Russlan and Liudmilla, he had some grounds for complaining of the fickleness and mental indolence of the Russian public. But his murmurings against destiny must be discounted by the fact that Glinka, the spoilt and delicate child, grew up into Glinka, the idolised and hypochondriacal man. On the whole his life was certainly favourable to his artistic development.

Stassov, in his fine monograph upon the composer, lays stress on this view of Glinka’s career. The history of art, he argues, contains only too many instances of perverted talent; even strongly gifted natures have succumbed to the ill-judged advice of friends, or to the mistaken promptings of their own nature, so that they have wasted valuable years in the manufacture of works which reached to a certain standard of academic excellence, and even beauty, before they realised their true individual vocation and their supreme powers. Glinka was fortunate in his parents, who never actually opposed his inclinations; and perhaps he was equally lucky in his teachers, for if they were not of the very highest class they did not at any rate interfere with his natural tendencies, nor impose upon him severe restrictions of routine and method. Another happy circumstance in his early life, so Stassov thinks, was his almost wholly feminine environment. Glinka’s temperament was dual; on the one hand he possessed a rich imagination, both receptive and creative, and was capable of passionate feeling; in the other side of his nature we find an element of excessive sensibility, a something rather passive and morbidly sentimental. Women had power to soothe and at the same time to stimulate his temperament. Somewhere in his memoirs, Glinka, speaking of his early manhood, says: “At that time I did not care for the society of my own sex, preferring that of women and girls who appreciated my musical gifts.” Stassov considers that these words might be applied to the whole of Glinka’s life, for he always seemed most at ease in the company of ladies.

In the autumn of 1817, being then thirteen, he was sent to the newly opened school for the sons of the aristocracy, where he remained until 1822. His schooldays appear to have been happy and profitable. He was industrious and popular alike with the masters and pupils. In the drawing class the laborious copying from the flat, with its tedious cross-hatching and stippling then in vogue, soon disgusted him. Mathematics did not greatly interest him. Dancing and fencing were accomplishments in which he never shone. But he acquired languages with a wonderful ease, taking up Latin, French, German, English and Persian. In after years he dropped to some extent Persian and English, but became proficient in Italian and Spanish. Geography and zoology both attracted him. That he loved and observed nature is evident from all his writings; and the one thing in which he resembled other boys was in his affection for birds, rabbits, and other pets. While travelling in the Caucasus in 1823 he tamed and kept wild goats, and sometimes had as many as sixteen caged birds in his room at once, which he would excite to song by playing the violin.

Glinka’s parents spared nothing to give their son a good general education, but the idea that they were dealing with a budding musical genius never occurred to them. As he had shown some aptitude for the piano and violin in childhood, he was allowed to continue both these studies while at school in St. Petersburg. He started lessons with the famous Irish composer and pianist John Field, who, being on the eve of his departure for Moscow, was obliged to hand Glinka over to his pupil Obmana. Afterwards he received some instruction from Zeuner, and eventually worked with Carl Meyer, an excellent pianist and teacher, with whom he made rapid progress. At the school concert in 1822, Glinka was the show pupil and played Hummel’s A minor Concerto, Meyer accompanying him on a second piano. With the violin he made less progress, although he took lessons from Bohm, a distinguished master and virtuoso who had not, however, so Glinka declared, the gift of imparting his own knowledge to others. Bohm would sigh over his pupil’s faulty bowing and remark: “Messieu Klinka, fous ne chouerez chamais du fiolon.”

Glinka’s repertory at nineteen contained nothing more profound than the virtuoso music of Steibelt, Herz, Hummel and Kalkbrenner. Although Beethoven had already endowed the world with his entire series of sonatas, and was then at the zenith of his fame, his music only began to make headway in Russia some ten years later. As time went on, Glinka heard and met most of the great pianists of his day, and his criticisms of their various styles are unconventional and interesting, but would lead us far away from the subject of Russian opera.

Imperfect as his mastery of the violin appears to have been, it was of more importance to his subsequent career than his fluency as a pianist, because during the vacations at home he was now able to take part in earnest in his uncle’s small orchestra. The band generally visited the Glinkas’ estate once a fortnight, and sometimes stayed a whole week. Before the general rehearsal, the son of the house would take each member of the orchestra through his part—with the exception of the leaders—and see that they were all note perfect and played in tune. In this way he learnt a good deal about instrumentation and something about the technique of conducting. Their repertory included overtures by Cherubini, MÉhul, and Mozart; and three symphonies, Haydn in B, Mozart in G minor, and Beethoven’s second symphony, in D major, the last named being Glinka’s special favourite.

In St. Petersburg he began to frequent the opera, which was not then so exclusively given over to Italian music as it was a few years later. MÉhul’s “Joseph,” Cherubini’s “Water-Carriers,” Isouard’s “Gioconda” and Boieldieu’s “Le Bonnet Rouge” were among the works which he heard and admired in the early ’twenties.

In 1824 Glinka entered the Government service as a clerk in the Ministry of Ways and Communications. Here he found several amateurs as enthusiastic as himself, and was soon launched in a social circle where his musical gifts were greatly appreciated and he ran the risk of degenerating into a spoilt dilettante. From the beginning to the end of his career Glinka remained an amateur in that higher sense of the word which implies that he merely wrote what he liked and was exempt from the necessity of composing to order for the sake of a livelihood.

He himself has related the circumstances of his first creative impulse. In the spring of 1822, when he was about nineteen, he made the acquaintance of a young lady “of fascinating appearance, who played the harp and had also a beautiful voice. This voice was not to be compared to any musical instrument; it was just a resonant silvery soprano, and she sang naturally and with extraordinary charm. Her attractive qualities and her kindness to me (she called me her nephew and I called her aunt) stirred my heart and my imagination.” We see the rest of the picture: a Petersburg drawing room with its semi-French decoration, an amiable grandpapa reposing in his armchair, while Glinka played by the hour and the young lady joined in with her silvery soprano. So the first compositions were written—“to do her a service and laid at her feet”—variations upon her favourite theme from Weigel’s “Swiss Family,” an opera then all the vogue, variations for harp and piano on a theme by Mozart and an original Valse in F for piano. Of these only the variations for harp survive.

At twenty Glinka took singing lessons from the Italian Belloli. This led to his first essays in song writing, and after one hopeless failure he succeeded in setting some words by Baratynsky, “Do not needlessly torment me.”

Henceforth Glinka began to be conscious of his powers, and between 1825 and 1830 he was constantly composing. Although the best of relations existed between himself and his father, he does not seem to have shown him anything of his deeper artistic nature, and Glinka’s family accepted his music merely as an agreeable addition to his social qualities. Meanwhile he wrote many of the songs of his first period, and a few isolated dramatic scenas with orchestral accompaniment, including the Chorus on the Death of a Hero, in C minor, and an Aria for baritone, a part of which he used in the finale of the second act of his opera Russlan and Liudmilla. He also learnt Italian and received some instruction in theory from Zamboni. In 1829 he published an album containing most of his early compositions.

From time to time Glinka was incapacitated by an affection of the eyes, and his general health was far from satisfactory. He was possessed of a craving to travel in Spain or Italy, and his father’s refusal to let him go abroad “hurt me,” he says, “to the point of tears.” However, a famous doctor having examined him, reported to his father that the young man had “a whole quadrille of ailments” and ought to be sent to a warm climate for at least three years. Glinka left Russia for Italy in 1830, and remained abroad until the spring of 1834.

During his visit to Italy, Glinka wrote regularly and fully to his family, but unfortunately the correspondence was not deemed worthy of preservation, and the letters were destroyed shortly after his return. If we may judge by the communications to his friends sent later in life from Spain, France and Germany, the destruction of these records of his early impressions is a real loss to musical biography.

The two chief objects of Glinka’s journey abroad were to improve his physical condition and to perfect his musical studies. As regards his health, he was benefited perhaps but not cured. “All his life,” says Stassov, “Glinka was a martyr to doctors and remedies,” and his autobiography is full of details concerning his fainting fits and nervous depression, and his bodily sufferings in general. He had, however, sufficient physical and moral strength to work at times with immense energy.

As regards his musical education, Glinka had now begun to realise that his technical equipment did not keep pace with his creative impulse. He felt the need of that theoretical knowledge which Kirnberg says is to the composer what wings are to a bird. He was by no means so completely ignorant of the theory of his art as many of his critics have insinuated. He had already composed music which was quite on a level with much that was popular in his day, and had won some flattering attentions from musical society in St. Petersburg. We must respect the self-criticism which prompted him to put himself to school again at six-and-twenty. But Italy could not give him that deeper and sounder musical culture of which he was in search. In Milan he began to work under Basili, the Director of the Milan Conservatoire, distinguished for having refused a scholarship to Verdi because he showed no aptitude for music. Basili does not seem to have had la main heureuse with budding genius; Glinka found his methods so dry and pedantic that he soon abandoned his lessons as a waste of time. Nevertheless Italy, then and now the Mecca of all aspiring art students, had much to give to the young Russian. He was deeply impressed by the beauty of his surroundings, but, from the practical side, it was in the art of singing and writing for the voice that Glinka made real progress during his sojourn in the South. He had arrived in Italy in company with Ivanov, who became later on the most famous Russian operatic tenor. Glinka’s father had persuaded the tenor to accompany his son abroad and had succeeded in getting him two years leave of absence from the Imperial Chapel. The opera season 1830-1831 was unusually brilliant at Milan, and the two friends heard Grisi, Pasta, Rubini, Galli and Orlandi. Their greatest experience came at the end of the season, when Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” was mounted for the first time, “Pasta and Rubini singing their very best in order to uphold their favourite maestro.” “We, in our box,” continues Glinka, “shed torrents of tears—tears of emotion and enthusiasm.” But still more important to his appreciation of vocal music was his acquaintance in Naples with Nozzari and Fodor-Mainville. Ivanov studied with both masters, and Glinka was permitted to be present at his lessons. Nozzari had already retired from the stage, but his voice was still in its fullest beauty. His compass was two octaves, from B to B, and his scale so perfect that Glinka says it could only be compared to Field’s scale upon the piano. Under the influence of Italian music, he wrote at this time a few piano pieces and two songs to Russian words. His setting of Koslov’s “Venetian Night” was merely an echo of his surroundings; “The Victor,” music to Joukovsky’s words, showed more promise of originality, and here we find for the first time the use of the plagal cadence which he employed so effectively in A Life for the Tsar.

During the third year of his visit, he felt a conviction that he was moving on the wrong track, and that there was a certain insincerity in all that he was attempting. “It cost me some pains to counterfeit the Italian sentimento brilliante,” he says. “I, a dweller in the North, felt quite differently (from the children of the sunny South); with us, things either make no impression at all, or they sink deep into the soul; it is either a frenzy of joy or bitter tears.” These reflections, joined to an acute fit of homesickness, led to his decision to return to Russia. After a few pleasant days spent in Vienna, he travelled direct to Berlin, where he hoped to make up some of the deficiencies of his Italian visit with the assistance of the well-known theorist Siegfried Dehn.

Dehn saw at once that his pupil was gifted with genius, but impatient of drudgery. He gave himself the trouble to devise a short cut to the essentials of musical theory. In five months he succeeded in giving Glinka a bird’s-eye view of harmony and counterpoint, fugue and instrumentation; the whole course being concentrated into four small exercise books. “There is no doubt,” writes Glinka, “that I owe more to Dehn than to any of my masters. He not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing.”

While studying with Dehn, he still found time for composition, and it is noticeable that what he wrote at this time is by no means Germanised music. Two songs, “The Rustling Oak,” words by Joukovsky, and Delvig’s poem, “Say not that love has fled,” the Variations for piano on Alabiev’s “Nightingale,” and outlines of the melody for the Orphan’s Song “When they slew my mother,” afterwards used in a Life for the Tsar, besides a sketch for one of the chief themes in the overture of the opera, all tend to prove that he was now deeply preoccupied with the expression of national sentiment in music.

In April 1834 his profitable studies with Dehn were cut short by the death of his father, which necessitated his immediate return to Russia. Stassov sums up the results of this period abroad in the words: “Glinka left us a dilettante and returned a maestro.”