Folk Revival - Russia

Topic: Folk Music Revival
English religious reformers were not the only ones to ban music because it was used by the Roman Catholic Church. [1] In 1648, the Russian Orthodox church pressured Alexis I to proscribe musical instruments. [2] The church had been combating the power of the minstrels [3] who arranged weddings and dances. [4] The patriarchy claimed all instruments and dances were pagan practices. [5]

Alexei Mikhailovich’s son, Peter the Great, neutered the church and introduced western ideas to modernize the economy and military. He defined four layers of society, the court, the nobility who were obliged to serve, the town that was restricted to trades, and the peasants whom he converted into serfs tied to the estates of nobles. [6]

By the time of Catherine the Great, each stratum had developed its own musical culture. [7] William Coxe observed the vocal traditions in the countryside during his visit in the late 1770s. He noted men sang while they worked and engaged in a form of chanting dialogue. [8] He was told people used prose lyrics and simple melodies that allowed "infinite variation." [9] More extraordinary to him were coachmen and soldiers who "performed occasionally in parts." [10]

Towns had been transformed by the acquisition of parts of Ukraine beginning with the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. [11] Musicians exposed to western music gravitated to the centers of power, where "peasants arriving from the different regions brought with them their own repertoires and the open air became a living laboratory where traditions interacted and the peasant songs, detached from the ritual, became urbanized." [12]

Nikolai Novikov opened bookstores and solicited anthologies of popular poetry. Mikhail Chulkov produced a collection that included both new and traditional songs in 1770. [13] They were described simply as "various songs" with no reference to provenance. [14]

Peter’s niece, Anna Ioannovna, introduced Italian opera in 1736. [15] Vasily Trutovsky went to the court of Empress Elizabeth from the Ukraine in 1761 [16] as an instrumentalist paid by the budget for the Italian Company, [17] and remained when Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762.

As the empire absorbed more parts of Europe, Catherine began emphasizing a Russian national identity. Trutovsky [18] set some songs collected by Chulov to simple melodies in what was the first attempt to transcribe native music. [19] Marina Ritzarev noted he called his 1776 collection "Ruskaya" rather than "Rosskaya." The second referred to the urban music, while he alluded to the "authentic, pure Russian, old and peasant folk songs." [20]

Trutovsky’s first volume was published after James MacPherson’s 1760 Ossian collection and Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [21] but before Herder published his first collection of Volkslieder in 1778. [22]

Conditions changed in Russia after Napoléon. Nicholas I was married to the daughter of Friedrich Wilhem III of Prussia. He followed the German-speaking princes in closing universities to French ideas. [23] After Poles rebelled against him in 1831, [24] the minister of popular enlightenment decreed:

"our common obligation consists in this, that the education of the people be conducted, according to the Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality." [25]

Richard Taruskin said the legend of Ivan Susanin, a peasant who died protecting the tsar from a Polish search party in the 1600s, became especially popular after the defeat of Napoléon in the War of 1812. [26]

It was in this atmosphere that Mikhail Glinka mounted his first opera in 1836. His family descended from Polish-Lithuanian noblemen in Ukraine where he heard village music as a child. He studied music in Saint Petersburg as an adolescent and visited Italy. [27] When he mentioned a desire to create a uniquely Russian opera, the tutor to the tsar’s son recommended Susanin. [28] The heir and his secretary provided most of the libretto. [29]

Taruskin noted Glinka did more than provide propaganda with a sprinkling of folk tunes in The Life of the Tsar. By using only peasant characters, he was able to incorporate elements of traditional music into the Italian form, [30] including 5/4 rhythms from village weddings songs [31] and Russian Orthodox antiphony. [32] The most interesting adoption was his use of recitatives, rather than spoken dialogue. [33] The chanted passages recalled Coxe’s earlier observation on singing style.

Glinka’s second opera added parallel octaves [34] and whole tone scales. [35] Ruslan and Lyudmila was disliked by the Nicholas Pavlovich, and his Saint Petersburg courtiers when it opened in 1842, but was staged again in Moscow in 1846. [36] Without imperial protection, it was exposed to swirling political conflicts at the time when loyalty to Russia was being changed from loyalty to the people to loyalty to the state by Nicholas. [37]

Life was criticized by Alexy Nikolayevich Verstovsky because it did not contain enough authentic folk material. [38] Faddei Benediktovich Bulgarin did not believe court music, like Ruslan, should absorb local idioms. [39]

Later composers stayed away from folk song texts that could attract the interest of censors. Instead, they adopted themes from Russian folk tales for instrumental music that incorporated traditional elements, like Ruslan. [40] Glinka’s synthesis became the inspiration for Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and, later, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. [41]

End Notes
1. The English reformers attitudes toward music were discussed in the posts for 5 August 2018 and 9 December 2018.

2. Marina Ritzarev. Eighteenth-Century Russian Music. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2006; 2016 Rutledge edition. 21.

3. Minstrels were the Skomorokh. Ritzarev discussed them in Russian Music. 16–22.
4. This was similar to the practice of Roman Catholics prosecuting their rivals as witches.
5. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 16.

6. B. H. Sumner. Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia. London: English Universities Press, 1960. 158. Cited by Wikipedia. "Government Reform of Peter the Great."

7. Marina Ritzarev. "Russian Music before Glinka: A Look from the Beginning of the Third Millennium." Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online. 2002. 12.

8. William Coxe. Travels Into Poland Russia Sweden And Denmark. London: printed for T. Cadell, 1792. 2:209. Ritzarev brought this to my attention in Russian Music. 142. Her source was Alfred Swain. Russian Music and Its Sources in Chant and Folk-song. London: John Baker, 1973. 52.

9. Coxe. 210.
10. Coxe. 209.

11. Wikipedia. "History of Ukraine" and "Cossacks." This was followed in 1667 by the Truce of Andrusovo that ceded Kiev and Smolensk to Russia. [42]

12. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142.
13. Mikhail Dmitrievich Chulkov. Sobranie raznykh pesen. Saint Petersburg: 1770.
14. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142–143.
15. Ritzarev, Glinka. 11.
16. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 56.
17. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 75.

18. Vasily Fyodorovich Trutovsky. Sobraniye russkikh prostïkh pesen s notami. Saint Petersburg: 1776.

19. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 152.
20. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 151.
21. These were discussed in the post for 7 April 2019.
22. This was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
23. Wikipedia. "Nicholas I of Russia."
24. Wikipedia, Nicholas I.

25. Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov. Quoted by Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 26.

26. Taruskin. 28.
27. Wikipedia. "Mikhail Glinka."

28. Taruskin. 27. Vasiliy Andreyevich Zhukovsky was a poet [43] and "an official censor" who maintained a "literary salon" in Saint Petersburg. [44]

29. Taruskin. 28. Neil Cornwell said Vladimir Odoeysky was the one who recommended Yegor Fydorovich Rozen for the libretto. [45]

30. Taruskin. 34.
31. Taruskin. 31.

32. Richard Anthony Leonard. A History of Russian Music. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. 46. Cited by Cory McKay. "Nationalism in Glinka’s Operas." 2001. McGill University, Schulich School of Music website. 2.

33. David Brown. Mikhail Glinka. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. 121.
34. Leonard. 51. Cited by McKay. 6.
35. Brown. 202.
36. Wikipedia. Ruslan and Lyudmila (Opera)."
37. Taruskin. 26.
38. Taruskin. 41–42.
39. Neil Cornwell. V. F. Odoevsky. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 137.
40. Ruslan and Lyudmila was based on a fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin.
41. Brown. 2.
42. Wikipedia. "History of Kiev."
43. Wikipedia. "Vasily Zhukovsky."
44. Taruskin. 27.
45. Cornwell. 137.