BALAKIREV, MILY
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BALAKIREV AND RUSSIAN FOLKSONG
by Nicholas Walker
In 25 Years of Russian Art (1882) Vladimir Vasilʹyevich Stasov (1824–1906), the famous Russian music and art critic, wrote:
Another important feature characterises our new school: its striving for national character. Such a striving cannot be found in any other European school. The historical and cultural traditions of other nations have been such that folksong – the expression of the spontaneous, unaffected musicality of the people – has long since all but vanished in most civilised countries. Who in the XIXth century knows or hears French, German, Italian or English folksongs? In our country it is altogether a different story: folksongs fill the air everywhere to this day. Every peasant, every carpenter, every stonemason, every washerwoman and cook – they all bring folksongs from their native villages to St Petersburg, Moscow or any other city, and you hear them the whole year round; they surround us everywhere, all the time. Just as it was a thousand years ago, a working man or woman in Russia never does his or her work except while singing a whole series of songs. The Russian soldier goes into battle with a folksong on his lips. These songs are our birthright, and therefore every Russian born with a creative musical spirit is brought up from his first days in a profoundly musical environment.
Amazingly, a century and a quarter later, echoes of this musicality remain: very recently in Moscow I heard four teenage girl buskers break into song with the so-called podgoloski technique, singing in unison for a while, blossoming into harmony, then returning to unison at the end of the phrase and with a thrillingly incisive ‘open’ vocal tone. Lyric song is still an important feature of Russian life.
The group of composers that strove hardest to achieve a Russian musical character was dubbed by Stasov as ‘the mighty handful’ and its leader was Mili Alekseyevich Balakirev, born in Nizhni Novgorod on 2 January 1837 (21 December 1836 according to the old Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time and still used by the Russian Orthodox Church today), to parents who were educated but not wealthy. His father, Alexei Konstantinovich, was a civil servant, though not a successful one; his mother, Elizavetta Ivanova Yasherova was connected with the local minor nobility.
Nizhni-Nogorod was founded in 1221 by Yuri Vsevolod, Grand Prince of Vladimir, and lies at the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers. The city has always been an important one, initially for defence and later economically. The famous annual Makariev Trade Fair, held in July, moved there in 1816 and attracted merchants from India, Iran and Central Asia as well as from Europe, a very varied group of peoples some of whose folk-music Balakirev must surely have heard at an impressionable age. In other respects Nizhni-Novgorod was not a very musical town.
There was, though, one notable exception: Alexander Dmitriyevitch Ulybyshev (1794–1858), a local land-owner and enthusiastic amateur musician, who also wrote the first biography of Mozart (1843); in addition, he possessed an extensive library of scores. Balakirev’s piano teacher at the time was Karl Eisrich who was also the conductor of the local theatre orchestra which often played at musical evenings at Ulybyshev’s house. It was through Eisrich that Balakirev was introduced to Ulybyshev and was soon made his master’s assistant at these evenings, which gave him the opportunity to know a wide variety of western music and to have practical experience of it, too: he conducted Beethoven’s First, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies in 1852 and later played through all the Beethoven piano sonatas for Ulybyshev. Ulybyshev became fond of Balakirev and gave him free access to his extensive library of scores from which he learnt to compose by studying actual works rather than from following an academic course.
Balakirev’s first compositions appear from 1852 and the Grande Fantaisie sur airs nationals [sic] Russes pour Le Pianoforté [sic] avec accompagnement d’Orchestre, Op. 4, is dated 12 (24) December of that year. Balakirev intended to finish the piece, having written ‘Finis del prima parte Auctor Milius Balakireff’ at the end of the movement, but he never returned to the work. At this time there was little in the way of serious concerto-writing by Russian composers; particularly popular with audiences were the glittery, though not necessarily substantial, show-pieces in which most of the material would be given to the piano, the orchestra being reduced to a rather subservient role. One reason was that in Russia, and to a lesser extent in many other countries at that time, the touring virtuoso composer-pianist could not depend on having an orchestra of a particular size and the writing for the orchestra had therefore needed to be kept fairly simple so that it could be quickly adapted if necessary, and so that, say, the possible absence of oboes or violas, might not impair the musical effect too much. Many virtuoso concertos of the early Romantic period, including those by Field and, in many respects, Chopin, fall more or less into this category. It is natural that such an early work (Balakirev was not yet fifteen) should show signs of influence, and one can feel echoes not only of Henselt and Hummel, but also Chopin and Schumann.
After a substantial introduction, partly formed from elements of the folk-tunes, the song ‘Ah, it’s not the sun that is eclipsed’ is stated very simply, first by the orchestra and then by the piano with orchestral accompaniment, before three variations of increasingly challenging virtuosity that even today, in a world full of Wunderkinder, would seem precocious. There follows an episode which has echoes of the introduction as well as phrases that anticipate the setting of ‘Amid the spreading vale’ before the folksong itself, which occurs three times, first in the left hand then sounding for all the world like a middle hand à la Henselt and lastly in the right hand. The work ends peacefully with a short coda. In its treatment of the folksongs this piece is not unusual for its period and the harmonic language and form are typical of early Romanticism. It is interesting that Balakirev chose these particular songs: the first appears to be the more ancient, with typically Russian leaps of a fourth or fifth; the words of ‘Amid the spreading vale’ are by Aleksei Fedorovich Myerzlyakov (1778–1830) and the tune probably contemporary, although the composer is unknown.
In 1853 at the age of sixteen Balakirev entered the University of Kazanʹ, as a mathematics student. Like many fathers, especially Russian ones, Balakirev’s father, who was not particularly interested in music, did not wish his son to pursue a musical education, especially in view of the family’s lack of money. Other composers have had the same problem in the past: Schumann, for instance, originally studied law, and Berlioz medicine. Kazanʹ is an ancient city founded in the fourteenth century, some two hundred miles east of Nizhni-Novgorod at the confluence of the Kazanka and Volga rivers, in a region which is a centre of Tatar culture. The Tatars are a mostly Muslim people, of mixed Turkic and Mongol extraction and were one of the peoples of the empire of Golden Horde founded in the thirteenth century by Genghis Khan’s grandson, Batu Khan. The city also boasted two fine eighteenth-century mosques. Judging from evidence in his compositions – for example, the opening of the Sixth Mazurka with its augmented seconds and arabesque ornamentation – the calling of the Muslim faithful to prayer by muezzin, along with Tatar folk-music, clearly fascinated Balakirev. All this time, he was hoping to pursue a musical career but lacked both financial resources and encouragement from his father. Luckily, Ulybyshev, who by this time had come to look on Balakirev as a son, offered to take Balakirev to St Petersburg. With delight Balakirev accepted and in the late autumn of 1855 he was thus enabled to follow a musical career.
Ulybyshev introduced Balakirev to Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804–57), the ‘Father of Russian Music’, who was to have a lasting effect on the young composer. Glinka was the founder of what one might call the Russian Nationalist School of composition. Up to this time there had been no school of Russian music to speak of. The reasons are many, but briefly stated they include Russia’s history: successive invasions by Mongols, Tatars and Poles, to mention only a few, did not encourage the growth of instrumental music. The lack of opportunity for musicians in either noble households or the church (in the Russian Orthodox Church, following the precepts of the early Fathers, only the human voice is permitted as an instrument of music), let alone civic life, together with the almost complete absence of a emergent middle class meant that the career ladder for an aspiring musician was rather fragile. If musicians were wanted in Russia they tended to be imported from western Europe, from Italy and Germany in particular. Cimarosa, Paisiello, Galuppi and Johann Wilhelm Hässler are names that spring to mind; from other countries John Field stands out as a composer and pianist of note.
The arrival of Glinka on the musical scene helped to change this situation. Educated at St Petersburg, he also studied in Italy and Germany. Through his two operas Life for the Tsar (1836) and Russlan and Ludmilla (1842), and the orchestral piece Kamarinskaya (1848), Glinka infused what had been a central European style of composition with a Russian flavour by the introduction of Russian folksong. Earlier composers had used folk-music, generally in ineffective and sometimes crude ways, but Glinka’s use of folksong began to affect his harmonic language and phrase-structure. Though this technique does not perhaps seem so remarkable now, at the time it was an astonishing innovation, and one which initially by no means met with universal approval. The introduction of peasant music into more genteel circles was regarded by some as cheap, and the first performance of A Life for the Tsar met with catcalls: the aristocracy, who were accustomed to operas usually based on classical mythological themes, were shocked by the curtain going up to reveal an ordinary Russian peasant wearing bast shoes (made from birch bark) and started complaining that it was ‘a coachman’s opera’.
Following Glinka the use of folk-music came to be seen as means of expressing Russianness, was felt as patriotic and, together with the choice of Russian folk tales and historical events as subjects for operas and instrumental pieces, became the definitive characteristic of Russian music right into the twentieth century. But at the time, even among musicians, not everyone was in favour of this new approach: for instance, Anton Rubinstein, the pre-eminent Russian pianist and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory, was prominent among those who were outrightly hostile to this new music.
The influence of Glinka on the young Balakirev was tremendous. Balakirev, never a man willing to take anyone’s advice, nevertheless accepted Glinka's with a certain devotion. The compliment was returned by Glinka who saw Balakirev as the only one to share his views on music completely: ‘believe me, in time he will be a second Glinka’. Balakirev, for his part, really did take to heart Glinka's principle that ‘the people produce music, we artists only arrange it’.
Balakirev had considerable success as a pianist in St Petersburg, but the idea of a virtuoso career repulsed him, nor did he seek out pupils, feeling that ‘a large number of lessons would be to destructive to me as a musician, would deaden my aesthetic feeling and eventually make me completely indifferent and apathetic to music itself’. But Balakirev’s gifts meant that he was held in awe by nearly everyone who came into contact with him, and before long he had gathered round him a group of would-be composers whom he encouraged to write truly Russian music and to throw off the heavy yoke of German influence which lay over virtually the whole musical world at the time. This circle of friends consisted of the military engineer César Cui, the guards’ officer Mussorgsky, the naval officer Rimsky-Korsakov, and the professor of chemistry Borodin – not a musician among them. Because of Balakirev's extraordinary talent, his magnetic personality and his enthusiasm, he exerted a formative influence over all of them and did succeed in turning them into composers.
In his memoirs, My Musical Life, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote of Balakirev:
An excellent pianist, a superior sight-reader of music, a splendid improviser, endowed by nature with a sense of correct harmony and part-writing, he possessed a technique partly native and partly acquired through a vast musical erudition with the help of an extraordinary memory, keen and retentive […].Then, too, he was a marvellous critic, especially a technical critic. He felt instantly every technical imperfection or error, he grasped a defect in form at once. [...] forthwith seating himself at the piano, he would improvise and show how the composition in question should be changed exactly as he had indicated, and frequently entire passages in other people’s compositions became his and not their putative author’s at all.
© Nicholas Walker 2006
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