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Some Thoughts on Two Russian Operas
by Kathryn Bumpass
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Tickets are now on sale for the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" series. To order, go to Opera San Luis Obispo or call the Cal Poly Arts box office at 805-756-4849. Tickets for each opera are $27, which includes parking and all other fees. Buy the entire series for $243, and get one opera free.
About three months ago I provided an overview of the HD series in this column. What strikes me now, as then, is the emphasis on Russian and Eastern European opera. We'll see Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev's The Nose, Borodin's Prince Igor and Dvorak's Rusalka. I'd like to take a closer look at two of these, Eugene Onegin and Prince Igor.
During the second half of the 19th century, Russian opera aesthetics were split by a more cosmopolitan outlook and a "nationalist" school of composition. Partisans of the former took as their models the masterpieces of Western European art music, while those of the latter believed that Russian music must look for its development to Russian folk music and church music.
Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin
Both Tchaikovsky and Borodin drew elements from both paths, though they differed in emphasis. Tchaikovsky inclined more to the cosmopolitan school, but drew frequently on Russian literature for his stories and included local folk color, especially for choral scenes.
The source of the libretto of Eugene Onegin, crafted by the composer and his friend Konstantin Shilovsky, is Alexander Pushkin's novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. The novel was so well known that many readers could recite parts of it by heart.
Yet the plot is thin and conventional, almost more of a soap opera than an operatic drama. Why would such an uninspired story be so revered by Russian readers?" As Russian music scholar Richard Taruskin put it, "Pushkin's novel was loved for the telling, not the tale . . . for its divine details: the verbal dazzle, the wry social commentary, the perfectly exact descriptions, the endlessly subtle and nuanced characterizations. . ." And here, Taruskin argues, is the source of Tchaikovsky's attraction to Pushkin's novel. He recognized that the kind of music he was "uniquely inclined and equipped to write" could capture these qualities of the story.
Apart from the novel, the Russian elements in Eugene Onegin are few – some choruses and dances. More common are forms of Western European music, especially the romance. Romances were simple lyrical songs with pleasing melodies, usually sentimental in nature. Tchaikovsky, essentially a lyricist, used the romance extensively in Onegin. As Taruskin has noted, the famous Letter Scene is organized as a series of romances and alternating recitatives.
Late 19th century Russian composers were famous, in their own day as in ours, for the brilliant use of a large orchestra, a trait that seems to have developed out of the colorful use of the orchestra in earlier 19th century France, especially French opera. Berlioz was a favorite model for younger composers in Russia. In Onegin Tchaikovsky used the orchestra to color a scene or a fleeting emotion.
The Met will serve up a new production of Eugene Onegin, starring one of today's leading bel canto sopranos, Anna Netrebko, with Mariusz Kwiecien and Piotr Beczala. It will be seen in an Encore performance, Sunday, October 20, at 2:00pm.
Borodin's Prince Igor
If Tchaikovsky's music was closer to the cosmopolitan wing of Russian opera, Borodin was more aligned with the nationalist school. He was, in fact, a member of the famous group of Russian composers called "the Mighty Five," whose aim was to create distinctly Russian music through the use of Russian literature and folk stories, folk songs, church music, and compositional techniques that were based on folk music.
The Five included Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. Most of them were amateur and largely self-taught composers. Only Balakirev had any systematic musical training. The nationalist ideal they championed was the chief factor in the emergence of Russian music as a powerful force in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
Borodin was actually a professor of chemistry and his time was divided between chemistry and music. At one point he referred to himself as a "Sunday composer." This meant that large projects such as Prince Igor were composed with many interruptions. In fact, Borodin worked on Prince Igor for 18 years and then died before finishing it. (It was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov from sketches and other sources Borodin left behind.)
The cohesiveness and fame of The Five owed much to the efforts of Vladimir Stasov, their chief ideologue and publicist. A man of enormous intellect, erudition, and ability, Stasov was also a zealot and an ardent polemicist. He quickly allied himself with the cause of Russian nationalist music, and his influence on The Five can scarcely be overestimated.
In his essay "Twenty-five Years of Russian Art: Our Music," Stasov set forth the aims and characteristics of the Russian nationalist school, as he saw them. Seeking to make virtues of The Five's ad hoc musical education, he praised them for their "open-mindedness" and "absence of preconceptions and blind faith." Because of these qualities they were "independent" and "irreverent" in the face of Western European music.
While folk story, folk song and Russian church music provided the most obvious elements of a nationalist style, "realism" was another important element. What Stasov and The Five meant by "realism" in music was fidelity to the text, its rhythms, characteristic sounds and of course its meaning. This was one element of the nationalist agenda that was not congenial to Borodin, and he noted that in this he "differed from many of my friends."
Each member of The Five found distinctive ways of evoking national character. Borodin, considered the most gifted and spontaneous melodist of the group, conjured up operatic arias and symphonic themes marked by a mixture of Russian and Oriental character and unfailing lyricism.
He had a flair for creating vivid and colorful scenes, whether in opera or program music. The famous Polovtsian Dances and chorus from Prince Igor are particularly good examples.
The story of this opera is based on a medieval legend about a Russian hero who seeks to drive a rival tribe, the Polovsti, out of Russia. It was Stasov who suggested this story and provided the composer with a scenario. Borodin researched various historical sources of Russian epics, as well as Hungarian and Russian folksong and ballads. With these efforts the national character was assured. To look forward a few decades after Prince Igor, these were the same elements Stravinsky applied to his early ballet scores, Firebird, Petrushka and Rite of Spring.
We don't have many chances to see Prince Igor, so we can thank the Met for this opportunity, which is offered in a new production starring Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role. Catch the Encore performance on Sunday, March 2, 2014, at 2:00pm at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center.
Alexander Borodin: Prince Igor - Polovtsian Dances - Bolshoi Theatre
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