Dargomïzhsky

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Dargomzhsky, Aleksandr Sergeyevich(b Troitskoye, Tula district, 2/14 Feb 1813; d St Petersburg, 5/17 Jan 1869). Russiancomposer. The outstanding figure in Russian opera between Glinkas lapse into creativeimpotence and the advent of Tchaikovsky and The Five, Dargomzhsky had an influence,and has a historical importance, out of all proportion to the frequency with which hismusic was ever performed. His songs and orchestral works are also of historicalimportance in the development of Russian music.

Dargomzhskys father, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, and a wealthy landowner inthe Smolensk district, possessed a caustic wit his son was to inherit. He had eloped withPrincess Kozlovskaya, a minor poet whose sentimental verses and pallid dramaticscenes were published during the 1820s and 1830s. Her interest in French culture wascommunicated to their six children. Though it is recorded that she disliked music, hereldest son Viktor was an accomplished violinist, a daughter played the harp, andAleksandr showed remarkable early promise as a pianist and composer. He was born on

his fathers country property where his parents had taken refuge from the Napoleonicarmy. A sickly child, he began to speak only at the age of five. Thanks to lessons with thefashionable master Benedict Zeibig, he was to become a noted singing teacher, but hisvoice was always high-pitched and squeaky. In 1817 the family settled in St Petersburg.The children received the customary home-based education in which the arts played animportant role. Dargomzhskys first piano teacher was his German governess, LouiseWohlgeboren, but he soon made sufficient progress to take lessons with AdrianDanilevsky, whom he later described as a fine musician. Danilevsky did not considercomposition a fitting occupation for a young aristocrat and tried to discourage his pupilscreative tendencies. (Apparently he met with little success since a number of songs andpiano pieces, chiefly dances, survive from the 1820s.) Dargomzhsky completed his

practical studies with Franz Schoberlechner, a pupil of Hummel, and was much indemand as a pianist at society gatherings and charity concerts. From 1822 he studiedthe violin with P.G. Vorontsov. Although he was often asked to make up a quartet, henever fully mastered the problems of intonation (a shortcoming celebrated by his brotherViktor in satirical verse) and soon lost interest in the instrument.

Following in his fathers footsteps, he entered government service in autumn 1827; areputation for efficiency won him regular promotion. Like most young men of his class, heregarded music as a leisure activity rather than a serious pursuit. He engaged in sociableforms of music-making and attended the opera, where he probably heard an Italiancompany in works by Rossini, Mozart, Fioravanti, Mercadante and Pacini, among others.Though several of his compositions were published some in journals, others perhaps at

his own expense he received no training in the theory of music. However, in winter18334 he was introduced to Glinka, who lent him the notebooks in which he had workedexercises in thoroughbass and counterpoint for Siegfried Dehn. With Glinka he playedpiano duets, organized concerts, and analysed Beethovens symphonies andMendelssohns overtures. He also attended the orchestral rehearsals ofA Life for theTsarand determined to follow Glinkas example by writing a full-length opera. His love ofFrench literature led him to base his first libretto on Hugos Lucrce Borgia, but he hadmade little progress by 1837 when, on the advice of Zhukovsky, he gave his attention to


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the libretto which Hugo had prepared for Louise Bertin from Notre-Dame de Paris(Hugos novel was in great vogue in Russia during the late 1830s). By 1841Dargomzhsky had completed the music and a Russian translation of the text of his firstopera, smeralda, and had given the score to the director of the Imperial Theatres.However, the opera is rooted in the tradition of French grand opra, and at this time the

repertory of the Russian opera houses was dominated by Italian works, so the youngcomposer had to wait until 1847 for its premire. In spite of the generally acknowledgedpower of the dramatic passages and the assured handling of the choral scenes surprising in so inexperienced a composer it had little success and was not revived untilmany years after the St Petersburg premire in 1851.

Dargomzhsky was understandably depressed by the delay in obtaining a performance ofhis first large-scale work, and his feelings were exacerbated by Glinkas continuingpopularity. However, he obtained some comfort from the flattering attentions of hisnumerous female singing pupils. (V.T. Sokolov recalled that he gave lessons only toladies and girls and took no monetary payment.) Indeed, about this time he remarked, Ifthere had been no women in the world, I should never have been a composer. They have

inspired me throughout my life. For these uncritical admirers he wrote a series of songs(the larger part of his vocal music is for womens voices), many of which were publishedand became popular. While most are typical examples of the abstract romance, chieflyinteresting for their melody, several, including Vlyublyon ya (I am in love), Lileta and Vkrovi gorit(The Fire of Desire), suggest an early interest in melodic declamation.

In September 1844 Dargomzhsky went abroad for six months, staying mainly in Berlin,Brussels, Paris and Vienna. He became acquainted with Ftis and Vieuxtemps, and wasintroduced to Auber, Donizetti, Halvy and Meyerbeer. The grands opras which he hadpreviously admired now struck him as unnatural, but he was full of praise for the satiricalvaudevilles and fascinated by the steady procession of rogues through the French lawcourts. Like Glinka a decade earlier, not until he was absent from his native land did he

realize the merits of its culture; he wrote to a friend on his return in May 1845, There isno nation in the world better than the Russian, and, if the elements of poetry exist inEurope, they exist in Russia. He began to experiment in his songs with the imitation ofcharacteristic melodic patterns of folk music and the intonation of Russian speech(Dushechka-devitsa: Darling Girl, Likhoradushka and Mel'nik: The Miller) andundertook a serious study of Russian folksong, the fruits of which were seen in the operaRusalka.

This was the great project of Dargomzhskys middle period and his most enduring workfor the stage. It was based upon Pushkins unfinished verse tragedy of the same name,and the composer worked on it from 1848 to 1855. Anything but realistic in impulse,Pushkins play was a romantic Singspiel libretto in the tradition of Kauers DasDonauweibchen, long a Russian favourite. Dargomzhskys opera could be seen as theculmination of a long line of German and Russian water-nymph operas. Yet the accentwith him (as, arguably, with Pushkin) is not on the supernatural aspect of the subject, oron the means of its embodiment in fantastic music, but on the highly chargedconfrontations of the main characters a Kievan Prince, a Miller and the latters daughter(Natasha in the opera), whom the Prince seduces and abandons, and who, havingthrown herself into the Dnepr, becomes the queen of the river nymphs (rusalki) and luresher tormentor to his doom.


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In a letter to Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, written at the height of his labours on the opera,Dargomzhsky summed up his attitude towards Rusalka and what he took to be his taskand achievement as a Russian composer:

The more I study the components of our national music, the more varied the aspects Idiscern in them. Glinka, who alone up to now has given Russian music a grand scale, in

my opinion, has as yet touched only one of its sides the lyrical side. His dramaturgy istoo plaintive, the comic aspect loses its national character To the extent that I am ableI am working, in my Rusalka, to develop our dramatic components.

Both the comic and the dramatic components in Rusalka intersect at fullest strength onthe character of the Miller. His main aria, which opens the opera, is cast in a jolly comic-opera patter style, but one not so obviously modelled on the opera buffa as is, forexample, Farlafs rondo in Ruslan and Lyudmila, which must have been inDargomzhskys mind when he criticized Glinkas handling of the comic aspect.Otherwise the Miller takes part only in ensembles. The most striking of these is his duetwith the Prince in Act 3, which begins with a lengthy accompanied recitative set directlyto Pushkins original verses, in which the bereft and demented father, thinking himself a

raven, pathetically recounts his daughters suicide. It amounts to a veritable mad scene.

The vast historical importance of this passage for Russian opera was catalysed byAleksandr Serov, Russias leading music critic by the time ofRusalkas premire in 1856.In a mammoth review which appeared in ten instalments in the St Petersburg weekly,Teatral'ny muzkal'ny vestnik(The Theatrical and Musical Courier), Serov raved aboutDargomzhskys success in realizing the greatest of all musics potentials, that ofcombining with words to produce a dramatic truth greater than either art could achievealone. After a theoretical evaluation of the composers achievement along these lines,he proceeded to a minute explication de textethat impressed many readers, among themDargomzhsky himself. He sent Serov revealing congratulations for the latters

penetration of my innermost and even unconscious thoughts; for he had not thought theAct 3 duet anywhere near so important. (His own favourite part ofRusalka was the Act 4finale, where he had had not only to write the music uncharacteristically complex andsymphonic music, in which he took especial pride but also to give the drama theending Pushkins torso lacked.) He immediately acceded to the critics view; starved ashe was for approbation, he was exceptionally vulnerable to the influence of those whopraised him. In the majority of his songs composed after about 1847 his chief concernwas with the direct expression of the emotional content of the text through simple andnatural musical means usually a basically declamatory vocal line and straightforwardharmonic accompaniment. His interest in humanity was not that of a philanthropist; whenin the late 1850s, stimulated by his involvement with a group of progressive writers andartists, he wrote a handful of songs (Stary kapral: The Old Corporal, Chervyak: TheWorm, Titulyarny sovetnik: Titular Councillor) which deal with subjects drawn fromeveryday life, his choice of texts was determined as much by their humorous anddramatic content as by their social relevance.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Dargomzhsky was encouraged to sustain aninterest in the expressive potential of music by the prevailing aesthetic philosophy of hisday. In 1857 he wrote an oft-quoted letter to a friend and pupil, in which he attackedthose who loved Italian opera with its melodies flattering to the ear. He continued, I


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want the note to express the word directly. I want truth. This manifesto marks thebeginning of a new and final phase in Dargomzhskys career. He forsook societydrawing-rooms to move in higher artistic circles. In 1859 he was elected to the committeeof the newly founded Russian Musical Society, and formed a slightly uneasy relationshipwith the group of young composers which had grown up around Balakirev, The Five. But,

as he cast around for a suitable subject for another opera rejecting Pushkins Poltava,abandoning a fairy opera, Rogdana, and (as he later recorded) recoiling (for the timebeing at least) from the huge undertaking of setting Kamenny gost'(The Stone Guest;the third of Pushkins Malenkiye tragedii, Little tragedies) Rusalka was withdrawn fromthe repertory of the Imperial Theatres and once again he grew dissatisfied with hisposition in Russian musical life. The Balakirev Circle, weary of his self-centredgrumblings and apparent hypochondria, dubbed his group of friends the Invalids, and nolonger frequented his soires. As in the dark days of the early 1840s, he turned histhoughts to Europe and, no doubt reckoning that orchestral pieces were more likely togain a performance there than an opera, completed two fantasias based on folksongs,Baba-Yaga and Kazachok. From late 1864 to early 1865 he was abroad, visitingWarsaw, Leipzig, Paris, London (with which he was favourably impressed) and Brussels,where he achieved public success with Kazachokand excerpts from Rusalka. Moreover,the management of the opera house expressed a wish to produce Esmeralda; however,Dargomzhsky pressed the claims of his opera-ballet, Torzhestvo Vakkha (The triumphof Bacchus), completed in 1848 but still unperformed, and eventually negotiationsfoundered. On this journey also he was cordially received by Liszt.

In the spring following his return to Russia, heartened by his success in Brussels, heembarked upon an ambitious project, the culmination of his quest for truthful andaccurate musical expression of emotions. Reconsidering the play he had previously putaside, Pushkins The Stone Guest, he decided to set it just as it stands, without altering asingle word (in fact, he made a few minor alterations) so that the underlying meaning,

the inner truth of the text, should in no way be distorted. To this end also, he employedthe most simple and natural compositional techniques continuous melodic recitativesupported by a mainly chordal accompaniment. This strange work, as he himselfdescribed it, attracted the attention of The Five, in particular Cui, who was at that timeformulating his own theories of operatic reform. The composer was spurred on by theencouragement of these young composers, and the opera was given a great many run-throughs, at various stages of its gestation, the composer taking the part of Don Juan,Musorgsky that of Leporello, Dargomzhskys singing pupil Aleksandra Purgold bothfemale roles, with her sister Nadezhda the future Mme Rimsky-Korsakov accompanying. Dargomzhsky shook off his depression at the disastrous failure of thefirst performance ofThe Triumph of Bacchus and worked at his operatic experiment in a

kind of fever, but the demands made upon his time by the presidency of the RussianMusical Society, to which he was elected in 1867, weakened his already failing health. Ashe prophesied, The Stone Guestwas to be his swan song. He died in January 1869,leaving the opera in piano score and still incomplete. At his request, Cui wrote thePrelude and the end of the first scene, and Rimsky-Korsakov finished the orchestrationby the end of 1870. However, as a matter of principle, Dargomzhsky had insisted upon ahigher performing fee than the Imperial Theatres were empowered by law to pay.Eventually the balance was raised by public subscription, and The Stone Guest was


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staged in February 1872. It met with a cool reception, and, unlike Rusalka, which soonrecovered from an unsatisfactory first performance and now commands a more or lessregular place in the repertory, it has never been popular, even in Russia.

A full-length numberless opera (but for two interpolated songs), it exemplified for thekuchkists the true music of the future (the Wagnerian being of course the false), for it

embodied what they saw as the most salubrious of all possible operatic reforms. That isto say, it did away with artificial form while retaining the traditional lyric style. Setthroughout in a kind of heightened arioso (or melodic recitative, as Cui called it),consisting of romance-like vocal phrases set to a figurative and harmonically regularaccompaniment, The Stone Guestmight best be viewed as a gigantic through-composedart song in which the whole shaping force, save at the pettiest level, is exercised by thetext. Its manner was very influential on Musorgsky, who paid heartfelt tribute to the lateDargomzhsky in a pair of dedications as the great teacher of musical truth. Many ofDargomzhskys individual expressive phrases are indeed inspired trouvailles,extraordinarily memorable and seemingly definitive. To those who understand and lovethe words on which it was modelled, The Stone Guestcan seem a masterpiece; to others

it can seem only a famous but rather dull opera.In Russia Dargomzhskys songs are acknowledged as an important contribution to therepertory. They range from the attractive and expressive lyrical romances and theengagingly simple composed folksongs of the late 1840s and early 1850s (pieces whichpoint the way to Tchaikovskys vocal music) to the vivid and powerful dramatic balladsand the low-key but telling comic sketches of his later years, in which he proves himself aworthy forerunner of Musorgsky. His orchestral pieces, full of high spirits, are effectivecurtain-raisers, though neither the use of a programme nor of a series of variations on afolksong can prevent Baba-Yaga and Kazachokfrom showing up Dargomzhskys limitedpowers of musical architecture. There is little doubt that his predilection for vocal musicwas a result, at least in part, of the need to use a text as a formal prop. The Finnish

Fantasy, Dargomzhskys only essay in sonata form, is more successful. Historically,these pieces are important for continuing the series of orchestral works initiated by Glinkawhich was to form the basis of the Russian symphonic tradition developed by subsequentgenerations.

For well over a century Dargomzhsky has been remembered since his death, in westernEurope at least, for the supposed influence of The Stone Guestrather than for hisachievements. In his own country, his reputation as a composer in his own right restsassured. Though he cannot be ascribed to the first rank of Russian composers, themerits of his songs alone suggest that a reassessment of his music by Western writersand performers is now overdue.

JENNIFER SPENCER, RICHARD TARUSKIN, STUART CAMPBELL

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Dargomïzhsky