Oliver Condy on Russian Music

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Russia may be the world’s largest country, stretching from European west to Asian far east, but for centuries it struggled to find a musical identity for itself. All the way up until the 19th century, Russian music lay in the hands of German, Italian or French composers that the Tsars imported to compose and perform at court, in particular Peter the Great, who saw Russia as very much a European nation and who chose his musicians from the heart of Europe. Even the first Russian opera, written in the 1730s, was composed by an Italian.

All this changed at the start of the 19th century, with the arrival of Mikhail Glinka. His opera, A Life for the Tsar, established him as the first Russian composer, its melodies and recitatives inflected with the character and rhythms of Russian folk music. Then came a composer called Dargomizhsky, who gave prominence to importance of the Russian language in opera.

But it was a group of composers called the Mighty Handful, including Balakirev, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, who gave vibrant life to the idea of a Russian school of music, fighting hard against the creeping influence from Germany of Wagner’s operas. Again, it was Russia’s folk traditions and literature that lay at the heart of the Mighty Handful’s music, in particular Borodin, whose In the Steppes of Central Asia incorporates ethnic Russian and Asiatic melodies as a caravan weaves its way gently through the vast deserts of Siberia.

And so Russian music was born – its exotic, modal harmonies, graceful melodic lines and transparent orchestrations taken to their heights by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, who then handed the baton to the master of the symphony, Alexander Glazunov, then to Rachmaninov, with his fierce Romanticism and love of folk music, and the ground-breaking 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky, whose richly orchestrated and inventive Firebird is a direct musical link back to Rimsky-Korsakov.

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