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Boris Godounow was successfully produced January 24, 1874, at the St. Petersburg Opera with a satisfactory cast. At once its native power was felt and its appalling longueurs, technical crudities and minor shortcomings were recognised as the inevitable slag in the profusion of rich ore. A Russian opera, more Russian than Glinka!
Glinka thoroughly detesting anything that savoured of flattery, took the young musician soundly to task for his pains; but Rubinstein remained true to his tenets, and later on, when years had matured his judgment, we find him including the name of Glinka with that of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin, as the chief germinators of modern music; whilst one of the last acts of his generous public career was a concert given in aid of a national monument to the composer of La Vie pour le Tsar.
He is married to a young and very beautiful woman whom he rules with a rod of iron. He is friendly with Sultans, Shahs, and Amirs. He collaborated with Glinka in writing "Ruslan and Liudmila." He was a friend of Pushkin, but has never read him. He has not read a single book in his life.
Sclavonic music figures so constantly upon every concert programme in these days that we are probably most of us accustomed to its vagaries of rhythm, or what may be styled irregularity of metre. This is a direct heritage from the folk-song, which Glinka and his successors have borrowed largely. The leading musical spirits of his day were quick to accredit him a kindred genius.
He had sufficient strength of purpose to carry out his designs he became the founder of the modern Russian school of music and the father of Russian opera. Glinka belonged to a good if not very wealthy family, who lived upon their estate in the government of Smolensk, where he was born in 1804.
The influence of the compositions of Rubinstein and Glinka can hardly be regarded as Russian since they were so saturated with European models that they might be ranked with Gluck, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Meyerbeer far better than with their fellow-countrymen who have expressed the idiom of Russia with greater veracity." Is music a part of the daily life of the child in the Russian home?
We know that the Byzantine Church modes were purely diatonic, so is the harmonization of the Russian folk-song in its most elementary and uncorrupted form. That the one produced the other is a most natural conclusion. In the oldest of the Russian national melodies Glinka discovered the most clearly defined type of the earliest Christian songs on record.
"The people are the creators," Glinka had told the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the conscious mind.
The last line, 'And how I suffer' ... she almost whispered, with a mournful prolongation of the last word. This song produced less impression on the audience than the Glinka ballad; there was much applause, however.... Kupfer was particularly conspicuous; folding his hands in a peculiar way, in the shape of a barrel, at each clap he produced an extraordinarily resounding report.
From the different reasons previously deduced there can be little doubt that in opera Glinka purposely laid the corner-stone of what he earnestly believed to be a true Russian school, and a glance at contemporary musical activity shows that here Russia has every opportunity for distinguishing herself, and that with very little competition.
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