Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

But it was this marriage (which ended in scandalous divorce) that encouraged Glinka to finish his opera as if on a single breath: “The weather was beautiful and I often worked with the door opened into the garden, drinking in the pure, balsamic air.”⁷ As Anna Akhmatova noted in a poem a century later, “If you only knew the rubbish / from which poetry grows, knowing no shame.”

As it sometimes happens (but very, very rarely) in these situations, everything around A Life for the Tsar moved smoothly. Glinka was immediately accepted into Zhukovsky’s circle, which met in the Winter Palace, where the poet lived as Tsarevich Alexander’s tutor, “a select company, consisting,” as the composer put it, “of poets, literary men and in general refined people.”⁸ Among the guests were Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol (who read his new comedy, The Marriage, when Glinka was there), Prince Vyazemsky, and Prince Odoevsky.

Pushkin and Zhukovsky took a lively interest in the libretto of A Life for the Tsar, and the latter wrote verses for the opera’s final pro-monarchistic apotheosis and in particular for the concluding march- like chorus, “Glory!,” which for many years was considered the unofficial anthem of Russia: “Glory, glory, our Russian Tsar! Our God-given Sovereign Tsar!” In the opera, the people gathered on Red Square in Moscow greet the triumphant entrance of the new monarch, Mikhail Romanov, with this vivid, majestic (but not pompous—it was Glinka at his best) music accompanied by two brass bands.

As Glinka reminisced, “As if by magic I suddenly had the plan for the entire opera and the idea of juxtaposing Russian music to Polish music; and then, many themes and even details of their development—all lit up in my head at once.”⁹

The music for A Life for the Tsar was composed at a feverish pitch, ahead of the libretto. Baron Rozen often had to submit texts to fit quite complex melodic lines and ornate rhythmical figures. Glinka was satisfied: “Zhukovsky and the others used to joke that Rozen had tucked away already prepared verses into his pockets, and all I had to do was say what sort I needed, that is, the rhythm, and how many lines, and each time he would pull out just as much as was needed of each sort, out of different pockets.”¹⁰ It sometimes seemed that Glinka didn’t care at all about the words in his opera, as long as they were easy for the vocalists to sing: “Write whatever you want as long as you remember to always go to an ‘a’ or ‘ee’ for the high notes.”¹¹

Assured of his own genius, overly ambitious, and often quite capricious, Glinka was inexplicably offered friendly collaboration at every turn. As a result, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Prince Odoevsky, Count Vladimir Sollogub, and Nicholas I himself were all involved in the opera’s creation. Everyone, it seems, understood the cultural and historical significance of what was happening before their very eyes.

Only stupid and greedy theatrical officials tried to sabotage the work during rehearsals. The director of the theater wrote rude letters to Glinka alleging, as the composer later recalled, “that I was forcing the artists to sing in a room filled with tobacco smoke, which was bad for their voices.” But the patronage of Nicholas I protected the inexperienced author, who under other circumstances would have been brought to his knees.

The opera was first called Ivan Susanin, then A Death for the Tsar, and got its final name, A Life for the Tsar, at the wish of Nicholas I: “He who gives his life for the Sovereign does not die.”¹² For that title alone, Nicholas I deserves to be listed among the collaborators of Glinka’s opera.

At the premiere, connoisseurs were astounded by the opera’s innovative style and originality. Prince Odoevsky best expressed that feeling of an avant- garde breakthrough: Glinka was able “to elevate folk song to tragedy.”¹³ It was done without sentimentality or melodrama, in the Glinka style—lyrical, but pure and restrained.

Gogol, in his influential “Petersburg Notes of 1836,” captured the delight of Glinka’s fans: “He happily melded in his creation two Slavic musics; you can hear where the Russian speaks and where the Pole: one brings the broad melody of Russian song, the other the rash motif of the Polish mazurka.”

The first audience was particularly moved by the scene in which Susanin bids farewell to life and then dies at the hands of the Poles. The choristers depicting Poles attacked the singer “with such frenzy that they tore his shirt, and he had to defend himself for real” (from Glinka’s Notes). Susanin died with the words “Our Tsar is saved.” At the moment even the severe Nicholas I shed a tear, but after the performance he told Glinka, “It is not good that Susanin is killed on stage.”¹⁴ Naturally, the necessary changes were made.

In a rare occasion, the praise of the tastemakers coincided with the autocrat’s approval; thus, the reaction of the cautious high officials and their wives, who filled the orchestra seats and boxes, was predetermined. They had watched closely to see how the unfamiliar and puzzling music was received in the imperial box. The tsar’s demonstrative tear had its magical effect: soon after, the entire theater resounded with the sobs of the fashionable audience.

A special treat highlighted the finale: Zhukovsky had suggested the mind-boggling panorama of Mikhail Romanov in a gilded cart entering Red Square with the Kremlin in the background and being met by the joyous crowd, which was cleverly magnified by cardboard figures that created the illusion of an endless mass of people (the equivalent of today’s computerized effects in film).

According to the report in the government newspaper, “at the end of the opera the author of the music was unanimously called out and received a most gracious sign of good will from the Crowned Patron of fine arts accompanied by the audience’s loud clapping.”¹⁵ Glinka was called into the imperial box, where he was thanked first by Nicholas I and then by the empress and their children.

Soon after, the composer received a royal gift: a ring with a topaz, circled with three rows of “marvelous diamonds,” costing 4,000 rubles, an impressive sum in those days.

Glinka’s opera was instantly taken to heart by St. Petersburg’s educated circles: “In societies of the capital, large and small, brilliant and modest, they discuss that masterly work by our young composer and even dance quadrilles made up of his delightful melodies.”¹⁶

Nicholas I could be pleased: the work created under his auspices and even with his participation had entered life and history. The artistic elite considered A Life for the Tsar as entree for Russian music onto the European stage. But for the emperor it was more important that the opera vividly fixed in the public mind the idyllic and patriotic story of the accession to the throne in 1613 of the first Romanov tsar.

The true events of young Mikhail Romanov’s accession were, of course, much more complex and cynical than what Nicholas I wanted to present more than two hundred years later. The person selected to be tsar in 1613 was, in the caustic remark of the great Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky, “not the most talented, but the most convenient … Mikhail Romanov is still young, his mind is not mature, and he will do our bidding.”¹⁷ Many thought and hoped that Tsar Mikhail would not last long on the throne. But he persevered, and reigned for a mostly uneventful thirty-two years.

In 1645, after Mikhail’s death, the boyars swore in his sixteen-year-old son, Alexei, who turned out to be a much more significant figure. His contemporaries dubbed Alexei “the Most Gentle,” and he is best known today as the father of the reformist Peter the Great.