Modern Music and Musicians, Vol. 3 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Modern Music and Musicians, Vol. 3

Music, as we know it now, with its broad melodies, its harmonic wealth, dazzling instrumental color, its intense expressiveness, is the youngest of the arts. The beginning of its present position dates only from the end of the eighteenth century - from Beethoven. But Beethoven had predecessors who for several centuries had prepared the ground for its heavenly seed. In Russia, music as an art goes back only to 1836, and thanks to the genius of Glinka - armed of a sudden, completely equipped, without preparation of any sort. True it is that the soil was fertile and that the musical genius of the Russian people had long before revealed itself in admirable folk songs which attracted the attention of musicians like Beethoven. I refer to his use of Russian themes in his quartets.

In Russia, as everywhere else, vocal music preceded the instrumental. Since the first half of the eighteenth century (1735) an opera house has existed in Petrograd, but the first opera there was Italian. Twenty years later a troupe of Russian singers was organized and music was written to Russian words. Catherine II wrote the texts of five operas. The composers were foreigners. The efforts of a few native composers, even of the most gifted, such as Verstarsky, were so colorless and unskilled that hardly any fragments of the scores have come down to us.

Michael Glinka (1804-1857) gave serious study to the piano. As for theory, he busied himself with it, sometimes in Petrograd and sometimes when abroad, but he never took a complete and systematic course. His natural gifts supplied the deficiency. He determined to write an opera, and in "A Life for the Czar," presented in 1836, at once created a masterpiece.

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