The Russian Opera. Newmarch Rosa
in 1799 he was appointed Court Capellmeister. In 1803 he became conductor of the Italian, Russian and French opera companies. Part of his duties consisted in composing for all three institutions. Light opera and ballet, given by the French company, was then all the fashion in St. Petersburg. Cavos quickly realised the direction and scope of the public taste, and soon began to write operas to romantic and legendary subjects borrowed from Russian history and folk-lore, and endeavoured to give his music a decided touch of national colour. In May, 1804, he made an immense success with his Roussalka of the Dneiper, in which he had the co-operation of Davidov. The following year he dispensed with all assistance and produced a four-act opera to a Russian text called The Invisible Prince, which found great favour with the public. Henceforth, through over thirty years of unresting creative activity, Cavos continued to work this popular vein. His operas have practically all sunk into oblivion, but the catalogue of their titles is still of some interest to students of Russian opera, because several of his subjects have since been treated and re-vitalised by a more recent generation of native composers. His chief works, given chronologically, are as follows: Ilya the Hero, the libretto by Krilov (1806); The Three Hunchback Brothers (1808); The Cossack Poet (1812); The Peasants, or the Unexpected Meeting (1814); Ivan Sousanin (1815); The Ruins of Babylon (1818); Dobrinya Nikitich (1810); and The Bird of Fire (1822)—the last two in co-operation with Antonolini; Svietlana, text by Joukovsky (1822); The Youth of Joan III. (1822); The Mountains of Piedmont, or The Devil’s Bridge (1825); Miroslava, or the Funeral Pyre (1827).
The foregoing list does not include any works which Cavos wrote to French or Italian texts, amounting to nearly thirty in all. In Ilya the Hero Cavos made his first attempt to produce a national epic opera. Founded on the Legend of Ilya Mouromets, from the Cycle of Kiev, the opera is not lacking in spirit, and evoked great enthusiasm in its day, especially one martial aria, “Victory, victory, Russian hero!” Cavos was fortunate in having secured as librettist a very capable writer, Prince Shakovsky, who also supplied the text for Ivan Sousanin, the most successful of all Cavos’s national operas; although we shall see in the next chapter how completely it was supplanted in the popular favour by Glinka’s work dealing with the same subject.
In the spring of 1840 Cavos’s health began to fail, and he received leave of absence from his many arduous but lucrative official posts. He became, however, rapidly much worse and had to abandon the idea of a journey. He died in St. Petersburg on April 28th (O.S.). His loss was deeply felt by the Russian artists, to whom, unlike many of his Italian predecessors, he had always shown generous sympathy; they paid him a last tribute of respect by singing Cherubini’s Requiem at his funeral.
The Russian musician Youry Arnold, who was well acquainted with Cavos in the later years of his life, describes him at sixty as a robust and energetic man, who was at his piano by 9 a.m., rehearsing the soloists till 1 p.m., when he took the orchestral rehearsals. If by any chance these ended a little sooner than he expected, he would occupy himself again with the soloists. At 5 p.m. he made his report to the Director of the Imperial Theatres, and then went home to dine. But he never failed to appear at the Opera House punctually at 7 o’clock. On evenings when there was no performance he devoted extra time to his soloists. He worked thus conscientiously and indefatigably year after year. He was not, however, indifferent to the pleasures of the table and was something of a gourmet. Even in the far-distant north he managed to obtain consignments of his favourite “vino nero.” “He told me more than once,” said Arnold, “that except with tea, he had never in the whole course of his life swallowed a mouthful of water: ‘Perchè cosa snaturalle, insoffribile e nocevole!’ ”
Cavos was an admirable and painstaking conductor, and his long régime must have greatly contributed to the discipline and good organisation of the opera, both as regards orchestra and singers. His own works, as might be expected from a musician whose whole life was spent in studying the scores of other composers, were not highly original. He wrote well, and with knowledge, for the voice, and his orchestration was adequate for that period, but his music lacks homogeneity, and reminiscences of Mozart, Cherubini and Méhul mingle with echoes of the Russian folk-songs in the pages of his operas. But the public of his day were on the whole well satisfied with Russian travesties of Italian and Viennese vaudevilles. It is true that new sentiments were beginning to rouse the social conscience, but the public was still a long way from desiring idealistic truth, let alone realism, in its music and literature. In spite of the one electrical thrill which Glinka administered to the public in A Life for the Tsar, opera was destined to be regarded for many years to come as a pleasing and not too exacting form of recreation. The libretto of Cavos’s Ivan Sousanin shows what society demanded from opera even as late as 1815; for here this tragedy of unquestioning loyalty to an ideal is made to end quite happily. At the moment when the Poles were about to slay him in the forest, Sousanin is rescued by a Russian boyard and his followers, and the hero, robust and jovial, lives to moralise over the footlights in the following couplets, in which he takes leave of the audience:
Now let the cruel foe beware,
And tremble all his days;
But let each loyal Russian heart
Rejoice in songs of praise.
At the same time it must be admitted that in this opera Cavos sometimes gives an echo of the genuine national spirit. The types of Sousanin and his young son Alexis, and of Masha and her husband, Matthew, are so clearly outlined, says Cheshikin, that Glinka had only to give them more relief and finish. The well-constructed overture, the duet between Masha and Alexis, and the folk-chorus “Oh, do not rave wild storm-wind” are all far in advance of anything to be found in the Russian operas of the eighteenth century.
Among those who were carried along by the tide of national feeling which rose steadily in Russia from 1812 onward was the gifted amateur Alexis Nicholaevich Verstovsky. Born in 1799, near Tambov, the son of a country gentleman, Verstovsky was educated at the Institute of Engineers, St. Petersburg, where he took pianoforte lessons from John Field, and later on from Steibelt. He also learnt some theory from Brandt and Steiner; singing from an operatic artist named Tarquini; and violin from Böhm and Maurer. Verstovsky composed his first vaudeville at nineteen and its success encouraged him to continue on the same lines. In 1823 he was appointed Director of the Moscow Opera, where he produced a whole series of operettas and vaudevilles, many of which were settings of texts translated from the French. After a time he became ambitious of writing a serious opera, and in May 1828, he produced his Pan Tvardovsky, the libretto by Zagoskin and Aksakov, well known literary men of the day. The book is founded on an old Polish or Malo-Russian legend, the hero being a kind of Slavonic Faust. The music was influenced by Méhul and Weber, but Verstovsky introduced a gipsy chorus which in itself won immediate popularity for the opera. Its success, though brilliant, was short-lived.
Pan Tvardovsky was followed by Vadim, or the Twenty Sleeping Maidens, based on a poem by Joukovsky, but the work is more of the nature of incidental music to a play than pure opera.
Askold’s Tomb, Verstovsky’s third opera, by which he attained his greatest fame, will be discussed separately.
Homesickness (Toska po rodine), the scene laid in Spain, was a poor work produced for the benefit night of the famous Russian bass O. A. Petrov, the precursor of Shaliapin.
The Boundary Hills, or the Waking Dream, stands nearest in order of merit to Askold’s Tomb. The scene is laid in mythical times, and the characters are supernatural beings, such as Domovoi (the House Spirit), Vodyanoi (the Water Sprite) and Liessnoi (the Wood Spirit). The music breathes something of the spirit of Russian folk-song, and a Slumber Song, a Triumphal March, and a very effectively mounted Russian Dance, which the composer subsequently added to the score, were the favourite numbers in this opera.
Verstovsky’s last opera Gromoboi was based upon the first part of Joukovsky’s poem “The Twenty Sleeping Maidens.” An oriental dance (Valakhsky Tanets) from this work was played at one of the concerts of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, and Serov speaks of it as being quite Eastern in colour, original and attractive as regards melody but poorly harmonised and orchestrated as compared with