The Russian Opera. Newmarch Rosa
where he hoped to make up some of the deficiencies of his Italian visit with the assistance of the well-known theorist Siegfried Dehn.
Dehn saw at once that his pupil was gifted with genius, but impatient of drudgery. He gave himself the trouble to devise a short cut to the essentials of musical theory. In five months he succeeded in giving Glinka a bird’s-eye view of harmony and counterpoint, fugue and instrumentation; the whole course being concentrated into four small exercise books. “There is no doubt,” writes Glinka, “that I owe more to Dehn than to any of my masters. He not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing.”
While studying with Dehn, he still found time for composition, and it is noticeable that what he wrote at this time is by no means Germanised music. Two songs, “The Rustling Oak,” words by Joukovsky, and Delvig’s poem, “Say not that love has fled,” the Variations for piano on Alabiev’s “Nightingale,” and outlines of the melody for the Orphan’s Song “When they slew my mother,” afterwards used in a Life for the Tsar, besides a sketch for one of the chief themes in the overture of the opera, all tend to prove that he was now deeply preoccupied with the expression of national sentiment in music.
In April 1834 his profitable studies with Dehn were cut short by the death of his father, which necessitated his immediate return to Russia. Stassov sums up the results of this period abroad in the words: “Glinka left us a dilettante and returned a maestro.”
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