Scan 51
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians Volume 2, 1927
8 lines. Read by computer on 11 September 2026. Printed page 13. See the scan on archive.org.
1remarkable fact that this future master of declamation only began to articulate at 5 years of age.
3Dargomijsky was educated in St. Petersburg. At 6 he received his first instruction on the piano, and two years later began the violin. At 11 he had already made some attempts at composition. His education completed, he entered, in 1831, the Control Department, but retired altogether from the Government service four years later. Dargomijsky was of good family, and mixed in fashionable society, where he became well known as an amateur pianist and as the composer of pleasing drawing-room songs. In 1833 a chance meeting with Glinka gave a more serious impulse to his musical talents. Dargomijsky was nine years younger than the composer of 'A Life for the Tsar,' yet for a time these two stood side by side, isolated figures on the horizon of the Russian musical world. Taken together they make up the sum total of the national character. Glinka had the versatility and spontaneity we are accustomed to associate with the Slav temperament; Dargomijsky had not less imagination, but was more reflective. Glinka's music is idealistic and lyrical; Dargomijsky's realistic and dramatic. Glinka was not devoid of wit; but Dargomijsky's humour is full-flavoured and racy of the soil. Glinka lent Dargomijsky the famous note-books containing the exercises in harmony which he had worked out with Professor Dehn in Berlin. This was all the theoretical training Dargomijsky ever received, but it so far strengthened his technical knowledge that he set to work on an opera, 'Esmeralda,' the French libretto of which was taken from Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Completed and translated into Russian in 1839, this work was not accepted by the directors of the Imperial Opera until 1847. Although these eight years of suspense undoubtedly discouraged Dargomijsky and retarded his development, he still had courage to devote himself entirely to music. 'Esmeralda' is light opera in the style of Auber or Halévy, but in the dramatic scenes there is already some evidence of that 'language of truth and force' which he afterwards developed in his magnum opus 'The Stone Guest.' A cantata on Poushkin's dramatic poem 'The Triumph of Bacchus,' began in 1842 and transformed into a ballet-opera in 1848, was never given in its entirety. Dargomijsky's letters, highly interesting and full of thought, written during a short visit to Paris in 1844-45, show that his views of music were greatly in advance of his time, and free from the influence of popular decree. 'The Roussalka' (The Watersprite), libretto from Poushkin's dramatic national legend, was a far stronger work than 'Esmeralda.' It was first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1856, but proved too novel in form and treatment to please a public infatuated with Italian opera. Besides adding the element of humour to national opera, Dargomijsky made a special feature in 'The Roussalka' of melodic recitative, in which he altogether surpassed Glinka as regards emotional expression.
5The comparative failure of 'The Roussalka' discouraged the composer from undertaking any new operatic work between 1856 and 1860; but this period was devoted chiefly to song-writing, a form of art in which he excelled all his Russian predecessors. His songs are extraordinarily varied in style and contents. He has left a long series of graceful and elegiac songs, and some inimitably humorous ones, in which he satirises the follies and vanities of the tchinovnik, or Russian official. In his Oriental songs he is not content with mere local colour and tricks of style, but breathes the very spirit and passion of the East ('An Eastern Song,' 'I think that thou wert born for this' and 'O Maid my Rose'). Wonderful laconic force and stirring emotion characterise his great dramatic ballads ('Knight-Errant' and 'The Old Corporal'), and it is not too much to compare them with the ballads of Schubert and Schumann. In 1864 Dargomijsky went abroad, taking with him the scores of 'The Roussalka' and of three highly original orchestral fantasias: the Little-Russian 'Kazachok,' a 'Russian Legend' and the 'Dance of Mummers.' In France and Germany he was unable to obtain a hearing; but in Belgium, then—as later—hospitably disposed towards the Russian school, his music was enthusiastically received. During this journey the composer spent a few days in London, and was favourably impressed by the capital.
7On his return to Russia, Dargomijsky became closely associated with Balakirev and his disciples, and took a leading part in the formation of a national and progressive school. Under the more liberal regime of Alexander II., the period between 1860 and 1870 was characterised by new ideals, new standards and freer modes of expression, alike in literature and in art. In Russia, at least, the desire for artistic reform was the logical accompaniment of a similar impulse in the political and social world. The programme of the new school, which was its formal protest against an exaggerated respect for tradition, is set forth in detail in Cui's pamphlet 'La Musique en Russie.' A similar dissatisfaction with the accepted forms of opera was also being expressed by Wagner. But the Wagnerian programme was in many respects contrary to the Russian taste and temperament. The new school did not hold with the primary importance which the German master gave to the orchestra. For them, too, there existed a special means of salvation from all that had become jejune and staled by convention:
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