The Russian Opera — Reading Companion

pe were already paramount in the country. Italian music had reached the capital and long held the field. The first twenty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a passionate revival of interest in the national music, and when, in 1836, Glinka created _A Life for the Tsar_, he inaugurated a fourth period in the history of national art, the limits of which have yet to be ultimately defined.

Of the first, the primitive period in Russian music, there are few records beyond the allusions to the love of minstrelsy which we find in the earliest known songs and legends of the Russian Slavs. When we reach the second period, at which the national music entered upon a struggle with the spiritual authorities, we begin to realise from the intolerance of the clerical attitude how deeply the art must have already laid hold upon the spirit of the people. Whether from a desire to be faithful to oriental asceticism, and to the austere spirit which animated the Church during the first centuries which followed the birth of Christ, or because of the need to keep a nation so recently converted, and still so deeply impregnated with paganism, fenced off from all contaminating influences, the Church soon waged relentless war upon every description of profane recreation. The Orthodox clergy were not only opposed to music, but to every form of secular art. Moreover the folksongs were of pagan origin; therefore, just as the priests of to-day still look askance at the songs and legends of the Brittany peasants which perpetuate the memory of heathen customs, so the Byzantine monks of the eleventh century, and onwards, denounced the national songs of Russia as being hostile to the spirit of Christianity. Songs, dances, and spectacular amusements were all condemned. Even at the weddings of the Tsars, as late as the seventeenth century, dancing and singing were rigorously excluded, only fanfares of trumpets, with the music of flutes and drums, and fireworks, being permitted. Professor Milioukhov, in his "Sketch for a History of Russian Culture," quotes one of the austere moralists of mediæval times who condemns mirth as a snare of the evil one; "laughter does not edify or save us; on the contrary it is the ruin of edification. Laughter displeases the Holy Spirit and drives out virtue, because it makes men forget death and eternal punishment. Lord, put mirth away from me; give me rather tears and lamentations." So persistent and effectual was the repression of all secular enjoyments that one monkish chronicler was able to remark with evident satisfaction that, for the time being, "there was silence in all the land of Russia."

Under these conditions the primitive music had little chance of development. Driven from the centres of dawning civilisation, it took refuge in forest settlements and remote villages. With it fled the bards and the mummers, the gleemen--those "merry lads" as the Russians called them--so dear to the hearts of the people. These musicians were originally of two classes: minstrels and _gusslee_ players (harpists), such as the famous Skald, Bayan; and the _Skomorokhi_, or mummers, who sang and juggled for the diversion of the people. In course of time we find allusions to several subdivisions in the band of _Skomorokhi_, all of which may now be said to have their modern equivalents in Russia. There was the _Skomorokh-pievets_, or singer of the mythical or heroic songs, who afterwards became absorbed into the ranks of the poets with the rise of a school of poetry at the close of the sixteenth century; the _Skomorokh-goudets_, who played for dancing, and was afterwards transformed into the orchestral player, exchanging his _gusslee_ or _dombra_ for some more modern western instrument; the _Skomorokh-plyassoun_, the dancer, now incorporated in the corps-de-ballet; and the _Skomorokh-gloumosslovets_, the buffoon or entertainer, who eventually became merged in the actor.