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“The Song of the Italians” (Italian national anthem), for example, were all prod- ucts of this patriotic zeal.
But how did a composer create music that sounded ethnic or national? He did so by incorporating indigenous folksongs, native scales, dance rhythms, and local instrumental sounds. Ethnic sentiments could also be conveyed by the use of national subjects—the life of a national hero, for example—as the basis of an opera or a tone poem. Among Romantic compositions with overtly nationalis- tic titles are Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, Dvorˇák’s Slavonic Dances, Smetana’s Má vlast (My Fatherland), and Sibelius’s Finlandia. For all these composers, a musical signifier (a folksong, for example) served as a badge of both personal identity and national pride.
Russian Nationalism: Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881)
Russia was one of the first countries to develop its own national style of art mu- sic, one distinct and separate from the traditions of German orchestral music and Italian opera. An early use of Russian subject matter can be found in Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1836). As a review of the first performance reported: “All were enthralled with the sounds of the native, Russian national music. Everyone showed complete accord in the expression of enthusiasm that the patriotic content of the opera aroused.” Glinka’s nationalist spirit was passed to a group of young composers whom contemporaries dubbed “The Mighty Handful” or, less grandiosely, the Russian Five: Alexander Borodin (1833–1887), César Cui (1835–1918), Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), and Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881). They created a national art by taking the sophisticated traditions of Western classical music and incorporat- ing therein simple elements of Russian folk and religious music. Of the “Russian Five,” the most original and least Western in musical style was Modest Musorgsky (Figure 14.7).
As with most members of the “Russian Five,” Musorgsky (pronounced
“moo-SORG-ski”) did not at first seem destined for a career in music. He
was trained to be a military officer and for a period of four years was com-
missioned in the Russian army. He resigned his appointment in 1858 in
favor of a minor post as a civil servant and more free time to indulge his
avocation, musical composition. The next year he said, “I have been a
cosmopolitan [Western classical composer], but now there’s been some
sort of regeneration. Everything Russian is becoming dear to me.” Unfor-
tunately, his brief, chaotic life was marked by increasing poverty, depres-
sion, and alcoholism, a development evident in the one surviving portrait
of him. During his few periods of creative productivity, Musorgsky man-
aged to compile a small body of work which includes a boldly inventive
tone poem, Night on Bald Mountain (1867, used prominently in Walt Dis-
ney’s Fantasia); an imaginative set of miniatures (character pieces) called
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874); and an operatic masterpiece, Boris Godu-
nov (1874), based on the life of a popular sixteenth-century Russian tsar. Many
of Musorgsky’s works were left unfinished at the time of his death in 1881. Modest Musorgsky
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Figure 14.7
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© Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/The Bridgeman Art Library
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