A tale of cock and despot

English Touring Opera's new production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel made me decide to give a one-off Zoom class on his satirical swan-song (the fact that the event itself turned out to be a bit of a turkey is incidental now). It may not be as profound as its immediate predecessor, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, where the myth of the disappearing city which sinks beneath lake waters to preserve itself from the marauding enemy might be repurposed now for Ukraine, or as bewitchingly lovely as The Snow Maiden, but it does encapsulate many of Korsakov's styles and innovations, taking them one step further down the road of a modernism he professed to hate.

As I made clear in the review, there's one aspect of the fable - drawn by Pushkin from Washington Irving's 'Legend of the Arabian Astrologer' in his delicious Tales of the Alhambra, which he read in a French translation - with obvious connections to now: a capricious ruler sets off on a pointless campaign, with disastrous results. For the poet, disaffection with Nicholas I was part of the picture; for the composer and his librettist Belsky, the evident twilight of Nicholas II's reign and the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1905 would have been pertinent. 

There's also a parallel real-life story which makes me very proud to have picked up a copy of the vocal score when I was last in Moscow, albeit a battered edition. As Sergei Bertenson and Jay Leyda, Rachmaninov's best biographers to date, record, the composer, leaving Russia towards the end of 1917, 'carried one small suitcase: the only music in it was his first act of Monna Vanna [the opera he never completed], sketchbooks containing the new piano pieces [the Op. 39 set of Etudes-Tableaux, for me his piano masterpiece], and the score of Rimsky-Kosakov's Golden Cockerel' - the same edition as the one I proudly possess. 

Later, in 1934, Rachmaninov wanted it sent from New York to his wonderful new Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne along with The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. 'Just to read a score by Rimsky-Korsakov always puts me in a better mood, whenever I feel restless or sad,' he declared.

Less valuable but much treasured by me are two editions of Pushkin's original tale. Artist Tatyana Mavrina's illustrations for Pushkin fairy-tales bound together by the story-telling cat of the poem that prefaces Ruslan and Lyudmila were published in 1984 by Detskaya Literatura and won the international Hans Christian Anderson Medal. This was one of the last things I bought from the long-defunct Collets on Charing Cross Road.

You also get the tales of Tsar Saltan, the Dead Tsarevna, the Fisherman and his Wife, and the Priest and his Worker Balda. But the Cockerel is what concerns us. I reproduce two of the three-page spreads below.

The most famous illustrations are those of the great turn-of-the-century artist Ivan Bilibin. They're not part of the beautifully-printed Everyman's Library of Children's Classics volume, from which I used to read to my godson Alexander the Tale of Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf with sound clips on cassette I took from Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov (he remembers that experience to this day, I;m so happy to say). But I found them in a slightly rougher-and-readier Pushkin volume published by Literatura Moscow, accompanying a dual Russian and English text. That's the ill-fated Tsar Dodon being pecked to death up top, This is the tailpiece

this the Tsar being presented with the Cockerel by the Astrologer,

and this the first manifestation of the mysterious Shemakhan Queen.

She's a fine manifestation of woman power, albeit only through using feminine wiles. The female heroines of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories aren't all-powerful, but that truly great writer has plenty of interesting new takes on the fairy-tales of Perrault and others. I returned to this beautiful spider's web of fantasies when I was covering Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle in my Hungarian music course, and realised I hadn't read beyond the titular narrative.

I soon realised that the 10 tales are much richer if read in context. 'Puss-in-Boots' serves as a kind of entr'acte, and animal metamorphoses are rife. Most remarkably, there are refrains that serve like musical themes, recurrent but altered by the context, and re-reading makes it all even richer. Stuck on a train without another book, I decided to turn a second time to the two stories I found the most hauting and poetic. 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Erl-King', with its fabulous descriptions of natural detail in a wood, and found even more connections in retrospect. If I still composed - I dabbled as a teenager - I'd be spoilt for choice to make mini-operas here. One could even use the same soprano (or mezzo) and baritone for a triple bill... Well, I can dream, can't I? But the music is already there in Carter's perfect prose. What genius.

From Firebird to Revolution, 1910-17

First term of my Russian music course on Zoom went well, by which I mean there were lots of happy students and I enjoyed every minute of it, firming up allegiances and discovering more (especially in the sphere of chamber music). In the end we covered ground from Glinka to early Rachmaninov, stopping at 1900, with a few glimpses into the future. My original idea, to devote the 10th class to Stravinsky's The Firebird as a last great synthesis of the fantasy tradition, was postponed simply because the one class I'd intended on Musorgsky's and Tchaikovsky's piano music turned into two. 

That was because Samson Tsoy had so much to say about Pictures at an Exhibition and his partner Pavel Kolesnikov, who popped up briefly at the end of that class, was happy to return a couple of weeks later. When great musicians are willing to come along, as they did for every class of my course on the symphony, you have to be flexible (pictured below by Eva Vermandel, Samson and Pavel during their phenomenal Ragged Music Festival, from which I'm still recovering: read what one of my students described as a 'palpitating' review - that's got to be better than 'gushing').

I'd also intended to go straight on from the first term to Soviet music. But it occurred to me that those seven amazing years from 1910 to 1917 could take a term of their own, albeit one of seven classes (taking a break and mapping out the possible up to Christmas meant I ended up with that number). Here's the plan. We start on Thursday 29 October and each class runs from 2.30pm-4.30pm (longer under certain circumstances). £10 a class so £70 for the term. Special guests TBC, though two top pianists have already shown willingness. UPDATE (19/11) Seven classes have evolved into eight, due to an enrichment not unlike the one we had in the first term.

 1: The Firebird and the end of a tradition  29 October

Stravinsky's first ballet for Diaghilev - the exotic exported to Paris - reflected the fairy-tale compendium of its scenario with homages to the fantasies of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and others, but also nodded to the harmonic experiments of Scriabin and looked forward to the rhythmic revolution of The Rite of Spring. I'll be placing it in the context of the 19th century tradition as well as the early years of the 20th century. Pictured above: Mikhail Fokine and Tamara Karsavina in the 1910 Ballets Russes premiere.

2: Petrushka and Russian popular song  5 November

Stocked high with highly original treatments of familiar folk/urban song, Stravinsky's fairground ballet of 1911 features a radical use of orchestration which owes its originality to Tchaikovsky's example. But it is also startlingly modern in the scenes featuring the pathetic Russian Pierrot come to life. Hungarian-born conductor Gergely Madaras is our special guest.

3: The Rite of Spring I: mostly melodic and traditional  12 November

Often overshadowed in the stress on rhythmic iconoclasm is Stravinsky's use of singing themes - only three of them this time taken from folk sources. Again, the mix of modernism and tradition is startling. Pictured above: maidens in Nicolas Roerich's designs for the Ballets Russes premiere of 1913. Andrew Litton, whose BIS recordings of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring are such a revelation, joined us for this class, and going with the flow meant we were only halfway through what needed to be said and demonstrated about the work. A second hour was intended the following week, which stretched to two - hence the offer I've just made of a free eighth class.

4: The Rite of Spring 2: polyrhythms and unfathomable accents  19 November

Andrew's return yielded more fascinating chapter and verse, and the return of Catherine Larsen-Maguire gave us insights into the writing for bassoon - her instrument before she changed to conducting. Leonard Bernstein in his Norton lecture 'The Poetry of Earth', Pina Bausch's choreography and Stravinsky speaking again on the aftermath also joined the party.

5: ''Footballish' pianism and audacious orchestral tricks: the young Prokofiev  26 November

 

 

First appearing on the scene in the same St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music where Stravinsky made his debut, a young Conservatoire student quickly created a sensation. With special focus on Prokofiev's first two piano concertos, early piano pieces and the Scythian Suite derived from his first ballet music for Diaghilev, Ala and Lolly.

6: Rachmaninov's The Bells and his Vespers as part of the revived Russian Orthodox tradition  3 December

 

The rediscovery of ancient church traditions only really took off in the early 1900s, and was flourishing when the revolution put a stop to so many schools of choral music. Before that happened, though, it produced its greatest synthesis-masterpiece, Rachmaninov's numbers for the All-Night Easter Vigil known as the Vespers, in total contrast to his choral symphony inspired by Edgar Allen Poe The Bells.

7: Scriabin: mystic chords and apocalyptic visions  10 December

 

 

Boris Pasternak thought him 'warped, posed and opinionated' but also as bright as the sun in his music; Prokofiev found his harmonic discoveries a millstone weighing down his options. But there's no doubt that Alexander Scriabin was a true original

 

8: On the eve of an earthquake  17 December

 

What kind of music were the Russian composers creating as the February and then the October revolutions broke? Prokofiev's diary gives a special insight into where he was and what he was doing at these times, with cinematic descriptions of being caught up in the chaos of Petrograd early in the year. We also look at Rachmaninov's last great compositional flowering before exile and the need to tour as pianist slowed down his creativity.

 

Do join us - and if you can't do so on the afternoon, I send out recordings (video if film is used, audio otherwise). You don't need to have attended the previous course. If you're interested, just send me a message with your email: I won't publish it, but I promise to respond.

Zooming from Kamarinskaya to The Firebird*

*Prefatory update (28/9) - having thrashed out new plans for a seven-week term between this and the Soviet music course, I've shunted The Firebird to the start of the 1900-17 sessions. So it's strictly From Glinka to Rachmaninov now. See revised schedule below.

 

So my last non-operatic Zoom class has run the symphonic gamut from Haydn to Adams, and I'm very proud of what we achieved - not least the participation of spectacular special guests each week, which waxed as lockdown dragged on. Just for the record, we had Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page on Haydn, Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan again on Beethoven 3, Nick Collon on Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Catherine Larsen-Maguire on Schumann 2, Brahms 1 and Adams' Harmonielehre (and much more from her as regular visitor to the other classes), Vladimir Jurowski on Brahms 4 and Tchaikovsky 6, Paavo Järvi on Mahler 3, Vasily Petrenko on Mahler 9 and Elgar 2, Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste on Sibelius 5, Andres again on Nielsen 5, Mark Elder on Vaughan Williams 6, Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning on Shostakovich 15.  Friend and sometime student Juliette made an artist's impression of the Brahms/Tchaikovsky class; probably wasn't paying full attention but I'm amused to see this. 'Vlad' is in the centre of the bottom row (!) Click to enlarge if you really want to see the grisly details - and if you were there and on the second 'page', think yourself lucky to have escaped.

In that ripe time, Madama Butterfly on the Opera Course was also enriched by three major exponents joining us for three full two-hour sessions: Ermonela Jaho, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder. A glorious complement indeed to Susan Bullock's presence throughout our Elektra classes.

Opera in Depth will resume with ten Monday afternoons on Götterdämmerung, starting late September and concluding our three-year survey of Wagner's Ring (any excuse to feature another of Anselm Kiefer's majestic apocalyptic visions from one of two White Cube exhibitions which knocked me for six, pictured below). It will remain on Zoom, as though Pushkin House is re-opening on a limited basis, I doubt if many students will want to return. I'm nearly halfway through Siegfried for the Wagner Society of Scotland, regretful at not returning to the woods of Gartmore this year; in September 2021 we'll probably embark on Tristan und Isolde.

At the same time I didn't want to disappoint the enthusiasm of the surprisingly big following for the symphony course - plus of course I need to be employed during this difficult summer, and I'm lucky that it can be on something I love - so this coming Thursday afternoon (6 August) I'll undertake a survey of Russian music from Glinka's Kamarinskaya to Stravinsky's The Firebird. If that's successful, we'll press on to the Soviet era in a second course.

For the outline, I only have to repeat what I wrote before beginning the symphony course.Below are the plans for all 10 classes, just so that I have them in something I can link to rather than just on an attachment. Message me if you'd like to join for all or some: it's a bargain (I halved the usual fees because I don't have room hire expenses and Zoom is, after all, not live with great equipment to hand, so it's £10 a class, ie £5 an hour. We meet on Thursday afternoons (exact time to be confirmed - one student suggested we start at 2.30pm rather than 3.30) tomorrow, 3.30-5.50pm. and if anyone misses a class or has connection/sound issues their end, I can send on a recording of the whole thing. Send me a message with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to get back to you.

Special guests TBC (though there will be fewer of them than during strict quarantine time...). Pictured up top: Glinka by Repin (detail), The Firebird by Bakst. The three illustrations below are by the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, starting with the scene where Pushkin's Ruslan meets the giant head.

1: Glinka: Russian acorns  6 August

The indisputable father of distinctively Russian music, his operatic predecessors and his two major works for the stage: the nationalist-history opera A Life for the Tsar and the fairy-tale opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, the first of many to be based on a work by Alexander Pushkin.

2: To 'the Five' and beyond 1: national style  13 August

Glinka again kicked off with his short orchestral fantasia on two folksongs Kamarinskaya. It had, as Tchaikovsky noted, a huge impact on all Russian composers, not least those whom Balakirev briefly gathered round him to take up the legacy of a truly Russian style - Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Musorgsky and Cesar Cui.

3: To 'the Five' and beyond 2: the influence of the east  20 August
Composers, like poets, travelled far and wide, especially around the fringes of the Russian Empire, and absorbed Persian and eastern music into a new 'exotic' style. Again, Glinka paved the way with the dances at Chernomor's fantasy eastern castle in Ruslan and Lyudmila.

4: 'The intonations of native speech': a new kind of opera  27 August

Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, based on Pushkin's original take on the Don Juan legend, pointed a way forward in the speech-melodic setting of verse. Musorgsky took it one step forward in the prose scene of Boris Godunov and his unfinished Gogol opera The Marriage.

5: The symphony: from Rubinstein to Tchaikovsky  10 September

Was there an element of anti-Semitism in Balakirev and co's rejection of symphonies by Anton Rubinstein? At any rate. the great achievements in the form did not come until the Second Symphony of Borodin and Tchaikovsky's experimentation with form.

6: Characterisation and style, opera and piano music 1 3 September

More on Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, aligned with his piano epic Pictures at an Exhibition. Pianist Samson Tsoy takes us through the piano work, with a later contribution from Pavel Kolesnikov.

7: The great Tchaikovsky ballets  17 September

Inspired by Delibes, Tchaikovsky took the art of piquant orchestration and original melody to supreme heights in Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.

 

8: Characterisation and style, opera and piano music 2  24 September

Tchaikovsky's characteristic romants style in Eugene Onegin, the songs and his piano cycle The Seasons. Pavel Kolesnikov joins us again to talk about Tchaikovsky's piano writing.

9: New paths in chamber music   1 October

The formation of chamber music circles and the advent of a supremely gifted composer in the form, Sergey Taneyev, brought big steps forward from the 1890s onwards.

10: Tchaikovsky's natural successor   8 October

Rachmaninov made his mark on the world of Russian music as a teenager with his C sharp minor Prelude and the one-act opera Aleko. We look at his specifically Russian works for both piano and orchestra. With special guest Kirill Gerstein.

UPDATE: latest thoughts are to carry The Firebird over to the first of seven classes starting at the end of October, dealing with Russian music in the seven years leading up to the Revolution. So one class apiece on The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, looking around and across at other related works, one on Rachmaninov's Vespers in the context of the Orthodox musical revival, the next on his Choral Symphony The Bells, a class on Scriabin and a last session on developments up to 1917, including the music of the young Prokofiev.

SeNaR

As in Sergey and Nataliya Rachmaninov (or Serge and Natalie Rachmaninoff, in the Frenchification SSR preferred in the west). Although works like the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Symphonic Dances prove that Rachmaninov was no romantic reactionary, who would have thought his dream for the land he bought at Hertenstein near Weggis on the shores of Lake Lucerne in 1930 was the modernist architecture of what became the Villa Senar?

First thoughts were for a conversion of the grand chalet already extant in the 1.5 hectare park. Then Rachmaninov decided to start from scratch, commissioning the Lucerne architects Alfred Möri and Karl-Friedrich Krebs to demolish the original house, clear away five metres of rocky outcrop and construct both the villa - one of the few Bauhaus-inspired buildings in Switzerland - and a gardener's house, in which he lived for a while from July 1931: 'I feel splendid, I go walking a little and I work a lot'. He bought another 2,563 metres of land, ploughed it and bought a motor boat. The economic crisis dented his finances and his confidences, but he went ahead and the house was finally completed, inside as well as out, in March 1934.

It offered, among other things, what he had stipulated: 'four bedrooms, with three bathrooms. The best room should definitely be the study with large windows 3.5 to 4 metres high looking out over Lake Lucerne'.Every summer he worked here, composing the Corelli Variations, the Paganini Rhapsody and the Third Symphony here, until August 1939 when he gave a final concert at the Lucerne Festival as soloist in both Beethoven's First Piano Concerto and his Paganini Rhapsody with Ansermet conducting, and left for the USA, never to return, on the 23rd, the day before the signing of the Hitler-Stalin/Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Not much has changed since then, though what the locals called 'Gibraltar' is now much more wooded, and presents a charming view below Rigi from the Lucerne boat.

Many of the trees in the garden have grown substantially, not least the two pines which obscure the intended view from the house of Mount Pilatus across the lake (there are plans for their removal). This is what you should see, from my walk back to Hertenstein quay.

I planned my trip, while I was in Lucerne for two festival concerts - one of them, under Haitink, exceptional, the other excellent in parts - with the friendly co-operation of Ettore F. Volontieri, general manager of the villa since the death of Alexander Rachmaninoff, who lived there in recent years, assuring a continuity of sorts. What's the latest on the status of Villa Senar? Probably best if I quote Ettore: 'The Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation –  created in 2000 by his grandson Alexander to foster the better knowledge of Sergei Rachmaninoff as a composer and as a man – is presently working to achieve the transformation of the Estate as a modern and dynamic cultural centre, following the model of the Red House of Benjamin Britten in the UK. Together with the KKL, the Lucerne Festival, the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (with its Zaubersee Festival) and the Wagner House in Tribschen, Villa Senar will contribute to create a unique cultural and musical environment on the Lake of Lucerne.' No substantial changes can be made: the house and grounds are under the protection of the Lucerne district council. 

Perhaps I should have disembarked at Hertenstein, but I was keen to see a bit of Weggis, popular holiday destination for Brits among others (including my mother). It was a very lovely 45 minute walk along the shore of the lake, and I earmarked a spot close to the Rachmaninov bust for swimming. 

Needless to say I spent so long at the villa in Ettore's company that there wasn't time on the way back; and besides the glorious sunshine had yielded to dramatic clouds and heavy showers. It all becomes totally rustic when you turn off the lakeside road and head up towards a convent, famous for educating young Swiss women not at one point admitted anywhere else. There are greenhouses full of tomatoes to be sent to Migros in Lucerne - good to see the produce for that supermarket grown so locally - and the entrance to Senar, unobtrusive, is opposite the Schloss, where I later met three ladies staying there with other members of their choir while performing Beethoven's Mass in C locally. They didn't know that Rachmaninov's villa was hard by.

We started in the garden house, its plainness offset by several pleasing curves at SSR's suggestion

and walked to the villa, which presents its most forbidding angle from the north-east. The back of course is much more attractive; the study is to the left, three steps down from the main ground floor.

It's the lifeblood of the place, the reason why this should be open to visitors. Dominating it is the extra-length Steinway Grand presented to SSR by the company on his 60th birthday.

Rachmaninov sat at the piano with the windows behind him so that the light would fall on the music. The desk, on the other hand, looks directly out. 

In the centre is a plaster cast of the composer's hands, with those long, long fingers.

The contents of the music cabinet and the photos on top are not quite what they were in his lifetime - I guess many of Alexander's LPs have been added - and foxing meant that copies of the portraits needed to be made. The originals, and the more valuable scores, are housed in the archive upstairs. It's a fascinating selection, all the same. Tchaikovsky, SSR's greatest early influence and part-mentor, and Rimsky-Korsakov are to the left, Frederick Steinway and Josef Hofmann to the right.

Odd juxtaposition - Fyodor Chaliapin and Noel Coward (who of course eventually had a place in Switzerland, Les Avants, where Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge became neighbours).

Pleased to see Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain among the books. 

In one of several admirable articles in the well-produced booklet on Villa Senar, Elger Niels quotes from the Nabokov poem at which the pages of a volume in the library fell open: 

Not the sea's sound...In the still night,
I hear a different reverberation:
The soft sound of my native land,
Her respiration and pulsation,..
In sleepless silence, one keeps listening
To one's own country, to her murmuring,
Her deathless deep.

Perhaps some of the trees in the grounds conjured up Russia for Rachmaninov. There is so much light. The dining room looks out to the garden beyond

and there were many family gatherings outside during those precious summers. This photo offers one of the rare instances of SSR smiling. Nataliya is to the left.

'SNR' is on so much, not least the cutlery,

and in my earlier quiz, duly answered, I featured the Rachmaninov tweed suit made in Jermyn Street - here's another angle.

Many of the original fittings remain, including one nice long bathtub and an array of taps. 

So outside, with various perspectives on the house

and a handsome flight of stone steps

down to the boathouse 

and a wonderful terrace right by the water's edge, a different perspective from the house higher up.

And then back, this time a shorter walk through a lovely valley 

to Hertenstein quay, coffee and cake at a pleasant cafe, and the return journey, this time on one of the original steamers. 

As dreamlike a round trip as if you arrive at Venice and leave it by vaporetto.