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Notes on the Program
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair
Valse-Fantaisie
Mikhail Glinka
or a young Russian aristocrat like
Mikhail Glinka, a career as a composer
was viewed as unseemly. At his father’s insistence, he accordingly spent several years
in “respectable” jobs in government bureaucracy. In the fall of 1830, torn between
filial duty and artistic yearnings, Glinka did
what post-adolescents often do to sort
things out: he took a trip abroad, to Italy. It
was a watershed moment to be in Milan,
where that winter Glinka heard Donizetti
and Bellini conduct the premieres of their
respective operas Anna Bolena and La sonnambula. By the time he returned to Russia, upon his father’s death in 1834, there
was no turning back on his career as a composer. His first opera, A Life for the Czar, met
with great enthusiasm at its premiere, in
1836, and he immediately set his sights on a
second opera, based on the satirical fairy
tale Ruslan and Ludmila, by his friend
Alexander Pushkin. While not a failure, the
opera failed to sustain the enthusiasm
shown by audiences during its premiere season (1841–42), and today it is remembered
almost exclusively for its splendid overture.
Glinka’s life was filled with turmoil during the years that separated his two principal operas. He had married in 1835, but he
and his wife proved incompatible and they
separated after a few tumultuous years.
Both had health issues, and although they
were flirting with financial ruin, Glinka resigned at the end of 1838 from the position
he had assumed two years earlier, as artistic director of the Imperial Chapel in St. Petersburg. Work on Ruslan and Ludmila
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dragged to a halt during 1839, and the composer instead produced a succession of
songs and instrumental pieces. “With the
exception of the Valse-Fantaisie and [the
song] ‘I recall a wonderful moment,’ ”
wrote Glinka’s biographer David Brown,
“none of these compositions is of any real
permanent value, and the instrumental
pieces are mostly banal.”
Valse-Fantaisie, however, stands apart,
thanks to its intriguing melody and surprising turns of rhythm and phrase structure. Infused with melancholy, mystery,
and passion, it has an unmistakably Russian character. Glinka composed it in
Pavlovsk, and in its day it became popularly
known as the Pavlovsk Waltz or the Melancholy Waltz. It obviously left an impression
on Tchaikovsky — particularly on his ballet
IN SHORT
Born: June 1, 1804, in Novospasskoye, near
Yelnya, Smolensk District of Russia
Died: February 15, 1857, in Berlin, Germany
Work composed: 1839, for solo piano;
orchestrated by 1845 by conductor Herman
(first name unknown), then orchestrated by
Glinka in 1856; revised further, posthumously,
by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) and
Alexander Glazunov (1865–1936)
World premiere: unknown
New York Philharmonic premiere and most
recent performance: July 12, 1956, Hugo
Fiorato, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
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scores — and a few off-kilter phrases even
seem to anticipate Shostakovich.
Glinka originally wrote Valse-Fantaisie
as a piano piece. He referred to it only once
in his Memoirs, penned in 1855. Writing
about the song “Bolero” from his 1840 song
set A Farewell to St. Petersburg, he stated:
From the Bolero I constructed an entire
piece for piano. Herman transposed it
very successfully for his own orchestra,
along with the Waltz Fantasy in B minor.
Both these pieces were very popular
with the public.
The identity of the conductor Herman
remains shadowy. In 1845 Glinka included
the piece on a symphonic program he conducted at the Salle Herz in Paris, with the
orchestra of the Théâtre Royal Italien; it is
unclear if he employed Herman’s setting or
if he orchestrated it himself for that occasion. The concert earned a long, glowing
review from Hector Berlioz, music critic of
the Journal des débats, who referred to this
piece as a “scherzo in waltz form” and reported that it was “warmly applauded by
the glittering audience.”
That setting disappeared at some point,
and Glinka orchestrated the work in early
1856, including contrapuntal lines that had
not figured in the original solo piano setting. In the late 1870s Nikolai RimskyKorsakov edited various Glinka scores for a
complete edition of that composer’s operas. The standard edition of the Valse-Fantaisie states that it was revised by
Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov.
Glazunov studied with Rimsky-Korsakov
from 1879 through 1881, after which they remained close colleagues. Their published
edition of this score bears no date, but it
cannot have appeared prior to 1879.
Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns,
two trumpets, bass trombone, timpani, triangle, and strings.
Tchaikovsky Assesses Glinka
By the time Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky entered this ringing endorsement in his diary, in 1888, Mikhail
Glinka had long since been hoisted onto a pedestal by the generation of Russian Romantic and nationalist composers who flourished in the second half of the 19th century. Here, Tchaikovsky refers
specifically to Glinka’s opera A Life for the Czar and his symphonic movement Kamarinskaya:
Glinka. An unprecedented, astonishing phenomenon in the sphere of art. A dilettante who played
the violin and piano a little; having composed completely insipid quadrilles, fantasias upon popular Italian tunes, having also tried his hand at serious musical forms (quartet, sextet) and at
songs, but not having written anything except banalities after the taste of the [18]30s, suddenly … creates
an opera for which genius sweep, originality, and irreproachable technique stands beside the greatest and
most profound in all musical art! … Almost fifty years
have passed since then; many Russian symphonic
works have been composed; it can be said that there is
a real Russian symphonic school. Well? It’s all in Kamarinskaya, just as the whole oak is in the acorn. And
for a long time Russian composers will draw from this
rich source, for it will need much time and much
Portrait of Glinka by Ilya Repin, 1887
strength to exhaust all its wealth.
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