Composer Mikhail Glinka.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
“MIMOSA” FROM GRANDMOTHER’S GREENHOUSE
Glinka’s older brother Alexey, the firstborn of his parents, did not live a year in the world. Grandma was very afraid that the same thing would happen to Mikhail, so she resolutely took care of the baby into her own hands. He was raised in greenhouse conditions. “I was a weakly built child, very scrofulous and nervous; My grandmother, an elderly woman, was almost always sick, so in her room (where I lived) it was at least 20 degrees Réaumur. Despite this, I did not leave my fur coat, and at night and many times during the day they gave me tea with cream, with a lot of sugar, pretzels and donuts of various types; They rarely let me go outside and only when it is hot,” Mikhail Ivanovich wrote in his autobiography. In fact, 20 degrees Reaumur is +25 Celsius, so it cannot be said that Misha grew up in some kind of hellish stuffiness; But she later explained her love for a warm climate precisely because of this concern.
In general, in his own words, he grew up “mimosa” and, in fact, was not a very healthy child. Since childhood he suffered from scrofula, that is, some kind of skin disease (at that time this concept included a variety of misfortunes, from atopic dermatitis to external tuberculosis), and when he grew up he began to have a whole “gang”. of illnesses”, complicated by hypochondria: attacks of distrust in Glinka seemed like a separate mental disorder.
It wasn’t about sending someone like that into military service. His father predicted a career as a diplomat and sent him to the Noble boarding school of the Main Pedagogical Institute. There he received a general education, in particular, he learned five languages (Latin, French, German, English and even Persian). He learned literature from Vladimir Kuchelbecker, a friend of Pushkin and a future Decembrist. He was also Michel’s tutor, as Glinka’s friends and family called him. Under his influence, Glinka seemed to try his hand at versification and later, at the age of 23, he even wrote the poem “Alsand”… But he was destined to become famous elsewhere.
IVAN SUSANIN, PRESIDENT OF THE VILLAGE COUNCIL
At the age of 17 he fell in love with his cousin Sofía and began to compose music. She created variations on themes from operas by Weigl and Mozart and gave them to the girl. This was the most important consequence of a passing hobby. Sophia was soon replaced by other young women, whom Glinka never tired of looking at. “Under thick, black, slightly furrowed eyebrows shone small eyes with dark pupils, whose gaze expressed pride when addressed to a man, but shone with an oily sheen of complete tenderness when it rested on the face of a pretty woman,” wrote one of his friends.
Several years passed and Glinka began to compose romances (this genre was very popular in the first half of the 19th century). At the age of 21, he wrote “Do not tempt me unnecessarily” to the lyrics of Baratynsky, at the age of 24 – “Do not sing, beauty, with me you are the songs of sad Georgia” (he was inspired by a Georgian melody that Griboedov presented to Glinka , and the poems were written especially by Pushkin, with whom the young composer maintained a friendly relationship). Around the same time, Michel decided that public service was not for him and resigned. “Do you want to become a jester?” -his father was outraged, to whom Glinka informed about the decision to continue studying music. But the young man stood his ground and, a few months later, he went to Italy, where he met Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Bellini (listening to his operas, Glinka cried from the outpouring of feelings).
He wrote his own opera when he was 32 years old. The plot about Ivan Susanin was suggested to him by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who threatened to compose the text himself and even wrote something, but was too busy to finish it. The librettist became Baron Yegor Rosen. The name was not chosen immediately: at first they called him “Ivan Susanin”, then they came up with the option “Death for the Tsar” and settled on “Life for the Tsar”. Emperor Nicholas I personally attended rehearsals at the Bolshoi (Kamenny) Theater in St. Petersburg, which was preparing to reopen after renovation. He was also at the premiere, where the entire society of St. Petersburg gathered and greeted the opera with applause. The only thing Nikolai didn’t like was that the Russian hero was killed on stage; the director had to make adjustments quickly (in the remake, Susanin was killed “off-screen”). It is curious that at the same time another opera about Ivan Susanin, written by the composer Katerino Kavos, was performed in the same theater, and this did not bother anyone (in the end, Kavos, enchanted by Glinka’s music, decided to withdraw his work from the repertoire).
This opera, one of the most important in the history of Russian music, experienced many adventures in the 20th century. After the February Revolution he left the stage (the idea of giving his life for the tsar seemed crazy), and after the October Revolution they tried to completely remake it: the action was moved to modern times, Susanin became the president. of the village council (!), and the Poles stayed in the place, because at that time there was war with Poland. At the end the words “Glory, glory, Soviet system” were heard. This was the idea of People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky and it turned out to be unfeasible. In 1939, a new version of the opera was invented: there Susanin gave his life not for the tsar, but for the Russian people. Now they are trying to put it together in the original version.
“MY POOR “RUSLAN”
The second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, had to wait six years. Glinka wanted to work on the libretto together with Pushkin, but he was killed. Work on music for some reason did not continue; Much of his time was occupied by strange activities (Glinka was appointed director of the court choir) and paperwork related to the inheritance of his late father. Finally, discord reigned in his personal life. In 1835 he married his distant relative Maria Ivanova and at first their marriage seemed ideal, but soon all illusions about it were dispelled. Glinka’s mother-in-law turned out to be a real slut, who incessantly scolded her son-in-law (“It was difficult to understand her broken Russian language and you could hear a whistle like a samovar,” he recalled).
Love has disappeared. But a new one came: Glinka fell madly in love with Ekaterina Kern. The daughter of the same Anna Petrovna to whom Pushkin dedicated “I remember a wonderful moment”, a poem that became the basis of another famous Glinka romance; he wrote it in 1840, at the height of his infatuation with Catherine. She was smarter, more educated, and in every way more charming than his legal wife, but it was impossible to separate from her, and her life with her gradually became hell. As the composer’s biographer, Ekaterina Lobankova, writes, Glinka “was shocked to discover that his former beauty had faded in the past three years and his behavior had deteriorated to the point that he no longer met any standards.” label. (…) He Now he was especially amazed by his morning meetings with Maria Petrovna. After putting on her husband’s robe, her dirty, sleepy-eyed, disheveled, bare feet, she took a drag on her tobacco. At the same time, his arrogance as a socialite grew, for which, in general, there was no particular reason. Apparently, she cheated on her husband. Then, without divorcing him, she further married the cornet Nikolai Vasilchikov. Glinka had wanted a divorce for a long time and it seemed to him that this scandalous case, a wedding with a cornet while his wife was alive, was an obvious reason to officially separate from his wife. But Maria brazenly announced that the marriage was the result of “the mischief of her husband”: as if in church she was simply listening to a prayer service, Vasilchikov was nearby, and the composer got him drunk and bribed the priest to record Wedding. .. Meanwhile, Ekaterina Kern was receiving treatment abroad. The romance with Glinka gradually faded. In 1852 she married and before burning all the composer’s letters.
In the retelling, all this seems like a kind of “Santa Barbara”, but Glinka was not amused. The divorce process lasted several years. And when it was all over, Glinka could only think of the marriage with horror. And for the rest of her life she hated blondes (her wife was blonde); From then on she was only interested in brown-haired women and brunettes.
The opera “Ruslan and Lyudmila” was not as triumphant as “A Life for the Tsar”; many people did not accept it. And even during rehearsals, Glinka himself began to think that he had composed an unsuccessful opera: he constantly repeated “My poor” Ruslan “…” In a state of melancholy, a few months after the premiere, he went abroad and visited France. and Spain. His last important work was “Kamarinskaya”, written in 1848, eight years before his death. By the way, he also met his death abroad, in Berlin.
It is strange, but the hypochondriac Glinka did not take seriously the slight illness that laid him down: he joked, drank champagne in small quantities, which “kept him down”, refused to take medication and then died suddenly, as the autopsy showed, from “ excessive development of the so-called fatty liver”, that is, fatty hepatosis. He was buried in Germany, but soon the ashes were transported to Russia. Which was shocked by the death of one of his main musical geniuses, who managed not to do so much in his short life…
